Projects

Partnerships

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Google Cloud

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Salesforce Heroku

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Tackle + AWS

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PDL + AWS

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Partner Highlight

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+

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Context

The year was 2016 and Fastly was quickly taking marketshare from Akamai and becoming a well known Enterprise grade Content Delivery Network (CDN). At the same time, Salesforce was starting to position Heroku as it’s own cloud platform to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In their journey becoming an Enterprise solution, Fastly started losing SMB users and were falling behind CloudFlare in that segment. Cloudflare offered a commercial model that was different and favorable for the SMB space — Cloudflare had a flat rate, fixed consumption model vs. Fastly’s metered usage model.

Salesforce had ambitions of becoming a cloud platform themselves. They saw the success of AWS and it’s related AWS Marketplace and felt they could build a better cloud ecosystem within Salesforce leveraging the Heroku platform.

Goals

The position both companies found themselves in at the same time led to an opportunity for both parties to craft a solution that would be mutually beneficial.

For Fastly, we felt we were losing ground fast in what was our initial core audience, developers and SMB companies. We were also in a growth stage still, so we were looking for a wider reach. We saw the Heroku platform as a solution for both.

Heroku was a pretty established platform for developers and SMB companies by the time Salesforce made their acquisition. The problem for Salesforce was that Heroku was popular with developers and SMB, but didn’t have enough appeal for the Enterprise grade. One glaring gap was that as an essential infrastructure, Heroku lacked a key piece of infrastructure — a content delivery network (and an Enterprise grade one at that). By partnering with Fastly, Salesforce Heroku aimed to remedy that.

Strategy

The partnership was very simple to start. Fastly had built an “integration” with Heroku to simply be listed on their platform as a vendor. This wasn’t an actual integration so much as it was signing up to be a partner and being able to publish a listing. So now we had a listing that was live, but it wasn’t driving any meaningful traffic for us. The hard part now was to come up with a business proposal and convince Product to lend me some resources to actually flesh out an integration.

At the time, Heroku boasted a userbase of roughly 300k active users with over 100k applications built. Most of these customers were small developers and SMB. Having an integration on the Heroku platform would give us access to that audience quickly and the Salesforce machine would help accelerate our time to market. Product agreed, and we quickly started working with the Heroku team to build a proper integration. The process took a bit over a month, but the team was able to build a Heroku integration that allowed customers to provision accounts and SSO into their Fastly instance all from the Heroku platform. With that, Fastly had access to developers and SMB’s again and Salesforce had their Enterprise CDN.

When we first introduced the integration, I only had a handful of tiered offerings for Fastly on Heroku. There was a free account and tiered offerings ranging from $25 - $500 / month. This was the first iteration of the integration, but we weren’t done yet. I decided to take a closer look at our customers and how they were using the offering. I had two key takeaways looking at the data.

1) Customers weren’t using everything they purchased. For example, say they purchased 10GB of bandwidth for $25, they were using only half of that or 5GB. That meant that the margins through this integration were actually much better than our direct business. Nearly 60% better.

2) Our ‘power users’, or our most active, top paying customers, were over consuming the product. This meant that if they purchased 10GB, they were consuming maybe 15GB.

These two findings presented an opportunity to double down on the partnership. It illustrated that there was indeed demand for the solution we built and that there was significant upside. With this data, I went back to my product team to make another ask. The data showed that our offerings on Heroku were not enough to satisfy our customers and because of that, there wasn’t a clear path to upgrading. We were stunting our own growth by not having more, higher priced packages. Luckily, this was an easy fix and product signed off on me launching further packages. Finally, we had packages ranging from $25 / month up to $10,000 / month.

Results

Once the partnership matured and scaled out, Fastly obtained a lucrative new channel and Salesforce Heroku added an up market CDN solution into their ecosystem. Both parties were able to experiment with new ways of GTM and the partnership thrived. Heroku’s platform became the only way customers could purchase Fastly in a ‘flat rate’ model while Fastly became the first and only upfront, annual commit deal sold through Salesforce Heroku (at the time). When the partnership first kicked off, revenue sat around ~$1,100 / month. At it’s peak, after the introduction of higher tiered packages, the integration consistently generated revenue around $29,000 / month.

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