Interview With Ryan Huff, CEO and Co-founder of Cirruspath

For those of you using Salesforce, Cirrus Insight probably needs no introduction. Nevertheless, when you get the chance to interview one of the leading apps for integrating Salesforce with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts – an introduction is in order. I interviewed Ryan Huff, CEO and Co-founder of Cirruspath, the makers of Cirrus Insight as they marked the two-year anniversary of their launch on the AppExchange.  It was both an opportunity to learn from an industry leader about the Salesforce ecosystem, as well as listen to what’s new with Cirrus Insight. Q1: Who is Cirruspath? A1: “Cirruspath is the maker of Cirrus Insight, the #1 app for integrating Salesforce with Gmail and Google Apps. Our goal is to make CRM easy by meeting sales and support people where they live, namely in their inboxes. We were one of the early apps on the Salesforce AppExchange and it’s been our pleasure to have grown along with it.” Q2: Where did the need to develop a payment SDK arise from? A2: “This month marks the two-year anniversary since we officially launched Cirrus Insight on the Salesforce AppExchange. Before we launched, we had beta testers hammering away at the app for over four months and providing feedback. There were so many things we wanted to get into v1.0 of the app, but back then it was just me and my co-founder Brandon, and we needed to start making money to get the company up and running. So sometime around September 2011, we put a bow on what would become Cirrus Insight v1.0 and started working on automating our back-office processes like License Management and Payment Processing. We built our License Management system in Salesforce, which allowed us to manage the entire customer on-boarding process with just the two of us.” Q3: Why a SDK for Stripe and not one of the other payment processing solutions? A3: “I started looking at solutions for payment processing. I’d had considerable experience with Authorize.net, PayPal and other systems – and they weren’t pleasant experiences. In my research, I found a then-new startup called Stripe that was building a payment processing platform for developers; a platform that was easy to integrate with, had the necessary feature set, and great documentation. It took about 5 minutes to set up an account and issue my first test payment, and I was sold. So I set to work building integration to Stripe’s APIs in Salesforce. Since then, our “SDK” for Stripe has grown and evolved and allowed us to seamlessly build payment processing into our License Management process. You can experience this live on our sign up page:-)” Q4: Why open source your Stripe SDK for Salesforce? A4: “Recently, Stripe became the payments platform for the Salesforce AppExchange, allowing Salesforce ISVs to offer a seamless payment option for users of their apps. So to help some of our fellow Salesforce ISVs – and other Salesforce developers in the community – we’re open-sourcing the code base on Github. We want to make it easy for Salesforce partners to monetize their apps, and we also hope the SDK will encourage the next generation of partners to build and grow thriving companies on the Salesforce Platform.”