Salesforce buys Assistly for $50M in cash | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce buys Assistly for $50M in cash

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100 pointsatldev34 comments

What I think is great about this story, is that there's nothing particularly novel about Assistly. They entered a pretty crowded market and made better software. That's it. And they're $50 million richer for it*.

Too often we harp on people for building "another [insert existing software]", but there are more success stories here than you'd think.

That's why you should sometimes ignore the "someone is already doing that" crowd when pitching your ideas.

Learn what they are doing so you can learn from their mistakes.

(Full disclosure, I'm competitively bias, but try to keeping balance) Is it really the case that it's the software that wins out, or the founding team behind it? While I certainly agree we do harp on about "another [insert existing software]", in this case look at the track record of the team behind the software - mostly all worked together before, mostly all sold before. Does the age old adage "It's not what you know, but who you know" come in to play here? It would be interesting to look at other similar success stories as this, where it's already a crowded market being penetrated, to see what the teams are behind each success.

Ex-salesforce here, in full agreement. Who you know has a big role to play in most acquisitions, but quite important for a corp culture as unique as salesforce. In all fairness, knowing the team & culture well (and seeing a close fit), helps mitigate the risk that the acquisition won't take.

There is something novel about Assistly: it's fucking awesome.

As someone who has tried every single support tool available on the web, Assistly blows everything else out of the water.

That's why they won.

The market is much, much bigger than $50M, so I wouldn't say they 'won'.

No surprise here.

The software is practically flawless. I am happy for the team.

After using Assistly for thousands of hours it is dead clear to me that a complex product CAN be easy to use and have many features/customizations while being virtually bug free with excellent usability.

Exactly. I've been using Assistly for about 3 months now and I can't imagine handling customer support without it.

I couldn't agree more. After trying several other support platforms moving to Assistly drastically changed our process for the better. Good for them!

Totally agree with you. Using a helpdesk system does have a positive impact - I no longer need to track every mail, tweet & facebook conversation listening to customers & potential customers.

Which helpdesk systems did you evaluate & did you find them very different? I have been evaluating Zendesk, Freshdesk & more recently Assistly.

For a starter Assistly pricing is very attractive to me. But other than that do you find marked difference in terms of the support process for those that you evaluated?

When we first started the process I was evaluating both Tender Support (http://tenderapp.com/) and Uservoice (http://uservoice.com/fullservice). Overall I preferred the way that Uservoice worked although there were a number of limitations at the time to how you could brand your help page.

Then we moved to Zendesk and used them for several months. Overall we were incredibly pleased with the process, although I was not a fan of their public support portal unless you use their API to roll your own.

Three weeks ago we setup an Assistly account and were instantly blown away at how they simplified the process of providing support, and added the ability to easily create complex business rules. When you're using Assistly it feels more like an native application full of keyboard shortcuts rather than a website. In short Assistly isn't a chore to use.

Plus, Assistly has some of the best support for their customers.

The CEO, COO, and Chief Architect were all my former bosses at Goowy Media back in the day, it is great to see their flawless track record continue! :)

I'm slightly amused by the fact that Salesforce is one of their investors, so they just paid themselves.

It is funny to think about, but most likely the purchase is for the rest of the shares SF doesn't own.

If you are reading this Assistly dudes, good job!

Genuine question for people who had sold their companies: How much does it matter if a deal is made "in-cash"? What does it affect by doing a deal in cash? Does it get bought at a lower price in comparison to an all stock or a mix cash-stock sale? Who determines whether it should be all cash or not?

Cash is almost always better, because it is immediate and without risk (as in stock price cratering before you can sell it).

Be very careful of an all-stock transaction. I had to pay a lot of money out of pocket to the IRS for shares in a company I couldn't sell.

I found out the hard way that restricted stock stays restricted until the company officially releases it to you (via a letter from their CFO, etc), even if you already satisfied the requirements to release the restriction per the terms of the deal (SEC restrictions, contract obligations, earn out, etc). Apparently this is a grey area and the company is under no obligation to release the stock.

Most brokers won't touch restricted stock with a ten foot poll. They tell you that you have to speak to their special division about restricted stock. And then they want to charge you to help you get it unrestricted and even then, there are no guarantees.

Stock is just a piece of paper until you can put it into a brokerage account and sell it. You MUST understand exactly what it will take to be able to sell that stock and who it will hinge on and when.

To add an additional headache, if you're still working for the company this complicates it even more depending on your role with the company.

TL;DR

I received stock after my company was sold, I had to pay tax on that stock as if it were cash in the bank, now I can't even sell the stock due to ambiguous rules. And the worst part is, even if I could sell my stock at this point, it wouldn't even cover what I paid in taxes.

You live, you learn. Rant over ;-)

or in this case, you live and i learn. :)

Thanks for that awesome bit of info. I've always assumed stock options are better because it raises the purchase price of a company in comparison to an all cash sale. I guess even if the purchase price is lower, money in your bank is always > paper money.

If Assistly is worth $50M, where does that put ZenDesk (http://zendesk.com)?

have you used either one? because you'd understand why acquiring assistly is more attractive.

Who said it wasn't?

Was thinking the same thing. We're using both Salesforce and ZenDesk, and our strategy is trying to co-locate as many of our 'services' as possible, reducing the number of systems, logins etc. Still don't think we're ditching ZenDesk...

With $19m more investment, and probably over 10,000 more customers (Assistly have never published any milestone figures, so I'm totally guessing) I doubt that puts Zendesk in any particular tight spot. Competition is fun though, when they're not selling.

As for anything else, let's see what unbias conclusions come up (ahem dreww).

SalesForce is piecing together social CRM: integrating social data into their CRM system. This will add to the monitoring (and in-progress publishing) capabilities from the Radian6 acquisition. The triforce is almost complete...

Question for those in the know: how tedious/challenging/hard/annoying to work on products that integrate various web 2.0 properties such as linkedin, twitter, facebook? (serious question)

In terms of ease: twitter > facebook > linked in > salesforce.

Is it annoying to work on a product that integrates various web properties?

Cause that sounds like a typical Enterprise Integration project that most programmers are dying to escape. Except instead of invoices, payments, they deal with Likes, Tweets, networks.

What about test environments of those web properties? do they have one?

Is it easy to include unit-test/integration-test?

I was just thinking about setting it up for a client for his iphone app and couldn't remember the name...glad this worked out.

such a good service - hope the project continues to receive the kind of stewardship it has gotten thus far.

if you haven't tried it, you're missing out.

decent service I've heard - good purchase

Proof again you can hit it big despite a stupid domain name.

What available domain name would you pick? Its not easy.

That is my point! A great product is what counts.

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