Podcasts about bizapps

Send me a Text Message hereFULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/635  Unlock the secrets to navigating the dynamic world of software ecosystems with us as we reflect on an extraordinary year of innovation and transformation. Our journey has been nothing short of remarkable, highlighted by the launch of Cloud Lighthouse in January 2024 and the burgeoning influence of Dynamics Minds, an event like no other, merging the sophistication of Davos with the creativity of Burning Man for Microsoft's community. We explore Microsoft's evolution from a stalwart software company into a trailblazing AI-driven organization, reshaping the very nature of business applications and redefining tech events. Our experiences in building BizApps and Azure practices reveal the vital importance of adaptability in an ever-changing tech landscape. Challenge the status quo with us as we advocate for a shift from traditional, siloed business practices to a comprehensive, global approach in cloud technology. The limitations of maintaining isolated, product-focused practices are laid bare as we champion a holistic cloud strategy that fosters cross-functional collaboration and integration. Drawing from a powerful example in Australia, we discuss how centralizing practices across regions can unlock significant growth potential and enhance customer service. As remote work continues to revolutionize the workforce, we highlight its societal benefits and caution against reverting to outdated office-centric models.Gaze into the future as we anticipate the evolution of AI, predicting a transition from "co-pilots" to "agents" by 2025. Our discussion delves into how AI can become more intuitive and seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, enhancing productivity by adapting to individual user preferences. We celebrate these achievements in the software ecosystem with engaging and insightful discussions that have sparked laughter and growth. As we wrap up, we thank our audience for their invaluable feedback and encourage everyone to stay connected for more innovative strategies to push boundaries and create value in the ever-evolving world of technology. In 2024, we celebrated seven years of the Microsoft Business Applications podcast. Now, we step into 2025 with a fresh new name. Welcome to the Microsoft Innovation podcast! Our new name reflects a broader vision, exploring the intersection of people, business, technology, and AI. 90 Day Mentoring ChallengeMicrosoft Business Applications Career Mentor for the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Justin WelshJustin Welsh's LinkedIn Operating System—the guide to finding your voice on LinkedIn.Support the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

NewsIntroducing: Copilot Page in Power Platform Admin Center (Preview) by Caitlin ShawWelcome to Episode 3 of #AIinAction: Building with Copilot Studio" with Elaiza Benitez on LinkedInHow to get the Dataverse Table's first row from List Rows in Power Automate? By Arun PottiJonas Rapp announced FetchXML Builder export to Excel on LinkedInHuman Resources app (Preview) for Dynamics 365 by Mónica Andrea PérezPower Pages: Upload large files – work in progress – Something Awesome About … Power Platform and BizApps..Dev and Ops by Olena GrischenkoPower Pages: Use a custom Rich Text Files table to store images (and avoid exposing the full msdyn_richtextfiles table) by Michel MendesAutomated Testing with Power Platform Pipelines: A Step-by-Step Guide by Suparna BanerjeeSteve Mordue - $500 for the coolest PCF control on LinkedInEventsEuropean Microsoft Fabric Community ConferenceStockholm, Sweden from September 24 -27, 2024. Nordic SummitTop Gun Power Pages workshopSeptember 27-28 Scottish SummitAberdeen, October 18-19, 2024Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of Power Platform BOOST!Thank you for buying us a coffee: buymeacoffee.comPodcast home page: https://powerplatformboost.comEmail: hello@powerplatformboost.comFollow us!Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerplatboost Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerplatformboost/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/powerplatboost/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090444536122 Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@powerplatboost

Episode 188 - John Siefert and BizApps Banter

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/528 Ever wondered what it's like to swap the sunny skies of Brazil for the emerald embrace of Ireland, all while scaling the heights of Microsoft's tech landscape? Michel Mendes, our spirited guest from Brazil, did just that. She traces her steps from SharePoint savant to a maestro of BizApps and Power Platform, with a special nod to her current passion, PowerPages. But Michel's tale isn't just about the bytes and codes; she paints a vibrant canvas of her life in Dublin, from headbanging at rock concerts to savouring craft beers at the famed Porterhouse. You'll feel the cobblestone beneath your feet as she brings the essence of Dublin – and the warmth of its pubs – to our ears.Join us as we walk the road less travelled with Michel, discussing not only the perks of city life but also the challenging leap of resettling in an English-speaking work environment. Her reflections on the linguistic gymnastics and cultural adaptability required to flourish abroad are as inspiring as they are practical. And if you're keen to know how engaging content and community spirit can earn you the coveted Microsoft MVP title, Michel's insights are a treasure trove. She shares her favourite Power Platform tools, combining advanced development with the streamlined functionality of Power Pages and Power Automate, proving that professional growth and personal reinvention go hand in hand.OTHER RESOURCES: Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP  90-Day Mentoring Challenge - https://ako.nz365guy.com/ AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

The gaming industry is a $200+ billion industry, with tremendous opportunity to grow. Being such a massive industry means plenty of customers. As such, it is hugely important for the customer experience to be optimized from the purchase, support and playing of a game. This week, we have a D365 and Gaming industry expert discussing how gaming companies are using D365 and realizing its value. Episode TopicsWhat are some top digital transformation trends happening in the Gaming industry?How are gaming companies using D365 today?Can you please share a customer success story around a Gaming company using D365?Useful ResourcesBusiness Applications | Microsoft Dynamics 365Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Power Virtual AgentsAbout Justin RaphaelJustin is a sales leader in the mighty West-Midwest OU in the Business Applications STU focused on West coast (+Colorado, Nevada, etc). He's been at Microsoft for 11 years, starting in support (TAM, Support Seller, Support Sales Manager) for 6 years. He lives in Tacoma, WA and currently lives, breathes, and eats all things BizApps (in addition to having a vibrant family, a passion for triathlon training, and hustling his kids to various after school activities).Connect with Justin - Justin Raphael | LinkedInWe'd love to hear from you!Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments, suggestions or feedback! We'd love to hear from you. Send your hosts an email at digestibledynamics@microsoft.com Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at microsoft.com/podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trodde ni vi var klara med Copilots? Ha! Vi hade bara en paus! Lättlurad! Vi tar hjälp av Peter Rhodin för att reda ut hur Copilot fungerar inom BizApps, Dynamics och Power Platform. Vi funderar också över hur bra man blir en bra partner inom dessa områden. Vi skulle bli superglada om du ville lämna ett betyg eller recension av Partnerpodden på Spotify eller Apple Podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/488 Join me as I sit down with the charismatic CTO of Colorado Technology Consultants, David Yack, a Microsoft MVP with two decades of rich experience. Get ready to embark on a fascinating journey with us as we meander through David's career path, his passion for developing on Microsoft platforms, his most cherished memories from Build and the MVP Summit, and his enthusiasm about the matured BizApps and AI.The second half of our conversation catapults you into the exhilarating world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Together with David, we address the learning curve associated with this technology, and its realistic capabilities, and offer insights on maintaining balanced expectations. We explore its potential benefits for individuals and businesses, share tips on smart investments in AI, and David generously reveals how everyone can access AI functionality through 365.training. This enlightening episode serves as a tech appetizer, whetting your appetite with David's wisdom and zest for technology.OTHER RESOURCES: Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP  90-Day Mentoring Challenge - https://ako.nz365guy.com/ White Paper: https://msft.it/60159ZvRl PowerUsers: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2391 GitHub: https://github.com/davidyack Pluralsight: https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/david-yack CRM 4.0 Developer Book: http://www.thecrmbook.com/ 365 Training: https://365.training/Instructors/detail/DavidYack AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/482 What if you could transform your organization into a digital native? Join us as we converse with Ayotunde Ayoola, a Principal Consultant and Product Lead hailing from Nigeria who is leading this digital revolution. With his team at Stringify, Ayo assists organizations in undergoing crucial digital transformations, introducing the power of technology to multiple sectors. Ayo also offers a glimpse into his life outside the tech world, sharing his love for reading, sports, and church. We also explore the burgeoning Nigerian tech and MVP community and their ever-growing interest in BizApps and Power Platform careers.But this episode isn't all tech and transformations. Has he ever wondered about the charitable side of the tech industry? Mark Smith, an MVP recognized as the NZ365 guy, shares his experiences of giving back to the community. He firmly believes that contributing isn't always about money but creating opportunities. Mark shares his experiences running a boot camp for high school students, introducing them to low code and other technologies. He believes in the transformative power of giving back and how it creates more opportunities for digital transformation. This episode is filled with insights, experiences, and heartwarming stories from the tech community. So, gear up for a compelling conversation with Ayo and Mark!OTHER RESOURCES: Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP  90-Day Mentoring Challenge - https://ako.nz365guy.com/ Azure Community Portal: https://azure.styava.dev/apac/id/user/organizer?userId=5b7eceb2-6b9c-43df-9937-a02856d1da2c GitHub: https://github.com/officialAY Microsoft Power Apps Community: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Community/ct-p/PowerApps1 AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/458 Ashish Rana shares how he likes to explore different cultures and try different foods. Learn about the various cultures and communities in Toronto, making it a great city to visit and explore. Ashish shares his insights and experiences in implementing blockchain technology in different sectors. How Ashish enjoys networking and socializing in the city. He talks about the various events and communities he is involved in, such as tech talks, universities, and virtual events. Ashish talks about the importance of community in learning about BizApps and blockchain technology. Discusses the future of blockchain technology and how it is constantly evolving in the field. Mentions about the resources available online, and that getting involved in the community can help individuals stay updated on the latest trends and innovations. Ashish Rana emphasizes the importance of keeping oneself updated on the latest tech trends and innovations.  The importance of keeping an eye on the market to understand how technology can be applied to solve business problems. Talks about how Rana's education in business and case studies helped him understand the importance of technology in solving business problems.  He also shares his experiences working in this field and how it has helped him grow both personally and professionally. OTHER RESOURCES: Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP  90-Day Mentoring Challenge - https://ako.nz365guy.com/ AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

This month Taylor and Rob dive back into a topic they first covered a year ago, Dynamics 365. This time they talk Business Apps with the MBG's own expert Hector Konomi (LinkedIn). They also discuss a fun Viva Topics development, extol the virtues of the Microsoft WhiteBoard Mobile App, and as always share some Microsoft 365 news!

