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.
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'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.
100%. You also buy Salesforce because your salespeople demand you too. It's something users are familiar with and excel in. Dislodging an incumbent is a lot more than just the technical product itself.
Twenty would be better served not marketing itself as an alternative as it isn't really an alternative. Instead, focus on their strengths and hone it on a niche audience. Useful guide by April Dunford, who's a guru at positioning (and coincidentally had repositioned a CRM tool previously!): https://www.aprildunford.com/post/a-quickstart-guide-to-posi....
What's ironic about ecosystems is that (as an integration developer), getting devs to build on your platform is so easy if companies would just help them connect to users to better understand their needs, and then give them the necessary endpoints.
I, and many others, would jump to build on basically any tool that facilitated those relationships.
Yeah IMO its a red flag to compare yourself to Salesforce unless you:
* Offer a managed database system that can support common ETL workloads, custom fields, event hooks like post-save, etc
* A embeded-DSL for scripting custom actions, no an API does not replace this functionality
* Consultants/Support-engineering/and other escape valves when a really important business process needs to get fixed or built NOW
* A lot more
And frankly many startups don't have the muscle for this. Its not easy to do database work and its not easy to create functional (not necessarily good, just functional) DSLs and programming languages. These are harder computer science problems that take real talent to solve well. There are valid reasons Salesforce has the market cap it does.
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.