What's Salesforce?
Hi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used.Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; https://tryretool.com), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc.The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. "add a column to the `Leads` table"), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. "I want to display this data in this view"). I've previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it's always frustrating because I can't customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool.To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :)(Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)