I have had my head down working on some big things since RapidStart CRM growth exploded, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Charles Lamanna who recently took over for James Phillips as head of Business Applications for Microsoft. This was my fourth chat with Charles, and it was interesting to back listen to them in order. It really gives you a sense of where Microsoft has come. I managed to catch him in his office having just wrapped up their year-end. Enjoy! If you want to listen to my chats with Charles in order, The first one was October of 2018, the second one was September of 2019, the third one was March of 2020. Transcript Below: Steve: Welcome to the Steve Has a Chat Podcast. Where I call someone out of the blue with a record button on, and hope to have an unscripted conversation about Microsoft business applications. Let's see how it goes. Enjoy. Charles: Hey, this is Charles Lamanna. Steve: Charles. Steve Mordue. How are you doing? Charles: Good. Great to hear from you, Steve. It's been a long time. Steve: It has been a while. Have you got some time for a chat? Charles: For you, anytime. Steve: I appreciate it. Well, I guess the big news for you obviously is putting on the big boy hat, huh? Charles: Yes. I moved up an extra floor in the Advanta building in the Microsoft Campus. Steve: Oh did you? Charles: No, I'm just kidding. But metaphorically speaking at least. Because for folks that don't know, James Phillips leaving in March of this year, I kinda stepped in across all aspects of business applications of Microsoft. And, over the last four years, I've gotten to know the place, know the people, know the business and I'm super excited about the opportunity. And I think the future has never been brighter for business at Microsoft. Steve: Well, I never got the feeling that James held you back, or any of the folks on your team back, but he certainly, we have to give him a lot of credit for really taking this thing to a whole nother level. You weren't here before, I don't think, at least with the business apps, but it was really run by morons before he took over. And he completely turned that thing around and turned it in a whole nother business. And now with you taking over, I'm expecting that to continue. I don't know if there's been some things that have been in your bag that you've wanted to do that James was keeping you from, that you're going to pull out, or if you're just going to continue the path, or what's your thinking now that you've got that gavel? Charles: So definitely not held back. I would say I was super fortunate I worked for James for, I think seven, eight years in total. So I was able to learn a bunch and he was without a doubt, the most supportive manager I've ever had in my career, in terms of both enabling and clearing paths for what we wanted to do from a vision and dreaming perspective. And if it weren't for his support, things like Power Apps would have never gotten off the ground. So, definitely. And I think as we go to the future, we have this amazing foundation. I mean, BizApps is a major and key component and pillar of the Microsoft Cloud. Charles: 10 years ago, you probably would've thought that impossible. Right. To have Dynamics and Power Platform alongside Azure and Office. Now that we're here, let's go take it to the next level. And that's the push, and it's continuing a lot of the great innovation we've already done from a data-first, AI-first approach. Kind of sprinkling in some more collaboration with teams, and really revisiting the end-user experience, the platform, to go increasingly modernize and scale it and make sure that all our components from CRM, to ERP, to Power Platform work great together. Steve: I don't think it could have achieved that status with Dynamics 365 alone. It really took the Power Platform coming into being, I think, to give it the breadth that it needed to be able to get there. With Dynamics 365, we didn't have apps for users to do small things, there was no way it was going to permeate an organization the way the Power Apps do. Charles: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I say two things are interesting. The first is, Power Platform has allowed us to help more users and more customers with business process transformation, which is what BizApps are all about. Right? Steve: Yeah. Charles: How do you make your sales processes better, your financial processes better, and Power Platform really turbocharged that. And that earned us credibility in a lot of those departments and with a lot of those users, and we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two. So we see that symbiosis working in a way which is incredibly customer-friendly, and it helps our business. Second thing is Power Platform has even helped us reimagine parts of the Dynamics apps themselves. And I think probably two of the best examples are the connectors, which are key to the Power Platform. Charles: You see the connectors starting to show up inside all these Dynamics apps, like Customer Insights uses Power Query for data ingestion, or Viva Sales even connects to Salesforce. So there's this amazing interoperability that we have, and also enabling the end-user. Our team built Viva Sales, even though it's not in the Dynamics or Power Platform brand. But it's this idea of having an integrated experience in Office for sellers, built on connectors and built on the Office integration. So it's changed the way you think about some products, and it's also helped us go expand our user base. Steve: Yeah. I saw I was on a PGI call with that yesterday. Very, very cool stuff. At the last PAC meeting, I was supposed to be on the Viva Sales round table, but I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds boring. I think I'm going to go to this one." And I really, I went to the wrong one, I missed a good one. But you know where I am, right? I'm on the platform. Charles: Yep. Steve: And we're exploding. Our app is continuing to grow on the platform as a low-cost simpler alternative to Dynamics 365 for companies that aren't ready for that. And I'm always bugging you about, "Hey, that cool new feature you guys got in the first-party. When are we going to get that at the platform level? So ISVs, and people that are just building their own stuff from scratch, could take advantage of some of the syncs." We got the Outlook app a while ago, we've been getting some things. And when I saw Viva Sales, that was probably my only disappointment was that, at least as I understand it, it's hardwired to Dynamics or hardwired to Salesforce. And I get that trying to play those two against each other, but it's leaving guys like me out in the cold. Charles: Well, I'd say for Viva Sales, the intent is to support any CRM, and I really do mean that generally. And even customers, because there are customers out there that we talked to today who have homegrown CRMs, they coded 15 years ago. They have a whole dev team still working on it. The idea is to support interoperability with your account records, your lead records, your opportunity records, standard pipeline data. And to do that in a way which works through the connector. So today it'll earn V1, it'll only be Dynamics in Salesforce, but the intent is to make that be a general purpose adapter. And you could have a RapidStart CRM connector, which shows up and supports the contacts the way we want, and it would be connectable. That's not going to happen in the next three months, but that's the ambition. Steve: I can call you in four. Charles: I go down and said... What was that, in four Months? Steve: I can call you in four months. Charles: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I might not pick up the phone then in four months, no I'm just kidding. Because even talking about, if people are even on Seibal. We should be able to support them with their sales. Because the idea is, you shouldn't have to transform the seller experience at the same pace that you transform your core CRM, your core system of record, and that's just the way the world's moving. Steve: Well, I love the idea that one of the challenges that CRM has always had, of course, is user adoption. It's one more place they need to go to do something. Outlook app helped with that, getting data into CRM without them having to actually go to it. It seems like yet another way for people to engage with their CRM without actually realizing they're engaging with their CRM. Charles: Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like ambient... Yeah for sure. Sorry. Yeah. I say it's almost like ambient CRM basically. How do you make it so that, instead of the user goes to your CRM, the CRM goes to the user where they are. And the outlook app was the beginnings of that. Some of the Team's integrations we've done are the beginnings of that. And that Viva Sales and that whole Viva idea is how do you elevate it? So anywhere you go, your CRM data is accessible without you having to go to a different user interface. Steve: Very cool. Very cool. So I ask you every time we get on a call about exciting features that are coming up. And in particular, maybe even some features that have launched, that didn't take off the way you thought they would and people are just missing something. We have this problem with our app sometimes, people don't understand and so they don't move forward, and it would be perfect for them. And I'm sure there's lots of features and capabilities that you guys broke a sweat building, and know in your heart, this would be awesome, but people don't seem to be getting that. What's a good example of one of those? Charles: I'd say a product which we've had a capability, where we've had a lot of customer usage from a small number of customers, but very deeply and with huge impact, and we wish were with more customers, is probably Conversation Intelligence. I'm not sure if you've seen that around the Sales app, and where that actually will sit in inside of say a phone call or a meeting and help you generate action items, and summaries, and coaching, and help you understand sentiment, and listening and talk ratio. We've used that internally at Microsoft with great success. So our digital sales reps and the folks who work our phones, they are diehard fans. We have this amazing video we released a