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Intro: I’m Paul Higgins an ex-corporate executive turned business owner who for five years, struggled to grow a cloud Consulting business whilst battling a chronic disease. With the help of mentors and experts, I got the business model right, built a sales and marketing engine, and developed a high performing team that ended in a successful exit. I received a kidney transplant from a mate, and now on my second life, I dedicate my time to helping other Cloud Consultants go quickly with less effort to enjoy life. Detecting an accent I'm an Aussie working globally from Melbourne Australia. I interview successful Cloud Consultants sharing their scaling story to give you inspiration and practical tips. I have dedicated experts for Cloud Consultants on the show to save you time and money by working with the right people. If you want to scale quickly with less effort to enjoy life you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Speaker 1 (0:55): I'm Paul Higgins and welcome to the cloud consultants show episode number 471. Today's topic is building an app on the Salesforce app exchange. And you will learn why use an outsourced development team and how to work with them, different types of apps being either hybrid native. The best way to work with Indian developers where Andi has got immense experience from that but he has worked in particular the US and in India and five. And finally, how artificial intelligence and machine learning will expand. He gives a score out of 10 at the moment and where he thinks it's going to be in the next couple of years.

Speaker 1 (1:34): If it's your first time welcome and if you love what you hear, please subscribe. It's for cloud consultants where people consult and go and implement or deploy SaaS platform. So if that's you, you're in the right place. And if you're a regular, thanks for your support. I'd love to hear from you. Email me at [email protected]. Let me know you listen and most importantly, suggest some topics or suggest some guests. And that may include you. Always really appreciate those that do. So I want to quick shout out to Kary Gunn, who did recommend Andi for the show, which was great. And you can get all the summary in the app that you're listening to now, but also at paulhigginsmentoring.com/podcast, it's episode 471. And before we go into the interview with Andi, I'd like to thank our sponsors, the first is the Cloud Consultants Collective. It's the world's only revenue focused collective for cloud consultants. Peers answering business questions for other peers, much better than Google or YouTube. Why don't you try it for yourself at the cloudconsultantscollective.com and you can join free for today. And the other one is Sendpark. So it's a fantastic personalized video platform brand for sales. It allows you to have a core video that's personalized and then also have other videos that you can attach. Why don't you go check it out for yourself because it's free to do so. You can get a free six month trial at paulhigginsmentoring.com/sendspark.

Speaker 1 (3:01): Today's guest is Andi Giri. He's an IT entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience. He completed his bachelor's at a college in Chennai, India and then a degree in computer engineering from the University of Maryland in the US. Andi started Soft Square back in 1997. And it was originally an IT staff augmentation firm, sorry if I can get that right. And then he pivoted towards more managed services in 2018, 2008 I should say. And now he is driving product best practice and he does builds fantastic apps and he goes through an example of one that he's built, but that's what he does, builds apps on it on AppExchanges. And he's very active both in the Tamil community. He's also active in investing in startups through native angel network and some others. And he's just an all round fantastic guy, runs a great team. And you're gonna love this interview with Andi Giri from softsquare.biz. So great to have you here, Andi.

Speaker 2 (4:08): My pleasure. 

Speaker 1 (4:09): Well, yeah. So look, you know, you've had a long time. Obviously you started very young in your life, a long time within the IT industry in particular within Salesforce of late. So we're going to dig into that in a little bit more detail soon. But why don't we start with what clients you llove to work with at the moment and what problems you love to solve for them?

Speaker 2 (4:28): OK, basically we enjoy doing digital transformation problems or solving them. Clients who use legacy databases, who use spreadsheets, not necessarily paper because the paper is gone for the last 20 years at least.

Speaker 1 (4:45): Yeah.

Speaker 2 (4:45): Those that have tough problems to solve and want to leverage this health and post-incer system for solving this problem. We are very specific to Salesforce. Of course, the plant has so many other SaaS solutions. We can go and learn every one of them. And this is the top one in the mid-size business to growth business, and that's where we dealt.

