Business Systems Innovation Labs

Lab 1a Pre-flight Checklist

“I did it! Check this OUT!”

Pick up where you left off with the story of Max, the SJSU student blogging her new
gig at a Silicon Valley startup. Follow along, step-by-step as she figures out how to
build an actual app on her laptop AND her phone!

Prep: Get ready

Be sure you read the Pre-lab backstory (Lab 0) first, so you know Max & what’s going on with her.
Careful! When the instructions tell you to create your Salesforce account, be sure that you:
• follow the link given to get the free Developer Edition (DE) account (DO NOT GO TO THE
SALESFORCE WEBSITE AND GET THE 30-DAY FREE TRIAL!!!), and
• do NOT sign up w/AOL or Yahoo—better to get a free Gmail account just for the labs instead.
SALESFORCE MAY NOT WORK RIGHT UNLESS YOU turn off ad/popup blockers AND allow cookies:
• In Safari, select Settings, click the Privacy tab & make Prevent cross-site tracking UNchecked
• In Chrome, select Settings, then choose Privacy & Security from the left-hand menu, then click
on Third-party Cookies & set it to Allow third-party cookies
• In Firefox, select Settings, then choose Privacy & Security from the left-hand menu, choose Custom
and then make sure Cookies is UNchecked

Learning Objectives: What to “get”

What is data, really? What are databases, at their core? What good are they, in real life & in business?
What’s the big idea of “the cloud?” Why use it for apps & data we work with?
Get how startup culture works & drives the world’s innovation.
See for yourself how tools, like Salesforce, let you do a lot, without a lot of effort/skill/knowledge.
This stuff’s not nerdy. It’s cool, it’s tech-boosted business and women belong.

Checkpoints: Get points

When you reach these checkpoints in the lab, make sure your screen matches the screencap shown there.
If not, fix whatever’s wrong before going on. It’s a good idea to run the grader app at every checkpoint, so
you can see any mistakes so far & how to fix them. (Just ignore errors about steps you haven't done yet.)
But be sure to run the grader app at the end of the lab, at least, before going on to the next one so
you don’t lose your work! (See https://www.maxzplace.com/grader-info for grader app installation/info.)

After Step 82 you should be viewing the fake data values you entered for your first Pitch record.
If not, click your Pitches tab and then click on the Pitch ID to open that record’s details. (80 pts)

After Step 98 you should be seeing a table w/4 columns (Pitch ID, Business Name, Investment
Amount & Equity Percentage) & at least 4 rows of fake data you added (2 VCs+2 Angels). (20 pts)

Tips: Get more

The big idea here is digital business enablement/transformation. If you zoom thru the steps just to get to
the end, you’ll miss out! The steps are just the “what.” The story parts give you the “how” & “why.” Read
to experience. Experience to learn.

Resources: Get help

Stuck? NEVER TRY TO UNDO/REDO THE WHOLE LAB—that can make things worse! Instead, look for a fast
fix, 24/7, at the Help FAQ at MaxzPlace. No luck? Then post to the Help Forum there to get answers ASAP!
 Max's Distinctive, Impressive BizTech Student Blog
Monday, September 16, 2019

I did it! Check this OUT

Ok, so I really, really wanted to impress my new “suit”-friend/boss Riley and make this the best app for tracking
pitches to VCs/Angel investors on the face of the planet and……I did! (I think). My own totally killer mobile app.
Built by me.You HAVE to try it for yourself. Seriously. It’s fun. Promise. I’ll list out what I did, step-by-step. Just
follow along. It’s super-easy.

But rst, before you re up Salesforce, let me give you the gist so you know where this is going. To start out, I
created what SF calls an “object”. (Prof says most databases call them “tables,” but SF likes to be different that
way—ok, whatever—we accept and move on.) Tables/objects– they’re just a way to organize the data into lists,
really. Rows and columns of data are like the list of players on the scoreboard at a Giant’s game.

We’re used to thinking of lists as bunches of the same kinds of things (players), where each row is one individual
of that type of thing (eg Buster Posey) and the columns tell different kinds of things about the things in the rows,
(eg Buster wears the number 28, plays the catcher position — “C”, batting average=.292).

So then in SF, objects are like lists of things you want to keep track of and when you create an object, you name
it that way (like “Players”). And the columns are called elds and you name the elds too (like “Player Name”,
“Position” & “Batting Average”, unlike the scoreboard). The eld names are like the column headers for the list.
You can have as many elds as you want (almost) and you can name them whatever makes sense for your app.

Now, back to my app for Riley. She wanted to keep track of these sales “pitches” that she’s going to be making to
the VCs & Angels to get them to invest. And I realized, that’s just like the baseball players—just keeping a list of
the investors she’s pitching with the columns of stuff about them so she can save it and pull it up on her phone
whenever she needs it.

Then I knew I just needed SF for setting up the object & the elds and the layout of how it should look, like in
the tutorial I did. Seemed easy enough. Turned out it was, mostly, but computers are picky—I had to get each
step just right. But once you get the details set, it does actually work. Ok, so now you HAVE to try this out for
yourself. I’ll show you every step.You’ll be amazed. Promise!

