Should You Vibe Code Your Own CRM?

Darin Pope (0:00)

A quick disclosure before we start today. Salesforce paid for my flight and hotel to be at Dreamforce 2026

They didn't get to see the questions ahead of time, and they didn't get a say in what made the cut. With that, on with the show.

Eddie Cliff (0:16)

The problem is, building has become cheaper and easier than ever before, and you don't even need to be a developer really to build. And so that gives people a lot of confidence, and maybe overconfidence, that they can create this. And a lot of times, yeah, your V1 day one looks great. You love it. And you start using it for real and start trying to make tweaks, it starts to kind of lose a little bit of that luster. And now you got to add more capabilities, that breaks something else, because it's not just the day one. You got to be there day 30, day 100 You got to be maintaining it. You got to make sure it doesn't go down. You've got to get other users access to it. Where are you hosting this thing? All of this gets to be quite expensive and time consuming. You end up spending more time vibe coding your CRM than you do running your business.

Darin Pope (0:59)

This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 371, Should You Vibe Code Your Own CRM?

Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darren and Victor, pretend we know what we're talking about. Most of the time, we mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like Kubernetes, serverless, CI-CD, team productivity, islands of happiness, and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing. Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there and there is no way we are going to find it.

Yes, it's Darren reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Victor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darren Pope and Victor Farson. As a developer, some of us dream of starting our own thing, so we can say goodbye to the man. But then we hit the problem of sales and marketing and service and all the things that one person just can't do. I'm still at Dreamforce 2026, Victor's not with me, but today I have with me Eddie Cliff. He's the VP and GM of SMB and Growth Products at Salesforce. Eddie, how are you doing?

Eddie Cliff (2:26)

I'm doing really well. Thanks for having me.

Darin Pope (2:28)

How often do you hear that conversation? Have you been hearing it from the, I mean, we think SMBs, and I talked to Dan Fernandez a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about, okay, it's not so much the size of the business, but you guys think developers, and that defines what a size of a business, because he said even Anthropic would be classified as potentially an SMB because of the bodies.

Eddie Cliff (2:49)

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think at Salesforce is we classify the different business units that we have from enterprise and SMB small business.

It's all by employee count. And for a small business, that can be pretty large. But I think the products where I'm really focused on are the really small businesses, the startups, the solopreneurs, and providing them with the same technology and power of Salesforce that can help them drive their business as if they are large, multi-thousand person enterprise using Salesforce.

Darin Pope (3:18)

So, I'm going to step into it now. Do you think we will see a one person, one billion dollar company?

Eddie Cliff (3:24)

It's a really good question. Wasn't there one not too long ago?

Darin Pope (3:27)

There was, but let's get real, because that one felt a little slimy to me.

Eddie Cliff (3:32)

I feel like a single person, billion dollar of revenue feels really difficult to kind of manage and kind of scale and support. Certainly, like in an evaluation, you could definitely see that happening. If it's something that's completely self-serve and product led, they can check out with their credit card, they can do all that from an app, then possibly, it still feels like all of the marketing that you need to do, all the selling that you need to do, the service that you need to do is larger. And not to mention developing a product is larger than one person can really manage and would need a small team. But perhaps with the revolution with agents, and now building and utilizing agents to handle a lot of those functions, I think just about anything's possible these days.