If you visit our website, the first thing you see emblazoned across the Home page is a bold proclamation: Your SaaS is in Our Hands. It’s a fun, sassy, throw-down type of statement. But what does it really mean? I sat down with CodeScience’s new CEO, Brian Walsh, to get his perspective.
Tell me what’s behind “Your SaaS is in Our Hands,” besides being a cheeky statement.
This is a statement of who we are committing to as an organization. We love working with entrepreneurs. We love their vision, energy, passion, speed of execution, and their hope of fixing something broken in the world. Entrepreneurs can choose many different business models to support their dreams. While we would love to support all entrepreneurs, we are pretty clear on our segment: we support entrepreneurs who have chosen the SaaS business model.
Given our company is filled with Salesforce experts, it is a perfect marriage of skill set and mission.
Why?
We think Salesforce, the #1 SaaS company in the world, is the perfect platform to support other SaaS companies. We’ve grown from building 250+ products for the AppExchange to expanding the breadth of our services to support all of customers’ needs.
We’ve always done ideation, product strategy, user experience, design and product development that bring products to market in a way that transforms our clients’ businesses and their bottom lines. But we’re much more than a product development shop. Once you are shipping product, we can help with sales ops and enablement, distribution, customer success, marketing and customer implementation for a holistic approach that supports SaaS businesses throughout the product lifecycle.
B2B SaaS companies are rarely a field of dreams (almost no one else can be a Slack). After you build it, they don’t just come: you have to aggressively sell and support it, enable your sales teams, connect your employees, drive your business with data. So in the end, we see “Your SaaS is in Our Hands” as our pledge that we have your back – we’ll take this journey with you.
What are the most important things you offer to your customers?
It’s simple: the fastest way to market and the most efficient capital spend.
Great! Let’s dig into that. What do you mean by time to market?
Time to market doesn’t just mean how quickly you can bring a product to market. It also means how quickly you can solve problems that impede a company’s growth. You need systems to create customer success, tools for sales enablement, communities for employees, customers and partners alike. We’ve demonstrated how we can accelerate bringing products and solutions to market dramatically faster than a company can internally or compared to our competitors.
Explain your thinking behind efficient capital spend.
I have a background in building SaaS companies, and lived the struggles and needs of a SaaS entrepreneur. My last startup was a bootstrapped endeavor. Being efficient with resources was mission critical. Engaging experts who weren’t learning on the job, mattered. My experiences color what we bring to the table for our customers today. It also defines our approach.
It’s clear what a SaaS company needs to do:
- Identify a problem
- Have a thesis on how to fix it
- Build it
- Test it
- Evaluate success and failures
- Repeat
The faster you can get through that loop, the faster you will evolve and increase your chances of success. So the question becomes, what is the least amount of work it will take to test the thesis? That should always be the goal. Long, waterfall projects that test the thesis at the end of the project have a higher probability of putting a company out of business.
We have demonstrated that design sprints, prototypes, and minimum viable products are the right paths forward to test your thesis as quickly as possible. We know that minimum lovable products are what you actually have to bring to market. We have shown that data driven SaaS companies have a much greater chance of customer success and developing roaring businesses.
These value props are not earth shattering. What differentiates you?
Excellent point. For a professional services organization, though, great execution is crucial. You have to get the fundamentals right in order to accomplish a huge vision.
One differentiator that I am most proud of is our Creative Group – a team of UX engineers, creative directors and designers. It is amazing to see how quickly this group has grown and the ongoing demand from our customers. In just 4 months, design sprints and reimagining customers’ applications have become a core part of our offering.
In fact, at Dreamforce, I’m leading a session on Reimagining your Application using Lightning, and our Creative Group is leading a 3 hour Design Sprint Boot Camp showcasing an actual client project. As Salesforce has embraced a powerful new interface and architecture, we need new processes and skills to take advantage. I hope to see you there!
Any last thoughts?
“Your SaaS is in Our Hands” just sounds awesome.
