Hacker News Reader

Comment by leeter | Hacker News Reader

I wish them the best, but I think they would have been best not drawing the comparison to Salesforce. IME people buy Salesforce not for the CRM but for the force.com platform. The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. CRM is a small part that definitely gets heavy use, but it's only a small part of the larger picture.

If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.

View on HN

> The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter.

While being able to update the platform seamlessly without breaking that logic.

It's probably wise as a startup to not go for Salesforce parity while building out the core roadmap. You can build a decent business catching new companies and paying attention to their needs unencumbered by the expectations of "switchers".

I agree with your points about what people want / expect from Salesforce. Would kind of be cool to see a CRM have AppExchange + SF data model interoperability.

I agree... with the exception of PersonAccounts... those need to go die in a dumpster fire

I'm not a fan of Elon-style "pitch FSD or promise things that you don't have" either. But we had to find the right balance between expressing our vision and expressing where we are which you can see through screenshots/product demos.

The vision is definitely to have something extensible and more powerful than force.com ; we aren't there yet because we need to build strong foundations before that. We already try to separate our business apps from the core engine in the code base to learn what will be the right api and get ready for that next step when it's time.

If that's the case I'd encourage you to take away a few lessons from Salesforce:

1. IT is not your customer. The business is, and they don't know how to write code. Based on what I saw thus far; this is your biggest weakness. The only way to extend the platform at the moment is to self-host and write code.

2. Avoid baking crazy logic into the system now that you'll be unable to fix later *cough* SF 'standard' objects *cough* that will behave in very weird ways.

2(a). Person Accounts look like a good idea. But, they aren't; and never will be. They just create a lot of complications later when someone gets married or starts a business.

  If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.

I'm curious. What would you use for that today? MS Dynamics? Airtable? Budibase? Appsmith?

After trying out a bunch of tools, I found Appsmith worked best for me but for some cases I had to move on to Windmill (which is not exactly low-code but can be)

I absolutely love Windmill. The ability to stitch scripts together into workflows is great.

How have you found Windmill's UI components? Are they enough for what you're building, or are you building/importing your own?

I haven't built too much UI at all, but with a little that I did it worked fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com