3 Things: TheraPunch, Shared Channels for Salesforce, FBN for X

Happy Sunday! Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share! This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• TheraPunch

• Shared Channels for Salesforce

• FBN for X

1. TheraPunch

I seriously considered spinning this up and then the pandemic happened. There is also a somewhat entertaining backstory here. One very early morning in 2019 I was going for a run in SF and approached an intersection where I had a walk sign and green light. A beat up car comes screaming from behind and without slowing, turns right on red and nearly hits me. I jumped back and yelled and the guy rolled down his window and yelled “get out of the street you stupid f*ing b*tch”. Now, I’m normally not a violent person and would just turn and run away but I was really pissed off and was about one second away from going and kicking the back of his car as hard as I could. Better thinking prevailed and I did run away but it got me thinking that something bigger was going on under the surface that I should probably do some thinking on. This was at a time when meditation was becoming extremely popular and part of me was thinking I should do more of that and chill out but a large part of me just really needed to punch something. Then I thought, why not both?

I immediately had the name and the idea. Physical spaces where you first spend 15 minutes in a 10ish ft x 10ish ft room with padded walls, punching bags, and things to rip and tear (think packing bubbles and fabric so things that can’t really hurt you unlike a smash/fury/break room). You can select various “rage playlists” and go to town getting all of the anger, frustration, and aggression out. After you exhaust yourself, you’re taken to the Zen Zone for 30 minutes where there are a variety of guided meditations, spa-like ambiance, and a place to relax and center yourself. After your 45 minute appointment, you can get back to your life, hopefully in a much better state. I think this could charge prices somewhere between a Barry’s Bootcamp and a massage and is easily scalable across locations and cities. I can see these popping up all over the place and becoming a go-to activity for young, stressed professionals.

2. Shared Channels for Salesforce

Since 1999, Salesforce has helped create the category of cloud software and built an empire with a market cap of $226B and a customer base of 150,000 companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. While Salesforce is known for CRM (I mean, their stock ticker is even CRM) they have built or bought dozens of products across categories ranging from marketing automation to customer support to analytics and more. With their Force.com platform and AppExchange Marketplace, they ushered in hundreds of 3rd party apps purpose-built for specific verticals or use cases that sit right on top of Salesforce. While Salesforce clearly provides top software for many categories that a company needs, their products are extremely intra-company focused. The problem is, the functions that leverage these products like sales, marketing, support, and finance spend a majority of their time working and serving parties that are external to their organization.

Slack too began as a tool focused solely on communication and collaboration within teams, but quickly realized that to “kill email” and become the hub for all collaboration, they needed to create a way for different companies to communicate across Slack Workspaces which led to the launch of Shared Channels which has now turned into Slack Connect. Some people believe this could be the killer use case for Slack but while many startups have adopted Slack, the vast majority of enterprises have not and a requirement to collaborate via Connect is that both companies have their own instances of Slack. On the flipside, Salesforce is relatively ubiquitous among mid-market and enterprise companies who are also the ones with more use cases for external collaboration. On top of that, Salesforce is the system of record for some of the most valuable data and processes within a company which often are slowed due to waiting on external parties. If you could easily invite external stakeholders on a deal like procurement, security, and finance to a “shared channel” within Salesforce, you could dramatically reduce sales cycles, improve automation for some more manual back-and-forth work, and bring partner companies into closer collaboration. One other use case is around acquisitions and trying to integrate multiple instances of Salesforce at a single company. I’ve heard horror stories of large companies ending up with 5, 6, even 7 different Salesforce instances after multiple acquisitions that still don’t speak to each other years post-acquisition.

3. FBN for X

I became fascinated with Farmer’s Business Network (FBN) after hearing about it on a podcast maybe 5 years ago. It’s the perfect example of a “give to get” product where farmers provide data about the seeds they plant and performance in exchange for getting access to the data provided by other farmers in the network in order to reduce costs, and maximize the value of crops. Today they have over 13,000 farmers across the US and Canada and provide services like directly purchasing seed, managing contracts and bids, communicating with farmers, monitoring fields, and keeping data organized. What I found genius about this model is that they were able to convince people to give away their precious and proprietary data for free which is typically something that any business protects as their keys to the kingdom. That got me thinking; what are other markets where a model like FBN makes sense?

You have companies like Glassdoor that provide anonymous company reviews and salary data and in the last year, there have been more than a few startups that have emerged in the compensation data category like Pave, Welcome, and Compaas that have the opportunity to execute on a similar business model. Outside of compensation information, there are plenty of data sets locked inside of companies or platforms that would be extremely valuable if aggregated, normalized, and shared to provide more transparency and direction for companies or individuals. One area could be around SaaS pricing where companies give away data on what they purchase and how much they paid to get more leverage with all future purchases by knowing what peer companies are paying. A few other areas where there is currently a lot of opacity that could benefit from data sharing are personal finance (I’d love to see how a variety of successful people are investing their money), costs/reviews related to professional services, agencies, and freelancers, and pharma/life sciences where we got to see what is possible when data is shared widely with the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccines. There are tons of examples of where the FBN for X model can be applied across almost any industry so excited to see what people come up with!

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine