Simon Goodyear and the crew at Wicked Bit just made the bold move to split the company in half. Wicked Bit will continue to provide consulting services, and the new entity, Beaufort 12, will focus on building enterprise business apps for the AppExchange.

Why? “The platform and it’s current position are perfect for small vendors like ourselves that are focusing purely on creating apps,” Simon said. “Moreover, small dedicated apps based companies have an advantage over the larger players: we move faster and we’re laser focused so customers get what they need.”

Beaufort 12 publishes two apps: Campaign Monitor and Dropbox Connector for Salesforce (formerly File It). Both are available via AppExchange Checkout. (If you want to know the history of the company name, just look at the provider profile for any one of those apps.)

Q: What’s it like to publish an app on the AppExchange?
A: Salesforce AppExchange opens up the entire world to us. We have customers all around the world – Australia to Singapore to the UK to the US. Interestingly over 80% of our licences are US based

Q: How was it to configure AppExchange Checkout?
A: Checkout setup is very easy. For products with simple monthly pricing it’s just a case of setting a couple of options. Self service aspects are great for us – handling credit card numbers for updates is a PCI nightmare and adding licences is a waste of our support time. Since most of our customers are in the US, we price in USD, which makes it very easy. We originally overlooked the need to support American Express, but adding it was easy, just a matter of switching payment gateways. None of our customers noticed.

Q: What would you share with other app creators about your experience with Checkout?
A: The Recurly integration back into Salesforce has been great for reporting and keeping an eye on income but we’ve had to tweak it to make better use of the LMA data model. Make sure you know the process for buying apps so you can help customers when they have questions. The Bracket Labs video has been invaluable to us.

Q: Do you have any advice for companies that want to both provide services and build apps?
A: I think I had this conversation 5 times with various different people at DreamForce – it’s something everyone seems to struggle with. We’re no different: we’ve found it to be a big challenge, and you know what we decided to do. And the reason we’ve gone this way is as you say for the chance to concentrate purely on apps, without the distraction of chasing consultancy, requirements, testing, etc – the stuff that can be all consuming.

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