couple months ago where we actually went out and interviewed these digital sales reps and their managers, and they just were going on and on about how great it is. Charles: And that's rare where you hear that about a piece of technology for a seller. And we have a few other external customers that have gone through that same journey, where they have a thousand digital reps, 2000 digital reps using this and just in love with it. But it's not as pervasive as we thought it would be at this point. And it's one of those things where, it's a product discovery, and easing people into the capability, because then you got to go out of your way to enable it and configure it. So we're doing work now to simplify it, and make it more accessible to more users. And we're doing that partly through Viva Sales, like conversation intelligence, the major capability of Viva Sales. Charles: And the second thing is also, there's even some culture aspects to it. Because if you use it, it's generating transcripts and recordings of a call, and not everyone's necessarily super comfortable with that. So we're even working about how do you enable more features without having to record the call, and how do you enable capabilities without having to get a transcript? Or how do you make it more natural to say, "Hey, I have a sales co-pilot thing. Are you okay if I enable it?" So there's a lot of interesting things, it's never just a technology problem. It's also a discovery and a, I'd say, change culture management problem. Steve: Yeah. I think that's been the challenge with anything AI really. A lot of people, it seem to think it might be a little too futuristic. They look at the benefit and think that's really cool, but they have no idea how to get it. And AI just in general, doesn't feel that approachable to people, even though in certain cases, it's extremely approachable. You don't have to do anything, it's approaching you. So it's a learning curve, you got to wait until my generation dies off and then you guys will see. Charles: I don't have as myopic of you, as you Steve. But I would say that, the big thing that we have to do is, there's been this evolution of AI where the AI is going to be something that automates away what humans do. And what we've realized is, AI is not even remotely close to being able to do that. But what AI can do, is it can turbocharge the people that use it. And so what we're trying to do is, how do we go expose these AI capabilities in a way where you or anyone else who uses them feels so much more productive. And just like when you first got the ability to use PC or a spreadsheet, you're like, "How did I exist before?" We're hoping we'll get to the point where, once you start using some of these AI assistive capabilities, like we've done in Conversation Intelligence, you'll be like, "How did I ever do a customer call before? And I had to take notes on paper while listening as opposed to having the AI take notes for me?" Yeah, exactly. Steve: I'm terrible about that. I'll be chicken scratching over here while I'm talking to people, and then we get off the phone I look at and I can't understand a word I wrote. Charles: Yeah. I like post-it notes next to my desk where I'm always writing stuff down. Steve: Yeah. So what else cool's coming on the horizon that we should be... That sounds like the Conversational Intelligence has been around. Sounds like Viva Sales is going to really bring that to the masses, so that one's on a path. What are some other new things that we should pay attention to that you're able to talk about? Charles: Yeah. Another one of my favorite things, which we've started to reveal some capabilities going back to last Ignite, so November of 2021. And we have some big announcements planned for the second half of 2022, is the new Contact Center related capabilities inside of Dynamics Customer Service. We have Omnichannel, we announced integrated voice, the Nuance acquisition closed, and the Nuance contact center AI team joined my group to align with customer service and contact center. So there's a lot of really exciting innovation happening there. And I'm really excited about the potential to make it super easy to get a comprehensive customer engagement story, without having to wire up eight different pieces of technology and do a ton of different complex integrations. So that's a place where there's a lot of innovation, there's new capabilities, Omnichannel, Power Virtual Agent, even the same type of conversation intelligence applied to support cases, Nuance for their Gatekeeper, which is identity and authentication verification based on voice and biometrics. Charles: There's a lot of cool stuff in that space. And that's one of the places where so many of the customers we work with are trying to improve the customer experience, and to go reduce costs. So I say that's a place where we've had a lot of exciting announcements over the last six to nine months, and we have a whole bunch more planned for the next six to nine months. So I say, stay tuned. And I won't say more than that to avoid getting in trouble by leaking information. But I just say, that's a place to really pay close attention. Steve: Who knew call centers could be cool? Charles: Yeah, exactly. Who would have thought that I'd be talking about contact centers, and how it's the next generation or next frontier of AI applications in 2022. Steve: Oh, well. Well I do have to thank you guys for the low-code advances you've continued to make in that platform. It actually allowed us to launch a, I think we're the first ones to try this, a new Service as a Subscription. Which includes awesome includes deployment, customization, training, everything except development code, which as you know today in so many of these projects, there's so little, if any of that. Charles: Yeah. Steve: Just a few years ago, if you tried to offer something like this, it really would be little more than a support agreement. But now, we're deploying, we're building, we're customizing, we're building entire things for customers all on a monthly subscription. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully I don't go broke, but... Charles: But you know what, it's fascinating. I literally was talking about this with the Power Platform team this morning. About a future where we'll have more partners who are able to sell a comprehensive service agreement, which includes the cloud hosting licenses, but also some incremental custom development and also ongoing maintenance and support. And it'll be almost this whole new industry, which will push a lot of innovation to the edges of the ecosystem, right? Steve: Yep. Charles: Not built by Microsoft, built by partners who really understand particular regions, particular industries, or particular segments. Like y'all are targeting a space where we're not trying to go take Dynamics, CRM, and go bring it down there. You can go build a world-class experience on top of our platform and provide a very much all-in-one, which exactly serves the needs of that audience and that market. And we can stay focused on building the super horizontal platform, which has great performance, great usability, incredible power, those types of things. Steve: Yeah, it sounds great. I'm glad that we had the same idea you guys did. I'll let you know, in a few months, if it was a smart one. Time will tell. Charles: Yes. Yeah. Steve: So, how are the rest of the team doing? It seems like some folks have moved around a little bit in the org, who's moved where? Charles: Yeah. So one of the big things we've been really focused on the engineering side, for the engineering organization, is bringing together strength from a product perspective that target the same type of user. And for example, we have a new customer experience platform team underneath Lori Lamkin, who leads all of our Dynamic Sales apps. So the Core Sales and Viva Sales, as well as commerce, as well as marketing, as well as customer insights. And it's very much focused on revenue generation, customer journeys, customer experiences. And what's great is by bringing those assets together, we have a great answer for B2B customers, as well as B2C. Like if you want to have self service, no touch eCommerce experience with lightweight telesales, you can do that all with those sets of applications. If you want to do a high relationship, high touch B2B sales process, you can do all of that. You're not going to use commerce, but you're probably going to use customer insights and sales, and maybe a little bit of account-based marketing. So we brought together these things, which are solving similar problems under a single leader. And that way the engineering teams can go back and forth between these different places to finish out full end-to-end customer journeys. And so that's a big area that we've spent a lot of time on, and that's a place where it's really the biggest and fastest growing category for us in the Dynamics 365 application portfolio. So that's one interesting example. Jeff Comstock, folks may know him. He's been around Dynamics 365 for a while. He continues customer service, he leads omnichannel, he's done some of this great expansion around the contact center for us. Ray Smith leads our supply chain team. So that includes things like more supply chain. Steve: So Ray moved? Charles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He by way of acquisition to SAP then moved. He worked in Dynamic Sales for a bit, where people may have known him. And now the supply chain, and really helping us be this new data driven, AI powered, supply chain story for core supply chain execution. Then we also had some exciting announcements around process advisor and the minor acquisition to help turbocharge that. Or Georg Glantschnig who leads our finance room of the house. And basically we call the room of the house, is the collection of products which focus on serving the CFO and the finance department. And that includes the Suplari acquisition, which we had done a couple years ago, as well as the Core Dynamics, 365 finance, HR, and project operations products. Charles: So you can see how we started to build these critical paths around particular departments and particular lines of businesses with our products. And in addition to that, we also of course have Power