SpanningPartners: small team, great solution

By Vivek | December 22nd, 2006 at 11:09 am ET         

SpanningSalesforce is one of those startups that portends how application development is going to happen in future. Really small teams getting together and rolling out apps rapidly. Actually in case of SpanningSalesforce the team size is 1. Yup, the only full-time employee is Charlie Wood, who gets help from 4-5 contractors as and when he needs. And the product offered by SpanningSalesforce delivers a very specific and targeted solution - RSS for anything to everything in Salesforce. So, if you are Salesforce user and tired of checking for new leads every now and then, you can just subscribe to your Spanning Salesforce feeds using any RSS reader and you are saved from click refresh button. Low subscription pricing, automated user signup and transaction handling, and safe delivery of user data, has enabled SpanningSalesforce to not only sustain itself in the market but also be profitable since its launch 1.5 years back.

Charlie initially started off in mid-2005 by providing RSS feeds for some of the important modules of Salesforce like new leads and opportunities, and escalated support cases, but soon started getting requests for more specific feeds. Realizing the opportunity, he went on to build Spanning Feedbuilder that lets users create custom feeds using a web-based interface. Ever since SpanningSalesforce has seen high customer signup rate. Charlie continues to receive VC and buyout offers once in a while, but wants to continue building more mashups with various Salesforce ISVs. SpanningSalesforce users will soon have the ability to sync their Google Apps, like Gmail and GoogleCalendar, with Salesforce. Also starting next year customers will be able to subscribe for the service from the soon to-be launched Salesforce AppStore.

On the whole, a great and very much required service from a smart startup.

Links:
SpanningSalesforce