Copyright 2024 © e Max Labs Project

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 First, go get an SF account but DO NOT GET THE 30 DAY FREE TRIAL ACCOUNT! Huge mistake!
Instead, go to https://www.salesforce.com/form/developer-signup/ and get the free, lifetime Salesforce “Developer
Edition” (DE) account. The web page with the form should look something like this:

On the signup page, enter your real name and use a real email address—one you can log into—bc they send you
an email with the link to set your password & get started. (Do NOT use a Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL
account—they don’t play nice with SF! To be safe, just create a new Gmail account to use just
for this.) For Job Title and Company, anything’s ok, but for Country, be sure to pick United States,
even if you’re someplace else, just to make sure everything will work later on. Then, check the boxes and click
Sign Me Up and just wait, even if nothing happens for a long time. Do NOT get impatient and redo
it!! (Trust me.)

In a few minutes you’ll get a “Welcome to Salesforce:Verify your account” email from them at the address you
entered. See where it says “To easily log in later, save this URL:”? That’s your personal SF login link! After this,
always use that for logging in to avoid problems. But for now, click Verify Account & follow the instructions
to set your password, etc & voila—you’re logged in! Now, don’t panic—just follow along with what I did.

So rst, like I said, I knew I needed an object to hold a record for each pitch Riley made (the “please invest in my
company” kind of pitch, NOT the baseball kind). SF has some built-in (“standard”) objects for accounts & leads &
other common business stuff, but not one for investor pitches, so I had to create my own (a “custom” object)
which I creatively named “Pitch”:

1. So rst, I clicked on the gear icon near the upper right corner, by the bell, & then, on the drop-down
that appeared, I clicked Setup (do NOT click Service Setup–never use that one) to make sure I was
on the Setup Home page that looks like this (different stuff in those panels is ok but if there’s no gear
icon at all then click Switch to Lightning Experience, on the upper right, just left of your name)
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 2. Then I clicked on the Create button and selected Custom Object from the drop-down

That brought up a new webpage labelled New Custom Object at the top. So far, so good. There was a form
to ll in and from the tutorial, I knew the slots with red bars on the edge are mandatory so…

3. Under Custom Object Information, I lled in the Label slot with “Pitch” (don’t type the quote
marks—they just show you exactly what to type—the stuff between them)
4. And for Plural Label, I used “Pitches”
5. I noticed SF had auto- lled Object Name with “Pitch” so I assumed that was ok and I skipped down
to Record Name under the Enter Record Name Label and Format section

So what about Record Name? I remembered in class we learned that records are just the individual rows of
data that go together for the kind of thing you’re tracking (eg “Buster Posey,” “C”, “.292” all would go together as
a baseball player record). And Prof says you want some kind of ID—some eld that’ll have a different value for
every record, just to help keep them all straight. Like for people records, they use Social Security numbers a lot,
but Riley wouldn’t be messing with that stuff, so I Googled around & gured it out.

Turns out SF’s got that covered—you can make it automatically assign a unique ID to every record as it’s being
created.You just use the settings to say how you want them numbered and how you want them to look:

6. For Record Name, it already said “Pitch Name” but I changed it to “Pitch ID”
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 7. Then, I used the Data Type drop-down menu to select Auto Number
8. In the Display Format textbox that opens up underneath, I entered “P-{000}” (tells SF to make the
IDs look like “P-027” and such; good enough to handle a thousand investors—plenty, but be sure to
include the curly braces!)
9. For Starting Number enter zero (the number 0, NOT the letter “O”)
10. Then I skipped down to the bottom and clicked Save

That brought up a page of details about Pitch, my rst very own custom SF object in the cloud! (Ok, not exactly
a viral sensation but a veritable…“micro-achievement”?)

11. Next, I knew I needed to add those elds that Riley would want to track for each of her pitches so I
clicked on Fields and Relationships, on the left-side vertical menu, just below Details with the
blue background behind it

Then I could see there were already three built-in (“standard”) elds created by SF and the Pitch ID one I had
set for the Record Name when I created Pitch. To add some for Riley:

12. I clicked on New, to the right, above the list of elds

That brought up a New Custom Field panel with a section labeled Step 1: Choose the eld type. Ok,
what’s up? So, here’s where SF wants to know if the eld is going to hold numbers, letters, dates, whatever it is so
it can store & then display the eld’s data properly.

So here I took a deep breath and thought for a sec, “What would Riley want to know about each pitch AND
what kind of data would that be?” Ok, Max, just start with the obvious—the name of the business, ie the VC rm
she made that pitch to.