Platform to support all of it. So it's amazing to see these things come together and converge. And we've been on this incredible run of innovation around Dynamics. I was counting it earlier this year, 29 different products in Dynamics, and really coalesced around these specific areas where we have a lot of energy, and also very well understood. I'd say synergies between the products that we have. So I'd say exciting times. Very exciting times. Steve: Customers are starting to understand it better also. Business Applications was the same thing for a long time. Then it spent the last five years reinventing itself every month, and new things exploding out of Advanta. And I think a lot of customers were having trouble just keeping up with... It's like little whackamole for them. And it takes a little time for customers to absorb what's happening, and what it's for, or what it does, and then to adopt it. And we're seeing that now. We used to have to go out and promote Power Apps to people who didn't understand what this was, or why it was. And now it's the opposite. They always come to us, looking for Power Apps, looking at those sorts of things. So that understanding seems to have finally permeated down to the customer level. But boy, it took a while. Charles: Yeah. It warms my heart. And I would say one of my favorite books is by Jim Collins, 'Good to great.' I always recommend it to folks on my team to read it. And he talks about this idea of the flywheel. It takes time to get a flywheel spinning, for the first period of time it looks like it's barely moving, but then eventually it's going super fast and it's just a blur. And you need to be consistent, and convicted, and believe in the strategy and the approach. And what's amazing about BizApps is for the last four years, we've been on the same mission, the same vision, the same ambition. And we just spend all the folks in advance at turning that flywheel, turning that flywheel. And it's started to reach that blur phase where it's spinning so fast, you can't even see it. Charles: And this, this all started years and years ago with a ton of work, but we're really at that magical moment where customers know what Power Platform is. Customers know that Microsoft gets customer experience and customer engagement. They know that Microsoft can help them optimize their supply chain. And what the good news is once that thing is going, it really builds upon itself, and I think it'll only continue that momentum further. And my favorite story is, I used to always do these executive briefings at Microsoft where we have executives come in from our customers to Redmond and we have a briefing center. It's very nice. And I would always say, let me talk about Power Apps and low-code. Charles: And everybody gives me a blank stare like, "What the heck is Power Apps? What the heck is low-code?" I go in those meetings now, and people know what Power Apps is, and they know the low-code strategy. And the only question is, "how?". Not, "should I?" Or "if?" "How do I do it with you, Microsoft?" And so different from three years ago. So anyway, so you're exactly right. A long winded answer, but I'd say it's exciting to see all of these things come together, and the benefits of just consistently repeating a message that resonates with customers. Steve: I would say at least three quarters of my customer calls today, they're bringing up right out of the gate, "We don't want any development. We want to do everything low-code, no code." So this is coming from the customer side where we used to have to explain to them what low-code, no code meant. Now they're coming demanding, "I only want low-code, no code." I think that they've come to this realization that, while low-code, no code might not be easy enough for your mom to do, it doesn't require a developer, and code does require developer. And once you've got this little blob of code in your environment, it's a black box for you. And so they don't want any of these black boxes. They want everything to be accessible. Steve: Use your knowledge to build us something complex out of low-code, but then I can still go back in there later and manipulate it, adjust it myself, or our team. So they have absolutely bought into that. And I know we originally, a lot of us partners were concerned early on that this was going to reduce the workload for partners, while our workload is more than it has ever been. Although the developers on the bench don't stay as busy as they used to. We've completely pivoted the team from developer heavy to now, we haven't even got a good title for them. A citizen developer doesn't sound right. We tell customers that, but citizen developers is what we've got so... Charles: This guy we found on the street, or gal found on the street, we just asked them to start building out. But no, it makes sense. There is almost this new role which is, it's not just pure coding expertise, it's technical development concept expertise. But even more importantly is business process and solution expertise. And that fusion of those two skill sets, that's the magic. That's what makes it special, because you understand it. Steve: Yeah. The challenge that we have with this brand new model that we just launched, because, first of all, being the first one out there is not always good because people have no idea what you're talking about. They're trying to compare it to other things. But we've got this little caveat that it's all you can eat, everything, except development code. And trying to define what that is hasn't been easy, and you get these customers coming in, "Oh, we're going to need a lot of customization. So this isn't going to work for us." And so you may need a lot of customizations, but you don't need any "development code". Charles: Yeah. Steve: And getting them to grasp that development code and customization are not synonymous, not even close. Charles: Exactly. Steve: Development code is a very small component today of customization. And once I think that they understand that, then we'll probably see more partners coming into a model like this. Because it makes a lot of sense for customers, makes a lot of sense for partners. Charles: Yeah. And if you go look at building solutions that last a decade, this is to your point, code is this little black box opaque thing, which is hard to maintain over time. If it's no code, low-code, it's easy to open it up and reconfigure as business requirements change. And it's how you build solutions that last. And I think we're getting to the phase with business software where customers are expecting to make long term technology bets. You're not going to replace your CRM every five years from now on. It's like building manufacturing plants and warehouses. These are big investments that you need to be able to amortize over a long time, to justify. And so I think to your point, no code doesn't mean no flexibility, no customization, also doesn't mean no agility. It just means you're doing it in a different way. Couldn't say it better myself. Steve: All right. Cool. Hey, listen, I'm going to let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day here when I caught you, to chat with me about this stuff, always fun talking to you Charles. I'm going to call you in four months and ask you about Viva Sales for the platform. Charles: Sounds good. Sounds good. Steve: I've got you on record there. Charles: So really appreciate you taking the time, giving me a ring, Steve. Hope you have a great rest of the summer. Steve: All right, man. Have a good one. Charles: Yep. You too.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire and Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Andrew, and I talk about his entrepreneurial journey building MicroAcquire, and some of the insights he's seeing when it comes to buying and selling startups.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world. Accelerating change and its certainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses.Interview Transcript with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Andrew Gazdecki who is the founder of MicroAcquire. And Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Welcome Andrew. Andrew Gazdecki: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited. Brian Ardinger: I've got my MicroAcquire socks on. So, thank you for that. I'm super excited to have you on to talk about the craziness that is the startup world. And you've had a front row seat for a number of years as a multi-founder. And now with MicroAcquire, let's talk about what MicroAcquire is and how you got into the business of helping startups sell to other folks.Andrew Gazdecki: MicroAcquire, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the largest startup acquisition marketplace in the world today. We have about 150,000 buyers registered. We've helped over six hundred startups to get acquired that combined acquisition total is 400 million at this point. Almost half a billion. We don't charge any fees. So, you can sell your business on MicroAcquire completely free.So, I started that business, candidly, as a side project. I just felt that needed to exist. I'd previously gone through two acquisitions, and it was just a mess. Everything from finding the buyers to, there's so much education today on how to grow your business. How to learn sales. How to recruit. And how to fundraise. But then there's nothing on the exit. Which is arguably the most important part of the founder's journey.And when I sold my first business, which we can talk about, if you'd like, it was a business called Business Apps. Spelled BiznessApps, and kind of the light bulb moment went on when I sold it. I just got a ton of emails and texts from friends that we're also running startups and they were like, how'd you get acquired?Like, how did you find the buyer? What was the process like? It was like hieroglyphics everyone. Including myself when I went through the process. So, what we're really trying to do at MicroAcquire is democratize startup acquisitions and just make the process easier and more transparent for founders. And also, buyers.