Speaker 1 (5:05): Right, and with Salesforce, are you all of the cloud products, or you focus on?

Speaker 2 (5:12): Most of them, sales cloud service cloud, consumer goods cloud, marketing cloud, these are the top ones. Because we have to dance to the market, right? We can't say we just do this. We can, but we are not that deep specialized at the moment.

Speaker 1 (5:24): Yeah, yeah. And we'll sort of dig into it a little bit more, but my understanding, you've sort of got the services arm, and then you've got the product arm as well. So just tell us a little bit about the difference between those two.

Speaker 2 (5:37): Okay, as many of you know, services is a low barrier entry point. So in fact, before services, we were doing a staff vlog in about 15, 20 years back. And then I didn't like that because there were ethical barriers I had to jump across. And I didn't like unethical means of running a business. So I moved away from that to project consulting. And we were doing project consulting for OS, cameras, PHP, PHP, New Galga and two different things. And I said, I was advised by someone saying that we should focus. So we started focusing on a product and I chose SAP and Salesforce way back in 2008. So I wanted to pivot to one of these two, or specialize in one of these two. And I started learning both. And I got my first consulting assignment with Salesforce. And I was lucky enough to pick Salesforce because that was the up and coming company while SAP was already well established. So it is difficult to get in to break in. So got into Salesforce and did services for about three years. We slowly instantly built a practice based on Elance, which is currently Upwork. So all very. small gigs, I mean from $800 to $10,000, we ranged, the range was, and then we would even develop code or configuration and put it on, not publish it, but say we have done this piece for you, and then win the project and then go ahead and do it. So that's how we did our services. And then I had a product manager, a product manager at that time who eventually is our product GM, his name is Nick Simpritow. He said, okay, we have some product ideas. Start developing and then we built some products, but they were not really commercial. We just put them free on the AppExchange. A couple of them were commercial, but we didn't do any marketing, no branding, nothing. So they didn't move much. And then the last couple of years is when we decided to do stronger commercial products and we are going strong at the moment or building it up. It is yet to scale to a larger level. 

Speaker 1 (7:39): Right. So the commercial products that you do, do you do them for yourself and you also do them for other Salesforce partners as well?

Speaker 2 (7:47): Correct, correct. In fact, our services, if you want me to explain a little bit about our services business, our service business has two pieces, one is SI, which could be consumed goods cloud or marketing cloud or sales cloud mostly, and some service cloud too. And then Pardart and CPQ and other B2B commerce, those components of the Salesforce ecosystem. And then the other piece that we have, which is almost 50% of our business is product building for others. So ISPs on the AppExchange, they have business ideas or they have built something to a certain piece. And they want a hybrid team with a certain amount of cost optimization. They come to us and say, hey, I need this thing built. Can you do an estimate for this piece to be built? Sometimes they come where they have developed something, but they can't push it through the AppExchange security review, which is kind of rigorous. So they come to us and we build those products for them or get them ready for the AppExchange list and help them with the other processes beyond the selfless development and then our deployment of the app. So app building is a major part of our practice and our ISV capabilities also gelatinous. Right? Our teams have internal communication and learning and best practices which we apply to our clients when we build those apps for them.

Speaker 1 (9:05): Yeah, and look, it's been a while since I've built an app myself and or consulted for apps, but I know in the old days it was, you know, people had great ideas but not a lot of money. That is a general rule and, you know, they used to say, hey, you know, like, yeah, we'll give you equity share or whatever it was, you know, what's your model and how you help people get products or apps to the app?

