Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce meeting that Marsh describes as “the Super Bowl of enterprise software.” (There were 80,000 attendees at this year’s Dreamforce meeting.) Marsh says he set up an unassuming booth to test the appeal of their concept. “We got all these leads,” he says. “People came by and we got amazing feedback. We signed our first customers. Clearly, it validated our concept.”
The decision was made to not give the product away for free, and, in January, Wise agreed to continue to invest ePrize resources in Contest Builder. About 20 more customers signed up to use the software and, as of July, Contest Builder became the top gamification app in the Salesforce AppExchange. “It’s amazing how quickly it happened,” Marsh adds.
Wise and Marsh decided to spin the app into a separate company, LevelEleven, partly to take advantage of the growing tech scene in Detroit. Last week, LevelEleven moved into the downtown, Dan Gilbert-owned Madison Building space that is home to a growing roster of tech startups, VCs, and anchor firms. LevelEleven’s team consists of six people, but Marsh expects to be hiring very soon.
Marsh says he feels good about the parallel paths of LevelEleven and ePrize. “This category [Leveleleven is] in—clearly, we’re in the very early stages,” he notes. “ePrize rapidly became a dominant player, and we see this doing the same thing. The concept is validated and we have many more ideas we’re going to come out with.”