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the types of startups that are being bought and sold on the platform. And how has that maybe changed since when you first launched? Andrew Gazdecki: Well, when we first launched, lots of small startups, you know ranging from, we would sell business, and we still do today, but 5k startups, mostly side projects. And since then, we've really expanded, I guess, up market. So, our largest acquisition is just under $10 million. We have buyers on the platform now that can facilitate acquisitions in the hundreds of millions if the value is there. Yeah, just started with humble beginnings just because I felt this was something that was so needed for the startup ecosystem. Because the other routes to sell your business, unless you're most founders think like Google shows up with a check and hey, you did it. Like you won the lottery. There's this saying most startups are bought, not sold and that's just not true. You know, you really need to sell your business. And so, the other routes were expensive, borderline highway robbery, and that's, that was really kind of like the main purpose of me launching MicroAcquire to really give another option for founders of this other business. And if you're curious about the other options, you can hire an investment banker. They're going to charge a big fee. If your startup is too small for an investment bank, because most investment banks will only work with you if your business is of a certain size. And you know, maybe you can get like eight, nine figure exit. And I had previously worked with an investment bank. And their minimum fee was $800,000 for a successful transaction. The short story there, we got a few offers, but the fee was just, I still had gas in the tank, so I kept going. But it showed me, and I remember telling the bankers, I was like, you guys have the coolest job in the world. I do all this work. And then at the end, you come in and get, you know, a nice payday. So that always kind of stuck with me. And then I stumbled on to business brokers. Business brokers, if your business is doing let's say less than you know 5 million in revenue. You can work with a business broker. They will typically charge 10 to 15% commission to sell your business. So, 10% to 15%. So that's like a small angel round. So, I just saw it. Okay. Business brokers don't do too much. You know, what would happen if we removed the middleman? And we let buyers and sellers connect directly. And we help businesses ranging from SaaS companies. That's kind of our sole focus. But we also sell a lot of e-commerce businesses. Communities. Some crypto companies. Direct to consumer. Newsletters. We like to say, we want to be the marketplace for profitable startups. So that's mainly our focus is startups that have traction. So, we don't list startups that are pre revenue. Content websites. Affiliate websites. Again, mostly focusing on businesses that have, you know, a lot of growth upside. Having a blast running it at the same time, too. Brian Ardinger: I'm hearing more and more about people using the platform, startup founders, maybe looking to buy a side project or a side hustle versus building something from scratch. Are you seeing that trend happening? Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Like one story that comes to mind is, there's builders and there's scalers. Where a lot of people love to build a business. They love to think of a new idea and bring something to life. And I think fallen, in both those buckets. Builders and scalers. And so people build these wonderful businesses, but they maybe build it to a certain point where they'd like to move on to something else.Maybe they built it to a few million in revenue and now they're, you know, mostly managing. When they'd really like to be building. And so MicroAcquire is a great outlet for them to meet buyers within like hours. Like the fastest acquisition on my group, where I was within, quite literally hours. Those are obviously outliers. Brian Ardinger: What are you seeing when it comes to valuation trends and things along those lines? How's the market changed or what shifts are you seeing? Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah, good question. It really depends on the business. So, a good business will always trade at really good multiples. SaaS trades at high multiples and e-commerce. Newsletters communities also trade lower than, you know, a typical SaaS business.So, there's so much variability. And when I get asked questions like I have a SaaS company, it's doing a million revenue. What's it worth. That's kind of akin to asking what a car is worth. You know, like, is there a 500,000 miles on it? Does it need a new transmission? Do you have a good team in place? What is your churn? What is the quality of your customers? And then other little things like when you go to sell your business, do you have an understanding of kind of what your business is worth? And on MicroAcquire, we have two different things that we do to help with valuations. One is we have a directory within MicroAcquire where you can hire someone to get a real valuation done.I highly recommend that. And then we also have a tool called MicroMRR. And you should go to micromrr.com and you connect your Stripe billing. And we'll actually give you a data-driven valuation based on what we're seeing from acquisitions happening in the market. So, acquisitions are a moving target. I'd say maybe there could be a slowdown coming.I know the public markets for trading believe like 22X, and then they dropped down to 12X and this is April. Those might climb back. But the last year was absolutely borderline bonkers in terms of. It was record numbers in terms of private equity activity. Just MNA activity in general. So, it's a good time to sell your business if you're looking to. Brian Ardinger: I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you came to create MicroAcquire. I mean, I know early on you even did some interesting marketing. Went viral. You had the Russ Hanneman character from Silicon Valley TV show, do a little viral stuff on Twitter. Talking about MicroAquire and that. Can you talk a little bit about your idea of how you got it started and the execution to get MicroAcquire off the ground?Andrew Gazdecki: Honest answer is, so I like to work within a frame. I'm not a big fan of like mental frameworks. That, you know, maybe other people put forth. But so, I'm always thinking of what worked five years ago or what worked 10 years ago does not work today. And so that's why you'll see, I'm always trying to market in a way that doesn't feel like marketing. But it also adds value and maybe even makes you laugh and stuff like that.A lot of startups today think that their main competitor is XYZ company. But it's really the 500,000 startups out there. So, you're competing for consumer attention. I'm a big believer in that. And so, we focus a lot on brand-building. Just sharing MicroAcquire story. Kind of everything. So, when I first launched it, I was working probably like 4:00 AM to like midnight. And the only way, so going back to kind of like how I think about and what I recommend founders think about when they first launch a startup is this won't come as a surprise. But find something you're passionate about. So, and then also find something that you have a unique insight into. So, I made a bet that entrepreneurship through acquisition was going to be a trend. And that was just through me going through two different acquisitions. And I was actually looking to buy a SaaS company. And I couldn't find anything that was specific to SaaS. I didn't like working with brokers. I wanted to speak directly to the founder because it's a very relationship type transaction. And it's not just here's the keys. You know, I want to know about the founder. I want to know why are they looking to sell? And so, I kind of just created what I feel acquisition should be. And I kind of built MicroAcquire in a way that thinking back on Bizness Apps is a 10 million a year revenue company. What would it take for me to list on a marketplace? So, we implemented things like privacy ability to connect. Financial metrics. You give buyer a good, healthy snapshot into the view of your business. To get it off the ground, I mean, a lot of podcasts. A lot of cold emails. Hanging out on live chat, 24 7. And I don't recommend this to founders, but again, going back to my previous point is before I launched MicroAcquire, I wrote down, what customer do I want to serve?And I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I love startups. And kind of a startup nerd. I love looking at new businesses. And I built this company. And so when I work on it kind of feels like a video game. It's not work. And if you can put yourself in that situation with some unique insights into a market. It's a customer that you love. And then unique insights kind of fall in line with what I describe as founder market fit. So why you. So, I think of why now. Why you. As probably the two most important things. I had a deep conviction that acquisitions are going to be increasing. And that proved to be right. So that was a non-obvious bet to a lot of people, but obvious to me. That became obvious over time. But when you're able to build a startup in a way that you enjoy playing, running, whatever you want to describe it. More than your favorite video game. You kind of want, cause it's really hard to compete against a founder that where it feels like work.My best analogy there is if you, I see a lot of founders creating startups around what I'd call like opportunistic opportunities. Where, you know, it's a good idea, but maybe you build a CRM for dentists. But you hate dentists. And a big part of building a startup is talking to customers all the time. I'm a big believer that your customers have path to product market fit. They have a better roadmap than you do. And so, you need to be able to talk to these customers and enjoy these conversations and really listen to them. Otherwise, there's someone out there who's going to love those conversations and it's just going to be really hard to compete. But it all kind of revolves around happiness. Where the founders that I think go the distance really enjoy what they do day in day out.And that's not to say it's super easy. Like just cause it's fun, it's easy. Like a video game. Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's easy. I think that's kind of the key that a lot of the founders should be thinking about is, is this a business I could run for a decade? If so, why? And kind of dip your toes in the water.Like when I launched my group, I didn't have grandiose visions for it. I just wanted to help other founders get acquired without these huge commissions. And then as the business grew, it became pretty obvious that the market opportunity was fairly large. Yeah, basically kind of grew forth. I knew this was something that the startup community needed, and I just worked.I was doing customer support. Vetting the listings. Writing the newsletters. Managing the product. Going on podcasts like this. Social media content. In a weird way, and now I have a team that helps me with all that stuff, but in a weird way, I kind of look back and I miss those days. Brian Ardinger: Well, it's never really been a better time to be an entrepreneur because you have a lot of these new No-code tools. And ways to spin up experiments. And like you said, dip your toe in the water. And you have access to a lot more information. You know, I think 10 to 15 years ago, the whole VC world was not very transparent. But now, you know, you can read blogs and books and figure out that particular path if you're an entrepreneur. It sounds like you're trying to do the same thing for on the acquisition side. Breathe some life into what that path looks like and that. So, let's talk a little bit about the book you just wrote, Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold my SaaS Startup. What can people expect to find in it? And why did you write the book? Andrew Gazdecki: I started BiznessApps again, spoke B I Z N E S S apps. My mom, this is kind of a funny footnote, but everyone called it BizApps. So, I ended up chasing down owner of the domain, BizApps. When your mom calls your business BizApp, and you don't have the domain, you got to go get it.But I started that business when I was 21 in college. And also going back to unique insights. I had a previous business that helped mobile developers connect to businesses. So, I saw businesses posting the same job requirement over and over and over. And I thought, whoa, they're paying like 50K to 100K for like a project like this?What if I just built a template and the functionality isn't really changed too much. But we just changed the content. Imagery. Which speeds up mobile app creation. Makes it more affordable. There's do yourself website builders at the time. And I thought, what about a do yourself mobile app builder for small businesses?So, the book is just kind of my story. I just journaled through the whole experience because it was very strange and surreal. I was 21 when I launched it. Just to give you kind of an idea of like the growth of it. And it was a right place, right time business. I got completely lucky. The iPhone had just come out. Android wasn't even there. Blackberry was still in the mix. We almost made a Blackberry app. I'm glad we didn't. But it's just my candid experience building that company, from idea all the way to the invested. So, it's not a book of here's how to build a startup. It's more of a book of here's how I built a startup with mistakes. Everything from when I thought of the idea to when I sold the business and everything in between. Brian Ardinger: Can you highlight some of the best or worst advice that you got on that journey.Andrew Gazdecki: I was so young. So, I was 23, 24, and I personally didn't grow up with too much means if you will. And so, I remember there's a specific situation. We needed a marketing hire. And I was handling most of the marketing. And the salary ranges, now I'm two years out of college and they were in like the 150K, 200K range.And I'm like, what am I going to pay someone that. Like you really need, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, talent wins games, but teamwork when championships. It's a Michael Jordan quote. So, I think, you know, hiring smarter people than me, was probably my biggest mistake. Also, a funny story. This is a true story. We had a period where we were again, because we didn't hire a really good marketer that could track in our paid ad spend and stuff like that. We were spending over a hundred thousand a month on Google ads. The business grew from zero to let's call it 7 million in the first five years. So it was just, everything was just kind of like, don't touch anything. We don't know what's working. But it's working. And it was so profitable. And our customer payback period was like 33 days. And for the first two years, our margins were about 90%. So, it was just extremely profitable. But when we finally hired someone to do analysis on how profitable is this pay-per-click ad campaign, we concluded basically we were burning about 90,000 out of that a hundred thousand. So, we call that era blowing up Ferrari's every month. So, every month we were blowing $90,000 because we weren't properly attributing our marketing spend to customer acquisition. And blowing up a Ferrari every month probably would have been cooler. Maybe not that would have hurt my heart because I'm a big car fan. But and I share all of that. I share the ups and the downs. And I think it's just a candid story of just what it's like to build a startup. Mistakes and wins included. Brian Ardinger: So, looking at the world today, what are some of the resources that you would recommend that startup founders be checking out or paying attention to?Andrew Gazdecki: I get a lot of really good insight just talking to other startup founders. I'm not a big podcast listener. I read a lot. Like this was kind of some books I'm reading and there's my book on top, like Play Bigger. It's a book about brand-building. From Impossible to Inevitable, that's a great book on how to build a SaaS company end to end. It goes over marketing, building a sales team, just written by Jason Lampkin and Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue.And then a Tuned In, which is basically how to listen to customers. You know, you can talk to customers. But how do you really listen and get the insights you need? So, I always say that customers have a way better roadmap to product market fit than you. You just need to talk to them and listen. So, I could give you a number of different books, but I'm an avid reader. That's kind of where I get a lot, but I will say you definitely learn the most when you launch a startup. When you kind of just, you can read all the books in the world, but when you finally launch a startup, that's when the real learning begins.And also like you kind of get in a situation of, I launched a startup. Okay, now I really need to figure out marketing. And so now you're very motivated to figure out marketing and apply some of the concepts that's right, that you might read in some of these books. Brian Ardinger: That's great advice. And I encourage anybody who's even thinking about it. The tools and the resources are out there to try things nowadays that maybe you couldn't have tried in the past. Even if you fail, you've probably leveled up your skills and game considerably than if you just read about it. So, encourage is that as well. My last question is what are you most excited about working on the next three to six months? Andrew Gazdecki: I'd say just helping startups and founders get acquired. We have a goal to help a thousand startups, get acquired this year. So far, we're on track for that. We average about 100 a month. So, we'll probably beat that goal. And what's interesting about startups and you start something, and it goes really slow, but stick with it. And then kind of takes off because we've done more acquisitions this year alone than we did in the first two years of being in business.So, what gets me excited is just helping founders. And we're building tooling to help acquisitions. To really streamline them and really educate founders on what is due diligence. What are the legal steps? How do I transfer assets? How do I do technical due diligence on code if I'm looking to acquire a business? How does escrow work? What are common deal terms? So, if you go to MicroAcquire, click resources at the top. You can literally learn how to acquire a 100-million-dollar business. We have so much content. And that's just kind of like something I felt was so needed because it's such an opaque topic that not too many people write about. So, I definitely recommend checking that out. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Andrew, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. And sharing these stories and giving us some insights and access to some of these resources. I think it's very valuable. I really do appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about MicroAcquire or the book, what's the best way to do that?Andrew Gazdecki: Definitely check out MicroAcquire.com. It's free to sign up. You can browse the startups. And then as a seller if you're looking to sell your business also completely free. You can list your startup. And instantly meet buyers. Sometimes within hours of going live. We do vet all listings. So, we have a process where we work. And we make sure that you are prepared when you go live on MicroAcquire. But follow me on Twitter, @agazdecki if you can spell that. Or just add me on LinkedIn.Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again for being on the show. And looking forward to staying connected. Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

(00:00) Local News Chat: Appleton Maps & Oshkosh Crime (18:30) Your Take on How To Counter Rising Retail Theft (39:00) Balky Previews Bucks Season & Packers Match-Up (55:30) Tommy Talks Tech: New Laptops & Useful Apps (85:00) The Takeaway: Bias Taints Expert Evaluations

On this episode, Elaiza Benitez takes over the CRM Audio podcast and brought Amey Holden and Matt Wittemann with her. Elaiza, Amey, and Matt worked for Microsoft partners and have since made changes in their career. Elaiza and Amey went independent and Matt went to work for Microsoft. We discuss the various career paths available with Microsoft Business Applications. Working for a Microsoft Partner Going independent Working for Microsoft

En este episodio conocemos a un miembro más de la familia de Business Apps en Microsoft México y conoceremos parte de su estrategia para desarrollar el mercado.