Speaker 2 (9:30): Initially we started with equity share when we had money in the in the pie or substantial amount to invest initially, but nowadays we do a deal except for one that we do, we generally build the client and basically they start with a fixed cost estimate of something. And we built one for Citrix and they said okay cost them $10,000 to do a bridge. So let me explain. There are two types of epixenage products hybrid and native. Hybrid products are those that already have been established as a SaaS platform. Either established or just built. And then SaaS platform is what's called a hybrid product because it's not the IP is not in SaaS and this. And the work, the actual grinding is done in their app and we provide a UI in SaaS not like an iFrame but more deeper UI. So they have an admin panel, they have some screens which will do some work on their platform and throw back the interface or give the user interface to a self-host customer who wants to leverage another SaaS platform. It's a cloud or SaaS product. So that we do, that's called a hybrid. Native products are actually the most cash generating for us because they need their IP, the client's IP is right there in Salesforce and we build Salesforce apps very similar to what you would build Node.js or Java or PHP or any kind of app, right? So you need a deeper knowledge of the system and it's built right there on the Salesforce platform, on the lighting platform, and we help them build those apps and go through the entire process of Java. And it's a recurring revenue for us because anyone who builds an app, scales the app and builds it and improves it, otherwise the product will be dead, right? So the dependence on us and our attachment with the customer is stronger when it comes to native app.

Speaker 1 (11:21): Yeah, and I talked to a lot of Salesforce partners, that's my job sort of every day to talk to them, coach them, interview them like I mean, they're viewing you. And a lot of them say, you know, services, difficulties. We all know the margins are tight, et cetera, et cetera. And we've got these great ideas for product, but they're like, but I don't really know how to do it. Like I've got a concept, but people even asked me, like, who do you know that does this? And for you, take a stream, maybe an example, you don't have to name the company, but from that initial idea stage to, I think I can commercialize this product to grow revenue outside of my services, to actually getting it to market, give us a just a quick overview of how that happens.

Speaker 2 (12:08): Okay, so there's an AppExchange app called NuLaw. It's a lawyer CRM, so meant for little business, primarily in the United States. I think there's some sales outside also. And they wanted to build an app about three years back. And they came to us saying, hey, we have the business requirements. We have a product manager. You provide us a technical architect and the technical lead and the a bunch of developers to get that done. So we started to, we are a scumbord. The chose Jira, they would collaborate with the team to build the app and it's been ongoing. So it's not only the build of the app that we support this customer, we also have got a deal to do the resize services. So over and above the building of the app and delivery of the app and constant enhancement to the app, we also provide SI services for that app to their customers. So the customers that needs, we also have a weekly meeting with this client to actually properly deliver those to their clients because it's their client, which they're giving to us and we need to make sure we deliver this product properly, or configure it properly but customer data migration is a very important piece, right? Because they would be using a competing legal product that they want to move to this model, this new app. And one thing I forgot to mention is some apps on Salesforce are built on top of Salesforce platform. They are not enhancements of Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. So they built like, you build a Node.js app and deploy it on AWS, similarly, or Azure. And these products are built on Salesforce platform, using Salesforce as one proprietary technology and then deploy it. So in this case, it's got OEM. So this is the OEM app that we support. I'll explain the other option in a subsequent.

Speaker 1 (14:04): Yeah, great, great. And look, I think that is that Kary, Kary Gunn, who's. 

Speaker 2 (14:08): Kary Gunn, yes. 

Speaker 1 (14:09): Yeah, yeah, great. And so how validated was the idea when they came to you? What have they done to develop that do market validation of the idea? 

Speaker 2 (14:21): The business side validation was completely done by them. Our capabilities are lesser on the business validation of the app. I think that was three years back at the moment. I think we have more knowledge, but we are not business consultants in that sense. Our strength is more technology or building apps for the app exchange. But then we have, we know there is something called app analytics that ISV self as ISV is used. And we had to teach some of our larger ISV saying, hey, this is a feature that itself was giving. They're giving you user adoption. They asked, they're giving us information about who or how many users use this component within this timeframe. They give a lot of analytics because currently they give CRM analytics licenses. And we use that to effectively go and let's say we go to a customer success session, we tell the customer, hey, you know, we have so much adoption of our app. And how many more users we see so many. So, from abstraction, we would like to know what you are going to, what you want more in our product, right? So, those, it helps a lot and we build some tools around Apponautics to make it more friendlier to the ISV and we are in the process of executing that piece for one of our big ISVs now.

