Chris Federspiel, CEO at Blackthorn.io | Episode 165

My guest this week has laid a truly impressive foundation for his company fueled by skill, passion, ingenuity, and a tremendous amount of grit! Blackthorn.io is a Salesforce application company that started back in 2015. And according to CEO Chris Federspiel, the road to success has not necessarily been an easy one. Chris talks about the go-to-market phase of his company in a manner that is truly admirable. Not only did the company face potential bankruptcy in 2018, but Chris himself petitioned multiple investors for funding support, none of which complied, only to charge the company forward and eventually turn profit as one of the fastest and most prolific apps in the Salesforce ecosystem.

For those of you who may not know, Salesforce has a 20% market share of the global CRM deployment network, with 100,000-150,000 independent organizations using the application, as well as 10 million installs in AppExchange alone. As for what Blackthorn.io does, Chris says the best way to think of them is a middleware that connects their customers from Salesforce to multiple other gateways. Their market share is concentrated in the higher education, nonprofit and healthcare verticals, with their target audience being any organization within the Salesforce ecosystem needs to move money.

As for their competitive edge, they have apps within the Salesforce ecosystem that cater to payments, events, messaging, and commerce. According to Chris, none of their competitors do even three out of four of these offerings, with most doing only one. They are also the fastest to install by a ratio of 30-45 minutes to 20-40 hours!

Tune in this week and hear Chris talk about his journey to CEO, as well as where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years, including a massive consolidation and a saturation of API-based payment clones.