Finding an idea for a Salesforce app on the IdeaExchange
Salesforce Ideas, or the IdeaExchange, is a great source of potential business ideas for Salesforce. Customers create ideas - usually just bug fixes or enhancement requests - then other customers support with comments and/or votes. Although Salesforce picks up some and builds them into the platform there are stacks left - currently around 40,000 open ideas! - and while there are no guarantees anyone will pay for them you do get a list of the users who created the idea and the company they work for so you can directly market your solution to strong leads.
Taking one example 'Enable field history tracking on Quotes':
https://ideas.salesforce.com/s/idea/a0B8W00000GdoOWUAZ/enable-field-history-tracking-on-quotes
This wouldn't be a complicated build for an experienced developer, it has around 700 votes, around 150 comments, and importantly it could be more future proofed by extending the functionality and making the solution work with other or all objects, not just Quotes (helping cover the risk that Salesforce may build this into the platform in the future).
Very back-of-a-napkin but let's say you can sell to 10% of the users who have commented at $100/month - that's 15 * 100 = $1500/month. Then we can assume most customers who want the functionality don't comment (hence 700 votes), so 10x might be reasonable? Even with Salesforce taking their 15% this is still a very healthy $13k/month business, and you can easily see how those figures could be higher...
I list a few of the ideas which jumped out at me when I was working out what to build in this post:
Solid idea. This method of finding ideas can be extended to other marketplaces as well
This is a very good idea, I wonder if there are similar resources for other big platforms.
Once you get selasforce users to use your new product, you can then make more similar products and market it to your existing users.
Yeah similar for something like the Chrome store would be really useful if it doesn't already exist. And yeah, totally reasonable to cross sell to existing customers, or even offer the smaller, easier to build apps as freebies (no charge to list on the AppExchange then either) and either go for a freemium model (which is what I'm planning to do) or cross sell bigger products off the back of it...