Speaker 1 (15:33): So, the how long did it take from when they first met you to go to market for NuLaw?

Speaker 2 (15:43): Oh yes, it was about a couple of years to get to that level.

Speaker 1 (15:48): Yeah, and for you, what do you, so working with, so, Kary and NuLaw, what do you find the piece that is critical for them to get right? Obviously, like you said, the business case is outside of, but working with your team. What makes a really good partner to work with versus a not-so?

Speaker 2 (16:07): Okay. Very importantly, clarity of requirement, right? If the client has a reasonable amount of detail and knowledge of the product that they want to build and market acceptance of that, then our job becomes easier. But easy is always not the best, right? So the more tougher problems or no more hazy it is. It is more challenging and more rewarding for our team to learn and go. But there's also risk, right? We are primarily offshore, which means we don't have direct communication as much as the leaders, right? I travel a lot and I meet everyone with my clients. My team members may not in all cases. So clarity of requirements has become very important. And then how they treat the people, right? So some clients are not sensitive to time zone differences. to be there during those hours and I avoid such customers because there are tools, it's always PPT, right? Process people and tools. So if you use the right tools and the right process, it's not impossible to run an offshore operation or align with an offshore team. And some clients is tough to teach them and it's become difficult. But we try our best to make sure they align with us to some extent. And also, yeah, treating your people well matters a lot because people are multiple initiatives that they have during the day or multiple tasks. And then they would choose a customer who treats them well, right? So it's all human finally. Yeah. That's pretty precise. So it looks like a lot of the code can be done by fancy video nowadays if you explain what you want.

Speaker 1 (17:44): Yeah, well, I know you studied a lot in the US. You spend some of your time now in the US, but also in India. Well, what do you say is the biggest cultural differences between the US and in India, and I suppose in the context of working with the development team?

Speaker 2 (18:01): Actually it's not greatly different. The education system in India is not too bad, but there is a lot of training we have to do to an inter-level developer in India because experiential learning is a little bit lacking in some of the colleges. So it depends on where they go, where they have gone. So US and India are very well aligned nowadays in terms of culture or company culture except that India is a very hierarchical by nature I think by cultures. And that's a little bit difficult to beat because I don't like hierarchy. I don't like these Yesman and Sir and things that I have learned from the US that should not be there, but so that's something that's difficult right here because you have to align with the local culture. That's one thing that I would like to improve. But otherwise, in terms of work at the, with the recent remote training, people learn from their customers, as much as they learn from their peers. So yeah, and there's always people who are achievers, and they are right, like low, but some who try low are also good, right? So it depends on how we can tap them and grow them as a carrier and not just a job. So that's, yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:20): Yeah, and, yeah. And, you know, my experiences, we had a small development team in the Philippines, but most of mine was more non-development skills into all around the world, particularly in the US and Australia. So that was my experience. And yes, I found that, you know, the Philippines, I was a very hierarchical, and, you know, they're very family orientated. So they're sort of the two key traits. And yes, I found where, you know, different cultures and different people didn't really speak. And it was less of a cultural thing. It was just a personality thing where if you didn't respect, like you said, those two key things, or didn't realize it. I remember the first time I had a meeting and I came from Australia where, you know, we generally call it how it is. I said, okay, we're going to have a workshop on how to improve the business. I sort of said, okay, so we'll go around and everyone will give their thoughts like I wouldn't go. When I was a director at Coca-Cola, I just thought, that's fine. I'll run a workshop, I'll run millions of them. And no one said a word. I'm like, anyway, long story short, it was like, well, it's disrespectful to talk about things that should be improved in front of the boss. That's not what you do. So I had to find different ways to get that information out. I think the fear of going offshore is often overstated. I think it's much better experience than most people think. It's going to be because you always hear the bad stories of the things that weren't wrong. You never hear all the good things about the things. that went right. So I think that's definitely part of it. But yeah, I think that hierarchy and, you know, the not wanting to directly give feedback that might be negative, I think, is, that's definitely in the Philippines. And I get the feeling that that's similar in India?

