Warmly sells to revenue teams, and revenue teams live inside Salesforce. That is where their reps work, where their pipeline sits, and where their leadership measures them. We already had a deep Salesforce integration, but the things our customers wanted most, ROI reporting and automated workflows, were only possible as a managed package.

I estimated eight weeks. It took eight months.

The first four weeks went exactly to plan. We built the integration, it worked in our sandbox, and we were on schedule. Then we hit the Salesforce security review, which is not a formality. Our first submission came back with issues we had never heard of: field-level security checks, sharing enforcement, SSL configuration. We fixed them and resubmitted. New issues came back. Each round cost us four weeks and $999.

Versioning turned out to be a chess game. Patch releases push fixes automatically but cannot add features. Major releases add features but require customers to upgrade manually, and now you are supporting several versions at once. The decisions are permanent. Choose a namespace and you are married to it. Make a component global and it is there forever. We got very good at thinking three versions ahead before adding anything.

The package also carried overhead we had not planned for: custom fields, API limits, permission sets. Several customers told us they were already close to their org limits and could not install ours.

By month six, my engineers were spending 30% of their time on packaging logistics instead of product. Eight months of calendar time and a third of our engineering capacity went into becoming mediocre Salesforce platform specialists, in a domain we had no intention of owning.

In the classic build versus buy decision, I got this one wrong. We should have bought.

We moved to Appnigma. Their team had already hit every pitfall we had spent months discovering. The build took two weeks. We were live on the AppExchange eight weeks from kickoff, six of which were Salesforce security review, with no resubmission cycles. My engineers wrote zero lines of Salesforce code and spent a total of 40 engineering hours on the entire engagement, most of it in requirements calls. Eight months of our capacity became one week of one engineer's.

The listing stopped being a project and became a revenue asset.

Being on the AppExchange established immediate credibility with enterprise buyers. As we moved upmarket, a native Salesforce app went from a nice to have to a procurement requirement, and that shift happens on the buyer's timeline rather than yours. Since going live we have closed $2M+ in enterprise revenue in deals where the Salesforce integration was raised during evaluation.

The operational change was just as significant. Every one of my AEs now opens with a live screen share of our product running inside Salesforce. Not a slide describing the integration, and not a line on the roadmap. The working product, inside the system the buyer already runs their day in. We have since taken the same approach to HubSpot.

The lesson I would pass on: managed packages are infrastructure, not your core product. Unless you are in the Salesforce packaging business, treat this the way you treat payments or authentication. Don't build it. Appnigma is worth a conversation before you spend a year learning that yourself.