Salesforce pretty much revolutionised the software business by offering it as a service with monthly / yearly fee rather than the traditional one-time purchase trend of the mid-to-late 90's.
This philosophy of recurring revenue is what attracts the app developers to the platform. The theory is simple: Build an app that fills a gap in the platform, keep your expenses fixed and start building your customer base. Try to keep your churn (customer who discontinue your service) low.
If you keep adding new customer regularly and manage to keep your older ones, soon enough you will hit a point where your expenses are equal to your revenue.
After this is the green zone 💸
I remember Leah McGowen-Hare speaking at the dinner the night before FrenchTouch Dreamin 2018 and said: "If you meet Jean-Michel once, you cannot forget him". I did not know what she meant that time but boy is she was correct. Over the next months, I had the opportunity of meeting JMM at many Dreamin' events and he always has this energy which is energising & infectious. You are not the same after meeting him and I mean it in a good way.
In this episode, Jean talks about his humble beginnings as a C++ developer and then rising to the ranks of CIO. Later, he talks about how he find no solution for pictures on the platform and this gave birth to SharinPix.
He is strong believer in the idea of AppExchange and recurring revenue. His company SharinPix has now broken even and he believes there is a big-wave coming because once everyone has implemented Salesforce, they will need apps to do daily business.
Enjoy the episode and let us know on twitter what do you think about recurring revenue.