Speaker 2 (21:04): That's very similar. It's difficult to explain negative things to people. Sometimes they take it personal, but it depends on your relationship, right? How you built it, live with a person. So if you just go and snap with them, then obviously, it'd be a lot of culture people would be upset. Right? So those are things that we learn. Learning is a lifelong exercise, I guess.

Speaker 1 (21:25): Yeah. And I think that's where your skills great that you've spent time in both right. So you've got that beautiful blend to help it smooth out. And like when, you know, new law came and approached you, how did they find you in the first place? How did they pick you as a partner versus, you know, anybody else?

Speaker 2 (21:44): Okay, through a reference, actually most of our clients at the moment or have been acquired through reference or through e-lance. So it's mostly a reference in terms of product clients, but in terms of SI, we've got a lot of traction with AIs, particularly in India space, because India is digitally transforming after COVID, unfortunately. And so there is a lot of projects itself which was introduced as to. And that's the finest and live scene when it comes to SI. So aligned with the EEs and they'll throw a lot of work at you.

Speaker 1 (22:18): Yeah, yeah. And any tips on how you oil that wheel better, right? Cause everyone's got a different view of doing it. What's your version of how you get the IEs to provide you a disproportionate share of those leads?

Speaker 2 (22:31): Okay. So it's essentially about relationship and how your quality of deliverable. this. Initially it used to be like when I tried 10 years back to all Attract Ease, I would we would go to create me and my ups VP would go to conferences to try to attract their attention when the SaaS had not really bloomed, right? It is bloomed in the US and probably some parts of Australia and UK and Canada and other places but not in India. So it's difficult to sell relatively more expensive software, CRM software to customers in India and we tried hard. So at that time we attract the attention of the AEs but we were a small thing so for them we've probably not taken off and then once we have scaled to a certain extent now they see the quality of deliverable and then the reputation that we have got and success. Of course there are challenges, right? Because if you spend a lot more than what you committed for to a client and you deliver they're very happy but then we have negative cash flow so you got to balance the seed but that properly right for each project and attain success. So it's a tighter game. Billables are lower here. So obviously we love to be really tight to make sure we have some little margin left, if not a loss. So tough. But yeah, your quality is what speaks.

Speaker 1 (23:53): And you know, speaking of, you know, Indian talent, once again, my main references in the Philippines where they continue to educate and continue to put people in this normie, you know, thankfully enough, enough people. And often people would say to me, hey, I'm looking for this particular person. I'm like, look, I can find you maybe one of them within the Australian market, or I can find you, you know, a thousand of them in the Filipino market. Right. So you make your choices to which one you want. So, you know, for you and the talent that you are looking for, like, you know, just tell us a little bit about that is like the unis, do they continue to pump out people that, you know, raise your, for you to train or is that getting easier or harder? Just give us a bit of an insight into the talent that's available within India.

Speaker 2 (24:42): Yeah, I mean, talent is available in all scales, right? Experienced or meaning inter-level versus Architect level. The sweet spot we dealt with is college. We go to multiple colleges, about 20, 30 colleges every year to hire about 30 to 50 people. And then some other, about 60, 70% of them take the offer. It's a competitive market. It's a still-as-market, typically, except for here and there a few years. And it's right out of college, and none of them, they are more commitment in some sense. And they also are pristine and fresh. They are green, right? So we can train them better than cross-referenced. Cross-fired individuals. So our success in terms of quality has come because we have nurtured people that are college who have the fire in the belly and also the intent to learn to grow along with us. So that is key to our success I think.

