As we gear up for Dreamforce and make plans to spend quality time with customers, industry analysts, prospects and investors, it’s easy to forget that prior to the 2011 Dreamforce Hackathon, RingDNA wasn’t yet a product - it was just a vision. 

The Vision

I dreamed of transforming business telephony by connecting the business phone to CRM and other sources of enterprise metrics, such as Google AdWords, LinkedIn and Twitter. This idea came to me through a series of consulting engagements with enterprise companies. With each client, my team of consultants and I were tasked with improving sales and marketing ROI by making it easier for companies to measure and monitor the impact of their efforts across a broad set of roles and channels. We consistently found that visibility into the business phone was by far the most challenging piece. Despite a shift to VoIP telephony, tying actionable call metrics into the CRM and other data sources was complex and time-intensive. We knew there had to be a better way to not only track calls in Salesforce, but also to deliver contextually relevant data to sales reps with phone calls. Data-driven telephony needed to be as simple as downloading and installing an app.

Testing the Concept

I’m a firm believer in testing the waters before committing to any business venture. The Dreamforce Hackathon provided the ideal environment to pitch the prototype for idea to fellow members of the Salesforce.com ecosystem. Using the Salesforce Platform toolkit for iOS, we decided to build an app that transformed an iPad into a mobile call center, and then have the judges call in so we could show how incoming calls, with advanced caller ID features, would look in a call queue. In the heat of the moment, we decided it would be more fun to let the entire audience dial our call center number. As the inbound calls poured in, the names and geographical locations of each caller displayed on the iOS interface. We then picked a random member of the audience to answer the call, which the entire audience heard over the room speakers. It was an exciting moment.

We were lucky enough to win first prize, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough to validate the vision for me. The win delivered immediate interest from press, investors, advisors and exceptionally bright developers interested in disrupting the business telephony establishment.  That was a key step in convincing me to move forward with RingDNA as a business.

Where We Are Today

RingDNA now since raised $3M in funding, has thousands of customers using our free mobile CRM apps for iPad and iPhone, as well as a rapidly growing base of enterprise customers using our premium solutions for inside sales, marketing and contact centers.

Most recently, my company RingDNA extended our API to external developers for the first time. The result of this crowdsourced coding effort was a Chrome browser phone extension that transforms Salesforce.com into a smart phone, delivering actionable data about prospects from sources such as LinkedIn and Twitter, along with phone calls. 

Obviously, I was tremendously excited to get the product in the hands of our customers. However, few realized that for me, RingDNA had just come full circle. Our story had started at the 2011 Dreamforce Hackathon, when RingDNA used Salesforce’s mobile SDK to build the basis of what would become our first app. Now, we had given other developers an opportunity to create something using our own platform.   As we continue to enable more developers to create incredible products with our API, I will always consider our participation in the Hackathon as one of the defining moments in our story.

Watch this video to learn more about the Hackathon.

If you're a developer interested in the Hackathon, read more about it in this blog post and register here. Join us at Dreamforce at the button below.