Let's be real... the Business Applications ISV motion from Microsoft to date, has been a shit show. Many budding ISVs struggled to navigate the program(s) only to reach the conclusion that there was not much there. For all the talk about how important ISVs are, Microsoft's actions to date have failed to live up to their words. I want to personally apologize. The Boy who cried Wolf! I am usually pretty cynical, but over the past few years, I have consistently fallen for the promises from many Microsoft team members, each of whom was independently responsible for some sliver of an ISV effort. Each of them failed to live up to the lowest of promises and expectations. The scattered effort lacked both direction and motivation. Yet, in spite of that history, I continued to get excited about ideas, and shared many of them here with you. If you had taken some of my advice, you to would have been disappointed with the results. For that, I apologize. A Story of Failure AppSource should work... but it doesn't. In Microsoft's zeal to turn it into something big quickly, shortly after it launched, they lowered the bar to entry and it promptly filled up with shit. It remains full of shit as I write this. From apps that won't even install, to some that are downright security risks. Co-Sell should work... but it doesn't. The idea that a Microsoft Seller could actually close a deal faster with an ISV, is not one most Microsoft Sellers have embraced, instead they see ISVs as confusing the conversation and slowing the sale. ISV Competency should work, but Microsoft pulled the pulled the plug on it, only a few months after it was introduced, because they could not remember why the launched it. The very definition of insanity, doing the same things and expecting different results, was fully in-play. The Missing Piece The landscape that I described above, is what Steven Guggenheimer "Guggs" was brought in to fix. Turn this shit show, into a jewel. I previously wrote of my high hopes for this new savior of ISV. Right out of the gate, priority one for Guggs appeared to be, how can Microsoft make money on ISVs. For many, it seemed like adding insult to injury. Seriously, you offer ISVs shit, and now you want them to pay you for that shit! If I were to stop writing this right here, it would not sound very good, but you know I always find the rainbows... Revenue Sharing is Brilliant! Not a novel idea, every other platform has been doing it for years, but Microsoft doing it also, will actually be the best possible thing Microsoft will have done for ISVs. Revenue Sharing is Brilliant? Guggs is no dummy, far from it. He is a no-nonsense kind of guy, that I have gotten know, he was even on my podcast recently. As Guggs surveyed the failures I outlined above, along with the many other failures I did not go into, he spotted the obvious common denominator. He slapped his forehead and said "Holy Crud, we actually don't give a shit!" My dad was my early business mentor, a truly successful entrepreneur. One of the things he would often say in response to ideas that I had was, "There's no percentage in it!".  My dad was not a philanthropist. What he did know, was that without some monetary reward, any business effort would fail. Guggs quickly reached the same conclusion. If you want things fixed, and you want people to give a shit, you need to put a bag of money at their end of the path. Not the only step While reading through the new program documents, it is clear that Revenue Sharing is not the only step Guggs and Team are taking, but it is the only one that matters, and is the single one, that will make all of the other ones happen. It is Pay-to-Play for ISVs now, which may come as an initial shock to many who had gotten used to the free ride. Turbulence Ahead The challenge that Microsoft has with this new effort, is of course, history. For most ISVs, their success has come, in spite of Microsoft. They have learned not to expect anything. I was talking to one of the ISVs that Microsoft often showcases as an "ISV Success Story" today, who told me that Microsoft never gave them anything. No leads, no technical assistance, no sales support, no funding, no... anything. They succeeded completely on their own. It will be a tough sell for Guggs to convince ISVs that they will get a return on this new mandatory cost, and he is well aware of that. Steve Falls for it, Again. The line between "Eternal Optimist" and Moron, is thin. I'd like to think I am the former, rather than the latter. But, up until now, that has not proven to be the case. We transitioned from a mostly SI, to a mostly ISV, because I drank the original Koolaid. Where many of those that did so at the same time, have since abandoned Microsoft as an aid to success, I continued to stay the course, and continued to be disappointed. My gut reaction to the new program announcement was excitement, but then found myself tempering my enthusiasm. Microsoft has also cried Wolf many times. Embrace or Scream The choice of reactions for ISVs will fall fairly clearly on one side or the other. Initially, I expect a lot of them will scream. After digesting the full value proposition, I think a significant number will embrace it. I am embracing it, but I am aware that my credibility on this subject is now dubious. One aspect that I see as key, is with the fact that I will now be paying Microsoft for the privilege of being an ISV for their products, that they "owe" me something. Up until now, the only way to get any ISV help from Microsoft, was to be persistant and super nice and hope that they might throw you a bone for not being an asshole. This "Program" turns the table. In return for my 20% "Payment", (yes, we will be opting into the premium tier), I will be expecting them to step up to the plate, and yes, if necessary, I will be a complete asshole about it. Resistance is Futile For the screamers, I think their screams will fall on deaf ears. I know that some of the bigger ISVs, who like to position themselves as more important to Microsoft, than Microsoft is for them, they will march up the ladder, "You do realize that our solution generates a ton of sales that you would not otherwise see?" This is the anecdotally, hard to quantify argument, that they have leveraged for years. I am sure there is truth to it... but again... hard to quantify. Many of the Bizapps team have proven pliable in the past and quick to buckle under pressure. I don't think Guggs is a buckler, particularly when he knows he is right. "Screw you guys" I'm sure some ISVs will attempt this tactic, but it sounds a little hollow. I mean, where you gonna go? Revenue Sharing is not a new idea that Guggs came up with, it is what the other platforms have been doing all along. In fact, it eerily resembles the Salesforce.com AppExchange model... because it largely is! I would suggest that instead of trying to brow beat Microsoft into some kind of "exception", that ain't gonna happen anyway, you instead hold them to their end of the bargain. I'll go into the specifics in a future post, but based on what I have seen, and been told, if they do hold up their end, this is a no-brainer on ROI, if they don't, you can join me in the asshole club.

My fellow MVP, good friend and co-collaborator on PowerISV, Mark Smith (aka @nz365guy) is on a "Shock and Awe" campaign that opens with the phrase: "Dynamics 365 is Dead!". But is it? The House that D365 Built At the recently concluded MVP Summit, Mark had the opportunity to lob his "D365 is Dead" grenade at Charles Lamanna for reaction. Charles seemed legitimately puzzled by the thought, and simply replied that "D365 pays for the entire Business Applications Team and Advanta campus".  So... not dead. Uprising I think we are a long way from knowing if Mark's assertion will prove correct. What sometimes gets missed, is the second part of his proclamation "... long live the Power Platform". Clearly Mark is placing his bet that the fairly new ability for users and developers to build apps directly on the platform, will eclipse the long-standing App offerings from Microsoft, that are built on the same platform. Zero-Sum Game? If anyone should be agreeing with Mark on this one, you would think it would be me. After all, we were one of the first ISVs to shift our applications from above the first-party apps, to under them. Our focus is 100% around building on the platform, avoiding the first-party apps entirely. We went "all-in" on the platform. Do I think this motion will overcome the First-Party apps? I do not. It is also not a goal or desire of mine. I don't see it as a zero sum game at all. A Fair Comparison? There is no possible way that my relatively small team is ever going to build a more sophisticated sales application, or any of the other first-party apps, on the platform. You are talking about a vast repository of development and refinement, created over a very long time, and the hits keep coming with AI and Mixed Reality, etc. I hear some people try and compare on price in a sales conversation, that the platform license is a third of the cost of the plan! As though they discovered a coupon to get the same thing for 66% off. But, they are far from the same thing. Customers? Clearly, sales of Dynamics 365 Apps are growing significantly YoY, and customers are not buffoons. Many have complex needs that can only be practically met by the power of the first-party applications. Is a partner really going to build their own Connected Field Service app on the platform? Force.com did not eliminate Salesforce's Sales, Service or Marketing clouds, in fact, it was the opposite. The Opposite? The real genius of Microsoft releasing a platform license, was to grow the entire pie exponentially. As opposed to taking away from the first-party apps, I think apps built on the platform, by partners, ISVs or Citizens, will actually drive more first-party app sales. This is happening through two movements. Movement One I don't have actual figures, but anecdotally, from my own experience, I think it's fair to say, that well over 50% of all organizations, from SMB through Enterprise, are still using Outlook and Speadsheets. Most organizations have not even made the move to a legitimate Business Process Application of any kind, and instead torture Excel. I worked with one Fortune 40 company that was using Outlook as a CRM for a 15,000 person sales force. Does this company have the need and budget for a sophisticated application like Dynamics 365? Obviously. Would it transform their business? Clearly. Are they eager and ready to jump into an enterprise-grade solution? Often not. Could a simple business application be built on the platform, that would be significantly better than Outlook and Excel? Absolutely. Is that a net new customer for Microsoft that they would not have gained otherwise? No Doubt. Should I continue asking and answering my own questions? I think not. Movement Two The Microsoft Bizapps ISV community is growing, maybe not as fast as they would like, but the momentum is there. Many ISV solutions were built on top of, or depended on items in, the First-Party applications. These would be the ones that fall into Guggs' patterns of "Extend" or "Connect". Many of these offered significant enhancements to the D365 Apps, others built their own end-to-end features on top of the first-party apps because that is what they had. So the second movement I see, is for certain ISVs to decouple their dependencies, and relaunch underneath the First-Party apps. This reduces the license cost to their customers, greatly expanding their addressable market, which again grows the whole pie. If a solution does not need anything from the First-Party apps, there is no need to price limit your market by sitting on top of it, if it is not necessary. Addressable Market Both of the above movements, will significantly expand the total addressable market by a factor of [insert big number here] . Will they siphon off some potential first-party sales? Sure, but they will also introduce a ton of customers to the Microsoft Business Applications Platform. A customer who starts with some departmental need filled by a custom PowerApp, and has a good experience, leads to more investigation by the customer. I have directly witnessed, with our own entry-level solutions, customers who then moved onto to add the full first-party Sales, Marketing and AI applications. This was not going to happen without an easy entry point. In fact, I feel comfortable saying that close to 100% of our customers, would not be using Microsoft Business Applications at all, were it not for the options we made available to them. How can Microsoft Accelerate these Movements? I know that the Bizapps leadership gets it. I know that the PMs who have P&L responsibility for the First-Party apps, do not get it. Right now, there are only two barriers to explosive growth. The first is artificial, first-party protection schemes. The second is prioritization of the tools and programs required for these motions to flourish. I also know that both of these barriers will be coming down very soon.