Speaker 1 (25:46): Yeah, yeah, great. And you mentioned like time zones can be a bit tricky being on multiple time zones, etc. What else you see that pops up when, you know, let's say that, you know, someone is building something on top of sales force like you said like NuLaw as an example. Now what are some of the other challenges that you you find on a regular basis when you're working with partners?

Speaker 2 (26:08): Working with partners, you mean, I speak partners is specific to, okay, so partners bring one important thing, which is they bring the client. So we don't have to go acquire new clients. So they have the clients and they want primarily development and some many cases they also want admin services in the self-host ecosystem knowledge of the product. So they want cost and scale, right? When it comes to offshore, it's about cost is one factor, which is kind of waning away now. But the other advantage is scale. The number of people who are available in this part of the world is bigger. So that helps them. So in terms of time zone, we, Pacific time zone is a bit difficult because it's 13 and a half hours away. Eastern and Central time zone in the US. And of course, Hong Kong, Australia, those time zones, it's early, we have to do an early shift. So we don't have a shift basis kind of thing. But our people, we can't mix and match people who do Australia with people who do the US because they're in the US because they're not going to do it. So we don't, we make sure they have a reasonable quality of life. So they're don't get burnt in the morning, out of the evening. Burnt means getting tired because of a long work day. So in terms of alignment, we tried to make sure the entire team does one particular reason, support our development work versus the other. And of course, process, right? And tools. So if you have the right tools, we give overlap. So every client would get at least three to four hours of time overlap so that they can interact with our people properly. And if they have to get into a call, in some cases, we have daily scrum calls. In some cases, two or three, we don't push process down the team. The same process down. We accommodate the client's requests and dance to their process and improve that as much as we can. And tools are important. Many clients would come and say email, email, email. Couple of months is OK. But then if they wanted to scale properly, then we would. OK. push them to Asana or Jira or a jail accelerator kind of tools and make sure they use them and project manager.

Speaker 1 (28:22): Yeah, and I think, you know, I've got team members all over the world and, you know, to me video has become a fantastic tool, whether it's, you know, use Loom, whether, you know, I use something called send spark, but, you know, using video now can replace a lot of meetings where you can have asynchronous communication, IE, you know, you watch it, you can, you know, repeat back, but you don't actually have to be in a meeting. And I think that thankfully COVID, I think is, you know, even for the people that weren't up to speed, now everyone's up to speed on that right as I always joke when, you know, you used to have to ask people if they'd turn the video on right before COVID. Now everyone just automatically comes on with a video on right. It's completely changed. And for you, so, you know, you've got all those time zones, et cetera. Are your people in an office, are they working from home, you got a hybrid model? Like where do your teams live? 

Speaker 2 (29:14): We were closed for about two years. We reopened November 1st of 2022. So last few months, we have four months. We've been doing from the office. About 20% of the workers still live home. Some of them have children in school and various other personal commitments. So we are fairly flexible if they're productive too so that they can manage their lives from their homes. Some of them come every other day to work sometimes. Some of them come every once a week. So primarily those that we find our collective, regardless of where they are, and we are flexible in that sense. But as a culture, we are starting to discourage work from home because inter-level people, we can't train them when they are at home. They come on a college, they think it's a nine to five. It's not about 9-5, it's about ability to communicate to the customer and our customers come at 6.30. So, your customers come to active work around 6.30 p.m. our time. So, our team has to obviously accommodate a bit of time shift towards the evening.

Speaker 1 (30:25): Yeah, great. Yeah, and you talked about, you know, the app exchange before, you know, obviously that's where all the marketplace and where it all happens. What are you, what have you seen, or what are you seeing is probably a better question. What are you seeing is the future of the app exchange and where it's going? Like, you know, if I'm interested on the salesforce partner, I'm listening to Andi and I'm thinking, you know, really, you know, I've got these great ideas for some, some apps that I want to develop on that app market, the place or exchange, I should say, you know, what do you see changing what are the trends? Or you might say, no, look, it's going to be the same for the next five years. I'd just love to get your perspective on that.

