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Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

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Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#41

Post by [deleted] »

ianyanusko wrote: post #32
nextworddev wrote: post #29

Meta observation: lots of YC companies basically build their startups around some workload (e.g. salesforce db) and sell some managed service around it. This game is quite difficult to scale and sell to enterprise. But it's understandable that many technical founders are most familiar with these types of "painpoints" and thus have their startup thesis around them.

Agreed that many technical founders build on the pain points they've experienced themselves. I'm curious your take on why the managed services approach is hard to scale? IMO, the reason many YC companies struggle with enterprise sales is because it's generally much harder than PLG, with long sales cycles and delayed feedback loops. It was definitely a learning curve for us!

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#42

Post by nextworddev »

ianyanusko wrote: post #32
nextworddev wrote: post #29

Meta observation: lots of YC companies basically build their startups around some workload (e.g. salesforce db) and sell some managed service around it. This game is quite difficult to scale and sell to enterprise. But it's understandable that many technical founders are most familiar with these types of "painpoints" and thus have their startup thesis around them.

Agreed that many technical founders build on the pain points they've experienced themselves. I'm curious your take on why the managed services approach is hard to scale? IMO, the reason many YC companies struggle with enterprise sales is because it's generally much harder than PLG, with long sales cycles and delayed feedback loops. It was definitely a learning curve for us!

(opinions as ex-AWS GTM specialist for AI)

An underrated challenge with enterprise sales is often that customers often misguidedly believe that 1) they can build it themselves, 2) they are worried about your companies ability to "scale" to their needs, and/or 3) the customer wants to "own" that responsibility for personal/political/career reasons.

Sales is hard for everyone including Azure, AWS, etc, just gotta keep grinding at it.

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#43

Post by ianyanusko »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #37

As a developer I love the idea. Choosing Postgres over say a GraphQL API is bold, but it makes sense. The customer can then scale up their Postgres instance as they hammer it more and more, and they might already being using this for their app, so developers can add it to their ORM. Or they could wrap this in a microservice. I also liked the submission recently about a git client that uses SQL. I like the idea that m…

Agreed! We’re big fans of consolidating in Postgres. We’re also hearing some downstream benefits to having things scaled in Postgres (makes reporting easier, allows the data team to use SQL rather than hitting an API, etc) from our users.

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#44

Post by couchand »

ianyanusko wrote: post #39
couchand wrote: post #34

This looks great! The UI and docs look very nice. Of course long-term reliability is what really matters in this space. I can definitely see incorporating this into client proposals. A few things I can't immediately see from the docs: do you support subsetting a data source -- only sync records matching criteria? Do you support to/from different instances of the same connector (e.g. Salesforce to Salesforce)? Can you…

Thank you! > do you support subsetting a data source -- only sync records matching criteria? In a one-way sync from Postgres to Salesforce, yes, you can apply filters using a SQL statement, but we’re working on adding this to the Salesforce side as well as two-way syncs. From your perspective, how would you want to set these filters? A SOQL query, or something else? > Do you support to/from different instances of the…

> From your perspective, how would you want to set these filters? A SOQL query, or something else?

For myself, I want to write SOQL there, though I'd guess many of your target customers will want a point-and-click option. Selecting a list view for that object could be an interesting UX hack that might be worth exploring: there's some Salesforce Labs product that does that.

> Salesforce Salesforce is not heavily tested... Curious what use case you have in mind?

I've seen a number of configurations for different purposes, the most common one being sandbox data movements.

Management of multiple production orgs gets complex fast, but there are a few places where a tool like this could find a niche: org migrations come to mind. There's often an interim period where you're two way syncing (even though you'd rather not!) before the org being phased out is done.

Good luck!

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#45

Post by couchand »

kunalrgarg wrote: post #38
couchand wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the GP's scheduled jobs are running within Salesforce, probably Apex. I'd note that I've seen inconsistent async processing delays even in EE and UE clients. First of all, I'm pretty sure everyone is on shared infrastructure, and second, the delay is at least in part relative to the amount of recent processing.

Yeah, so far, we’ve found that this combination of the three APIs is a happy medium between reliability, simplicity, and API limit consciousness.

I'm curious what's the biggest table you've tested on? Things start to get really interesting in Salesforce when your object has a million rows.

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#47

Post by peterlada »

nextworddev wrote: post #29

Meta observation: lots of YC companies basically build their startups around some workload (e.g. salesforce db) and sell some managed service around it. This game is quite difficult to scale and sell to enterprise. But it's understandable that many technical founders are most familiar with these types of "painpoints" and thus have their startup thesis around them.

It is incredibly hard and a giant overhead on each of these SaaS startups to do marketing and enterprise sales which shows up in pricing (30-70%!) These solutions still need to be vendored in and integrated at each client.

Rolling up all the YC single-feature SaaS business into a single sales org and providing an a la carte set of solutions to partners would make a ton of sense.

I guess that is the theory behind SaaS.group and its ilk.

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#48

Post by ianyanusko »

couchand wrote: post #44
ianyanusko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! > do you support subsetting a data source -- only sync records matching criteria? In a one-way sync from Postgres to Salesforce, yes, you can apply filters using a SQL statement, but we’re working on adding this to the Salesforce side as well as two-way syncs. From your perspective, how would you want to set these filters? A SOQL query, or something else? > Do you support to/from different instances of the…

> From your perspective, how would you want to set these filters? A SOQL query, or something else? For myself, I want to write SOQL there, though I'd guess many of your target customers will want a point-and-click option. Selecting a list view for that object could be an interesting UX hack that might be worth exploring: there's some Salesforce Labs product that does that. > Salesforce Salesforce is not heavily teste…

Really helpful on both fronts, thanks for the thoughts. Both the sandbox and migration use cases make a lot of sense.

Re: Launch HN: Bracket (YC W22) – Two-Way Sync Between Salesforce and Postgres

#50

Post by ianyanusko »

bambax wrote: post #49

Neat! How specific is your solution to Postgres? Could it be ported to another db engine? (And, how are conflicts resolved? In a huge system with millions of records coming from everywhere it can fast become nightmarish?)

> How specific is your solution to Postgres? Could it be ported to another db engine?

Our polling approach is relatively database-agnostic. We just need to handle each DB's quirks with our transformers (e.g. dealing with MySQL's lack of BOOL field types).

Streaming is currently Postgres-specific. We're planning on rolling out support for MySQL next, after we've finished our Hubspot integration. Do you have a specific DB in mind?

> (And, how are conflicts resolved? In a huge system with millions of records coming from everywhere it can fast become nightmarish?)

The primary source wins any merge conflicts that happen within a sync period. With polling, it's pretty straightforward: at every poll, we see how each side has changed, and for any record pairings for which there were edits on both sides, we prefer the primary source.

With streaming, we employ a hybrid method, where we only poll when events occur in either Salesforce or Postgres. If at that poll, the same record has been edited on both sides since the previous poll, we still prioritize the primary source (Salesforce). You can read the step-by-step flow here: https://docs.usebracket.com/streaming#the-streaming-sync-met...

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