Time to value

The problem we’re trying to solve is super obvious. In 5 years, there should be no Salesforce ecosystem agencies anymore. If the long term direction is clear then the perogative also clear. It is to create a highly automated agency that can outcompete the market via automation and price.

Now the question is how can we get enough data points to get there in the most efficient way possible? Time to value. The faster we can get a product that provides ROI, the more data points we can get which will start a positive feedback loop.

How do we speedrun the ROI process? We’re venture funded, if the calculus works out then we can exchange money for speed of learnings.

Strategies

My current guess is that the phases of the business are going to be discovery phase and growth phase. Discovery phase being the phase of the business pre clear ROI - either for ourselves as an agency (eg almost 100% of work still done manually) OR for the PSO we work with (eg the tool isn’t useful yet). Here we’re optimizing for getting to ROI for a niche slice of our TAM by building a good product. This is the shorter term strategy.

Growth Phase - The product now is clear ROI for a niche body of the TAM and our new goals is to be optimizing for the fastest path to complete automation and customer TAM domination as possible. This is the longer term strategy.

Fundamentally, these two phases are completely different but they impact each other. It’s critical we land in the right niche for the discovery phase as that might yield an easy or hard time tam expanding in the growth phase. The same logic can be applied to what we automate. Similarly, our goal is to be the end state PSO after the growth phase, to get there as fast as possible the answer might be to build tooling for PSOs so we can gather data on how extendable the product is to different sectors OR to create a larger and larger PSO org that covers more and more implementations.

Open ended questions

Now, how we make an informed decision across both the strategies requires data. Here are the open ended questions I would like the answers to in the coming days and if I have the answers to them I’ll postulate here how I would reason about planning what to do.

How do PSO’s source leads? What differentiates a good PSO vs a bad PSO? How can we make our meaningful first hire here? Or do we not care about this and will just hire anyone with a deal and experience for learnings? What sector of PSO should we target? Can we, for Salesforce specifically, rank sectors by different vectors like highest TAM or most easily automatable and decide which direction to go in? And for ease of automation we should try to know every different possible Salesforce automation across every sector and rank those by impact - eg what percentage of implementations require that automation AND difficulty of automation – and we can look for sweet spot automations to start that are both high impact and low difficulty – this is like Console and Serval password reset requests.

Directionally if I had the answer to these questions, I would start with The automations of the services that have the highest value when calculating dollar value of that automation across every sector * correction for how difficult I think it is to build(ttv on product side) * correction factor for ease of sourcing

Evaluation

When weighing different strategies I feel like the two most important vectors of two way doorable-ness is price and time. What also matters here is confidence percentage - the dunning kruger effect is super relevant here. We’re going to weigh all the strategies and calculate expected price, expected time and decide from there.

Discovery Phase

Being a PSO

  1. Hire a consultant - if we RNG a good one yay but if not it’s fine as long as they have any deal flow - This feels not very difficult <3 day task.
  2. Ask consultant above questions
  3. Source leads (new) OR use consultants current deal flow. ?? Timeline – If we’re sourcing leads this could be weeks in the worst case because we need to create lead sourcing channels. NEED DATA HERE
  4. Iterate with the in house hire/contractor and build out the product on live deal flow and get to ROI.

Now the factors that matter are the above in open ended questions like which sector do we hire the consultant from and which services do we want the consultant to have relevant experience in to start automating? These decisions are important.

Serving PSO’s

  1. Find a PSO that’s willing to take a bet on a pretty nascent product - ?? Amount of time – I can’t even guess
  2. Work side by side with that PSO or pay them to provide them tooling.
  3. Iterate until the product is good enough for them to use.

Now the factors that matter are the above in open ended questions like which sector of PSO do we try and break into and which services do we want the PSO to have relevant experience in to start automating. The risk in this approach is also that we end up building tooling that is very different then the full end to end product – this does seem unlikely though.

Conclusion: From the cost perspective they’re probably pretty similar with being a PSO maybe being marginally more expensive. Unless the open ended questions yield unexpected data, I would postulate that recruiting consultants in house is higher EV because we can bound the amount of time that we can start iterating on product/getting data. To even start iterating in the right direction on the serving PSO’s side seems unbounded which is way worse.

The data that can sway this conclusion is the receptiveness of PSO’s to using a nascent product because the pain is so great they need something right now. If somehow we can get into PSO’s with a nascent product easily and get into many different ones then we would have a wealth of data where we could pick and choose what to automate instead of going through the slower operational overhead of hiring, coordinating and running a PSO. The latter being way slower in terms of incremental expansion as well as slower in terms of being able to pivot on a dime.

Given the limited data that we do have though currently, I doubt the above scenerio is likely to happen.

Growth Phase

I’m going to keep this one brief because it’s postulating too much into the future.

Being a PSO

  1. Scale contractors across multiple sectors and services
  2. Try and conquer larger and larger percentages of the Salesforce deal flow ecosystem

Serving PSO’s

  1. Automate more and more of the PSO work.
  2. Reduce headcount within these organizations until there’s nobody left.

I think the critical thing to realize is these are heavily impacted by where we start.

After we hire our first consultant and the product starts being iterated on we can start the second thread of seeing if it’s worth building out tooling to hyper scale to hella PSOs in concurrency to building out own agency. I’m faily convinced that we need data now and that the fastest way to do this is to higher a consultant. The more open ended questions are how that decision of what we automate now impacts the hyper growth trajectory in the future and what that hyper growth trajectory looks like whether that’s

  1. Getting the product to a stable point via the consultant data method then hyper scaling it across different PSO’s as a tool – this seems very possible because it’s been proven by Auctor that they’re receptive when the tooling is good
  2. Getting the product to a stable point via the consultant data method then building out a huge consulting organization and taking over the stack – which does feel like end state but might not be the easiest way to get to end state.

The actionable for now are purely to

  1. Hire our first consultant
  2. Try and answer all the open ended questions
  3. Write out our long term discovery and growth plans with the open ended questions answered
  4. Execute said plan and complete the discovery phase product.