Speaker 2 (31:04): Okay. I mean, automation is a key to any SaaS product, right? Particularly Salesforce, right? It enables automation. Even now in our own products, we use Office 63s to be sheet. We have email. We have both signed to eSign out documents, but they're still in different systems, right? So we tend to automate those for our own and we deploy some of that as part of our tool set, right? So what we have our ISV partners or ISV clients eat our dog food. In some cases, as I mentioned, the app analytics and those. So it's important that automation stays, which is already there, right? It's been around for more than 10 years. While I think AI enabling App Exchange products, yes, would help a lot, including our own products render in a crucial images, videos, PDFs, PPTs, whatever it is, right? Most of the content that customers use. And then we had a requirement to scan a device or some kind of an equipment and get the OCR out of it, get the text out of that so that a call center doesn't have to read it and put it, right? A call center rep. So that kind of requirement, if we enable that product to also OCR, that would help, right? We're thinking about how we can differentiate the products with AI. It could be an LP, it could be image recognition, it could be any of the new upcoming trends, right? So I think we will gain a lot, IPCS needs products, we gain a lot of traction if there is more AI and possibly ML associated announcements that products, product vendors could build on top of Self-host app exchange and part of it is aligning the right AI provider right self-host has Einstein, but that doesn't mean Einstein is a big long name all of everything There is tensor flow by Google. There is Zoho tools. There is Oracle doing some work. So we need to IBM particularly And we need to align and learn and do the best tool in the market and not just get to use only self-host tools. 

Speaker 1 (33:20): Yeah, yeah, and then you know when we talked before about the universities and you know you're getting fresh grads which is great out of the university out of the colleges, right? How you know obviously AI it's you know, I forget what it the saying but it's basically like you know it takes a lot longer, you know innovation always takes a lot longer than you think but at the end of it it comes very fast, right and may I would chat GPT and everything at the moment. It's like, you know I'm using it every day most people are using it every day, right, where we weren't even two months ago. The question is, you know, are the, how are the universities and the students keeping up with the latest development within AI for us who's, you know, right at the cutting edge of it, find it hard to keep, keep up with it. Well, you know, are you going to have to train your employees on the AI or is it, you know, something that the universities are going to do?

Speaker 2 (34:10): It depends on the university, right? If someone has gone, had gone to the IATs or any of the premium institutes, then they are more exposure. People go to Tier 2 town universities or colleges where we typically hire, we have to train them, right? It also depends on the individual. Some individuals are upfront learners, some need a job to learn. So it varies and in many cases we end up training them in whichever technology they are supposed to. And we also use conferences for that because we're in a big city, Chennai. So there's a conference you imagine happening in a couple of weeks here. The Saas Boomi, just Asia's largest SaaS conference, which is happening. It's mostly learning. I'm just going for that for the first time. So there's a lot of this, about 600 plus SaaS companies which are coming there. So learn from each other. So that exposure we give to our people, which typically they won't get out of college.

Speaker 1 (35:07): Yeah, great. And let's say that full adoptions are 10 out of 10. Where are we in the curve at the moment for AI and your perspective, especially from an epic change point of view? Are we still at two or three? Or where are we sitting at the moment?

Speaker 2 (35:21): That's probably three or four.

Speaker 1 (35:24): Yeah. What's the pace in the next two years? Is that going to go up to six to seven or do you think it will gradually increase?

Speaker 2 (35:32): I think it has to because that's a way to differentiate your products, right? That just the UI and the speed and those things are all mundane. I think the more differentiation you have for your product, the more effective you can sell. So, and it's also buzzword, right? Dot AI is a big thing. So, part of your branding, if you have some really AI in your product, it helps a lot.

Speaker 1 (35:55): Yeah, yeah. And as a general rule, the stuff that you're releasing at the moment, how much AI is in it is that 5% functionality of the function, about 10%?