I was recently at Extreme365 in Austin, I even had a role in Keynote! One of the sessions was a "Fireside Chat" with the Bizapps product team. Aside from there not actually being a fire that I could see, there was some great conversation. Ryan Jones, who works with Charles Lamanna on the platform team, said something that stuck in my head. Five Things When asked about what ISVs can do better in working with Microsoft and AppSource, Ryan said Microsoft focuses on five things. Availability/Reliability (This actually seems like two things) Performance Security Supportability Efficiency Depending on whether you are "Build", "Extend" or "Connect", these may have slightly different meanings to you. If you don't know what Build, Extend or Connect are, read this post. Let's dive in a little deeper on these five things. Availability/Reliability Like I said, this seem like a twofer, and really feels more like a Connect track issue more than the others. If you have an external service that your solution connects to D365, then obviously you will want to make sure you have provided for redundancy in the event something happens, so your users are not suddenly without your wonderful value-add. In addition, you will need to stay on top of changes to Microsoft's end of the platform, to make sure your solution continues to connect, day in and day out, to delight your customers. Performance For a Connect ISV, you need to make sure you have enough capacity to scale and handle whatever may come your way, without bringing your solution, or D365 to a crawl. For all ISVs this is an important consideration. Poor performance can come from many different things, but the result is that your customers suffer with a bad experience. In addition, poor performing code could put unnecessary strain and cost on Microsoft's end, which may cause you to be removed from their Christmas Card list. Microsoft recently launched the Solution Checker to help you identify performance issues. You can read about it here. Security We know that Microsoft is maniacal about security. It is a competitive advantage that they do not plan to put at risk. ISVs are a weak spot in their defense. I have seen apps in AppSource, that request you provide tenant admin credentials into a form displayed in an iframe. Seriously! Microsoft has started to focus on this "hole" more, and I expect that to tighten up significantly. It is not enough for them to waive responsibility for your app, they need to ensure that your app is not creating a security doorway. Supportability There are certain ISV apps that continuously generate support issues for Microsoft. You do not want yours to be on that list. If it is, you already know it. Deprecated code is probably the main driver of lack of supportability. Fortunately the Solution Checker and AppSource Pre-Certification tools are here to help you identify these issues. Many of these issues will also cause performance issues, so you should fix them. Microsoft has not yet launched a tool to automatically fix your crappy code, so for the foreseeable future, you will need to crack it open and do it yourself. Efficiency This one is getting tougher to keep up with. Things you built a particular way, only a year ago, are not necessarily the most efficient way to do that task today. Some thing that you wrote 500 lines of code to do, might be accomplished with a checkbox today. This is particularly true for legacy ISVs. If you have not touched your solution in the last 6 months, you are already out of sync. And we both know, many of you have not touched your solutions in years. If you did, it was just patching it up to keep working, so today you have a real house of cards. Efficiency is not even a consideration. The Stick is Coming Up until now, Microsoft has been more than forgiving of ISVs and Customer solutions that fail on one or more of the above five items. But that is neither scalable, or supportable as we rapidly move towards a single version of the product. Microsoft has tried the Carrot approach, and that has worked for a portion of you, but now it is time to switch to the Stick. I expect Microsoft to get much more aggressive around solutions complying with these five things soon. Consider yourself warned.

I was listening to Gus Gonzales' recent podcast on Ten Features that should be removed from Dynamics 365. As usual, Gus makes some great points, but when he was discussing limits, I think he left out a part of the story, that leads to a larger question. Mismatch We were recently engaged in a P2P scenario, where a partner had quoted a fixed price to their customer, to perform some work that they needed our help with. We were engaged by the partner on a hourly basis to perform this work. The project turned out to be significantly more complex than the partner had imagined when they quoted the fixed price. Sure enough, our hourly cost to the partner ultimately exceeded their fixed cost from their customer. This was a cost mismatch that was unfortunate for that partner. One Microsoft While Microsoft aspires to the "One Microsoft" story, they fact is that there is not "one" P&L. Each business group has it's own P&L, which is necessary for Wall Street and many other reasons. When one Business Group uses services from another Business Group, they are not free... they get a bill, just like we do. Business Applications on Azure With version 9 of Dynamics 365, there was a lot of hoopla about the legacy CRM database moving to Azure. It was going to be so much better, more scalable, faster, etc. And it was indeed all of those things. But there was also one new wrinkle. The Business Applications group was now going to receive a bill from the Azure Business Group for all of those spinning servers and storage services. Azure is sold on consumption, but Dynamics is offered on fixed licensing. Sounds familiar to my P2P story. Dynamics 365 Limits I agree with Gus that having a 50 record aggregation limit can occasionally be an issue. While Gus feels his customer might be willing to wait an hour or two for the results of a million record aggregation to be complied, that is going to spin the Azure meters like crazy. That customer with a need for a million record aggregation, is paying Microsoft the same amount per user, as customers who never exceed 50K record aggregations. But Microsoft's COGS could potentially eclipse the revenue that customer is paying. This is not a good spot, it is a mismatch. Match Fix One way to fix the mismatch, would be for Microsoft to change the way they offer Business Applications from Licensing to Consumption. In a consumption based model, there would be no need for any limits, on anything. The customer could spin the servers, and save as much data as they wanted, as long as they were willing to pay for it. License to Consumption Some of you may recall my battles with the Dynamics 365 for Marketing initial Licensing scheme. What I was really lobbying for was a consumption model. We ultimately landed on a workable compromise, which is kind of a quasi-consumption. I recall, one of the obstacles to going to a straight consumption model was "That is not how any of our competitors offer this".  I was of course thinking that was exactly why we should do it. Life on Consumption Let's imagine that you are renting an apartment. You have a fixed monthly rent amount (License), but your electric bill varies (Consumption). While I cannot control my rent amount, I know I can control my electric bill, turn off some lights, adjust thermostat etc. When I go out of town for a month, my electric bill drops way down, but my rent does not. Imagine if instead of paying a fixed monthly rent amount, there were thermal sensors in the apartment, and was only charged rent based on the number of hours someone was in it. I would not pay any rent for my two week family vacation. Would people buy that? BTW, Microsoft IoT would be a great choice for any landlords considering this approach. Who will be first? This is not unique to Microsoft Business Applications. Netflix charges a fixed fee to customers, but pays Amazon on consumption. When everybody started sharing their Netflix login with friends and family, Netflix was getting hammered, so they introduced limits. The opposite is also true. The licensing prices for Microsoft Business Applications are based on some formulas of typical usage. Some users are above the range, but those below, are in effect, subsidizing those above. Same as how skinny people offset the fat people at a Chinese buffet. The risk for the buffet owner is the local chapter of the "Society of Obese People", picking their place to meet. The recent exploration of changing the way Microsoft charges for instances and storage was an attempt to level this out. Microsoft temporarily stepped back from the consumption based storage model, but what if they came back to it... with everything? Bizapps on Consumption Imagine that everything under the Microsoft Business Applications umbrella shifted from licensing to consumption. Use whatever you want, as much as you want, with no limits. No figuring out what licenses users need, instead maybe you stick meters on roles. It would not have to be tied directly to Azure consumption, but some sort of metric(s) that go up and down based on usage. Logins, record views, number of records in an aggregation, etc. If a customer closed the plant for a month for the holidays, their cost would be near zero. When they ramped up activity for back to school, their cost would be higher. A direct relationship of use vs. cost. No one subsidizing anyone else. Could you sell that? But what will it cost? Yup, I hear this argument. "Customers will always want to know exactly how much it will cost!". I think that is an assumption many are making on behalf of all customers, that has proven not to be true for other things. One of the fastest growing services on the planet today is Microsoft Azure, with no fixed cost. Azure sits right next to another service, from Amazon, that also has no fixed cost. Both of those tools have "cost estimators", which is as good an idea as you're going to get. It appears obvious to me, that customers are more interested in paying for what they use... or at least the "skinny" customers. The Consumption Economy is Next If the cloud is, as Gavriella Schuster put it to me recently, the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", then consumption models will be the fuel. By the time your high school age children, have children of their own, this will be the norm.