Customer Story · ISV
Left Main REI and Swantide
How a growing real estate ISV used Swantide to deliver their product to customers faster.
Background
Left Main REI is a leading CRM for real estate investors built on Salesforce. Their platform helps investors move faster, price smarter, and scale with confidence. As Left Main was poised to grow significantly, they faced operational challenges in scaling their Customer Success, Product, and Engineering teams while continuing to deliver a best-in-class product and customer experience.
The Problem
Left Main has a number of add-on products that support their core package, including Cadences, Property Sales AI, DealSignals, Direct Mail Configuration, and Left Main Exchange. Delivering all of these features as part of their managed package posed significant technical challenges, and they were looking for an alternative approach.
“We have a whole bunch of add-on products, and to be able to get these products in market faster was really why we chose to go with Swantide. Because we weren’t constrained by some of the things that packaging constrains you with, and we’re able to plug into the infrastructure and deploy this upgrade super fast.”
In order to help sell these products, Left Main also offered implementation support to get these products live for customers, and their existing CS team would be unable to meet the demand for these new products if every configuration step outside of the package needed to be performed manually. They needed a way to scale implementation of add-on products across their professional services organization.
“We offered, if you bought our product, you get X amount of free implementation hours. So how do we, with a small team, manage that? Well, you need to find a way to automate a lot of it.”
Additionally, the core Left Main packages have evolved significantly in the 6 years they’ve been on the AppExchange. It was a challenge to maintain up to date documentation, which created operational headwinds as the product and team evolved:
“Years go by and we didn’t document anything. Your workforce changes, people come in and out. We needed to be able to keep them current with the latest information about how our product works.”
The Solution
One-click workflows for package add-ons
Left Main reviewed the implementation guides for each of their add-on products and identified the repetitive tasks completed as part of each implementation. They leveraged Swantide workflows to define the metadata configuration associated with each step. After they built the template once, it could be deployed to each new customer with a single click in Swantide. The time savings added up quickly, with some Swantide workflows saving “10 hours of work each time we use it.”
The workflows have become a central part of Left Main’s delivery of add-on packages, as Swantide has been used to deliver product add-ons at 230 customer orgs.
Swantide helped drive usage and adoption of new features without placing additional burden on customers:
“Normally we send out release notes to clients, we give them steps to take on their page layouts, for example. But now with Swantide, it’s a courtesy — we can just do this for you. We’re automatically able to give that release to our clients rather than having them install it through release notes.”
Swantide connected to the packaging org
Left Main has also leveraged Swantide’s AI Assistant and Documentation to maintain up to date documentation of their core packages. Left Main connected an org with an unlocked version of their packages to Swantide, containing over 13,000 metadata components. Swantide maintains documentation of what each component does, and gives Left Main users the ability to ask questions about how the package works. The documentation is kept up to date automatically as the product evolves.
Swantide has become Left Main’s internal source of truth for answering questions about their packages, freeing up valuable time for senior technical resources.
“Swantide provides institutional knowledge of how the package works. People on our team tell me, I didn’t have to ask you these questions because I went to Swantide and asked instead. Those have been big wins for us.”
Swantide has allowed Left Main to scale their operations and meet the growing demand from customers:
“Swantide has been that partner we needed to enable us to meet those engagements we have with our clients.”