Speaker 2 (36:04): 10%. A lot more improved, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:09): Yeah, great. Well, look, we've been talking to Andi. He's from SoftSquare.biz in episode 471. And for me, if you're listening to Andi and you've got a product idea, you may not have internal teams. So, you've got the business case, like we said with NuLaw, but you like. I just, I know that we haven't got the development and in particular, always recommend that people don't split. They don't try to retrain the people that you're currently doing your services with. Don't try to train them to be developers. We've all been down that hole. We've been down that path and we know what the outcome is there. But, you know, getting contact with Andi and you can see he's very knowledgeable in this space and he can certainly direct you in the right direction. So Andi, what we're going to do now is the rapid fire. I'll ask you four questions and get your rapid responses. So you ready for that?

Speaker 2 (37:00): Yes, sir.

Speaker 1 (37:01): All right. Great. So the first one is what are some daily habits that you do to help you scale your business?

Speaker 2 (37:07): Learn. Right. So every day is a learning game, learning day. Scaling your business is not just about putting money in and investing and doing things for your customers. It's also nurturing your people. So we have been thinking about planning for initiatives to enhance learning and and certification presence. Career growth versus job satisfaction. Pay is not the only thing in the world. There is more to a career than just pay and spending. So as I mentioned, I learned from conferences, from speakers, inspiration, podcasts like yours, and then applied to some of them to our company's growth.

Speaker 1 (37:48): Yeah, yeah, Brilliant, that covers off the next question is where do you learn more? So you've done a brilliant job in combining those two. So the next one is what's one wish that we could grant you for your business Softsquare to scale it?

Speaker 2 (38:02): Right, I mean, learning from books is one. My brain takes more from conferences to see people and hear inspirational content of other achievers who have made it big and learned from them. So it's mostly face-to-face conferences or sometimes Zoom, but I go to Dreamforce, I go to Thai conferences in Santa Clara as well as in India. So that's where most of the inspiration and the knowledge comes from. 

Speaker 1 (38:37): Right. So your wish is you want free. People will tell you the best conferences, free tickets and free travel. That's what Andi wishes for for his business. The last one is you've been in the industry for a long time because you started very young. But what do you know now that you wish you had of known early? And in particular around this product and app space?

Speaker 2 (39:00): People management is one that's very important to grow the team and grow. your products. Identifying the right people and have them leverage your presence, leverage your products, leverage your customers and their talent has been the most challenging and the most learning that I've been doing over the last few years. So if you get the right people to not just work but will align with your business ideas, I think that's a really important success. We are the right people, your customers and swarm around you.

Speaker 1 (39:33): Yeah, great. And how big is the team at the moment, Andi?

Speaker 2 (39:37): We're 140.

Speaker 1 (39:39): Yeah, well that, yeah, I think that's a great way to finish it. As I said, you're listening to Andi, some soft square dot biz, we'll have all the links, etc. in the show notes. But I've thoroughly enjoyed past conversations we've had Andi. I've enjoyed this one and yeah, thanks for helping other Salesforce partners, other ISVs get great products to market. So, we're forward to speaking again soon.

Speaker 2 (40:04): Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time.

Speaker 1 (40:07): Hope you enjoyed that interview. Andi is a fantastic person and like I said, if you've got a product idea, you've got some questions around the app exchange, maybe launching a product, et cetera, Andi's a wonderful guy, he's very giving of his time and just a wonderful person. And if you've got other peers that you think got this challenge where they wanna either launch an app or trying to launch one, please share it with them. They'll love you, they'll think you're an absolute rock star. Check out our solo shows. Also don't forget our scaling blueprint where it shows you what we believe is best practice after doing it myself and also mentoring hundreds of other cloud consultants. And you can see exactly where you are. You can get that for free at paulhigginsmentoring.com/blueprint. And as always, please take action to scale quickly with less effort to enjoy life more.

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