And biz names are just text so:

13. For Data Type, I scrolled down to nd Text & clicked the little circle (aka a “radio button”)
14. Then I scrolled down to the bottom and clicked Next (lower right) to continue
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 15. Step 2 wanted me to enter the details. For Field Label, I entered “Business Name” & when I hit my
tab key to go to the next slot, SF auto- lled the Field Name slot with “Business_Name” (w/ an
underscore)
16. For Length, I put in the number 40 ( gured that should be enough for any business name)
17. Then I checked the checkbox for Required so SF would Always require a value in this eld in
order to save a record (seemed to make sense–every pitch kinda needs the name of the business)
18. Then, I scrolled on down and clicked Next
19. That took me to Step 3 which was stuff about Field Level Security, which I totally ignored & I
clicked Next again, but only after waiting for the page to fully load (impt!!—learned the hard way)
20. Then I got to Step 4, a page about layouts (which I waited to let fully load again) & then bypassed like
the last one by clicking Save & New to start back at the beginning, so I could add another eld

(BTW, as I was adding these elds, I messed up a couple of times and got lost & I kind of panicked. But it turns
out, it’s ok bc if that happens, all the stuff you saved is still there and you can just use New again to get back into
adding elds, just like before, to nish off. No worries.)

So now…more elds, right? Hmm…ok, she would want more than just a list of the names of the places she
pitched, right? Like stuff about them. But what exactly…? Ok, so they could be a VC or an “Angel”-type investor,
right? Probably good to know which is which—so how about a eld for “type?” And there’s only two possible
options (data values) for that so she’d want to be able to just pick one instead of having to type it out each
time…and…behold—in the Data Type list, I found the perfect thing:

21. I chose Picklist (NOT the Multi-Select one) & then clicked Next like before
22. For Field Label, I entered “Type” (to tell which type of biz, VC or Angel, for each Pitch record)
23. Then, just below Field Label, next to Values, I clicked the Enter values, with each value
separated by a new line option & that opened a textbox where I typed “VC” on the 1st line & then
hit Enter/Return & typed “Angel” on the 2nd line

24. Then, like before, I clicked Next & then waited for the page to fully load (remember? always let it load)
and then I clicked Next again (and waited again, yes) and then Save & New, to add another eld

Ok, so what other info would she want to keep for a pitch? If I were trying to hit someone up for big bucks,
seems like I would probably want to keep track of their name, to prevent yet another entry in “Max’s Big Book of
Awkward Moments.” So, I went ahead and repeated the process to create another new eld as follows:
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 25. For Data Type, I selected Text & clicked Next
26. For Field Label, I entered “Contact Name”
27. Length: 30
28. Then (you guessed it)—Next (pause) & then Next (pause) & then Save & New, to add another eld

Next—pretty safe assumption—you would want to keep their contact info too, right? Fortunately, I saw the
clever geeks at SF had included a data type just for handling phone number formats, so:

29. Data Type: Phone

30. Next
31. Field Label: “Mobile”
32. Next (pause) & then Next (pause) & then Save & New (remember—don’t click thru too fast!)

Then, unsurprisingly by now, I saw there was also a special data type for email address elds, so:

33. Data Type: Email

34. Next
35. Field Label: “Email” (less typing than “Email Address” & the “Address” part is obvious)
36. Next, Next, Save & New (with pauses in between, always!)

Now I was on a mini-roll…at least!

Ok, so at each company she pitched, she would want to keep track of the dollar amount they talked about
investing (kinda the whole point). I thought about using text but then I remembered—Prof said if you type
numbers into a text eld, they’re just like letters, etc—you can’t do math on them. What if she wanted to…say…
add up the total amount for all pitches, or list all the pitches for over $200k, or whatever? So I looked for a
number-based eld type and found Currency (perfect) & set it big enough for multi-million deals (hah), just in
case:

37. Data Type: Currency

38. Next
39. Field Label: “Investment Amount”
40. Length: 12
41. Decimal places: 2
42. Next, Next, Save & New (w/pauses)

And we learned if they invest money, then they get a piece of the action (aka “equity percentage”) ie how much
of the company (what %) they own for their investment:

43. Data Type: Percent

44. Next
45. Field Label: “Equity Percentage”
46. Length: 3
47. Decimal places: 1
48. Next, Next, Save & New (w/pauses)
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Then it occurred to me that the date she made the pitch might be important to know & I found a data type for
that too:

49. Data Type: Date

50. Next
51. Field Label: “Pitch Date”
52. Next, Next, Save & New (w/pauses)

Then, envisioning how she would actually use this stuff, I guessed she would want to keep track of when she
would plan to follow up with them after the initial meeting so I added that too:

53. Data Type: Date (just like the last one)

54. Next
55. Field Label: “Follow Up”
56. Next, Next, Save & New (w/pauses)

Finally, she said she needed to type in written comments about each business, to remind her how things went.
Looking at the text options, Text Area (Long) and Text Area (Rich) seemed like overkill. But 255
characters seemed ok enough for comments so:

57. Data Type: Text Area

58. Next
59. Field Label: “Comments”
60. Next, Next and then...WAIT!!!—NOT Save & New this time (bc I was done with adding elds)—
so just plain Save this time

Ok, so I had a custom object (table) with a bunch of custom elds (columns) of all different types and it
took...only a few. Not so bad. Then it was like, ok what else do I need to make it an app—something she can
actually use to do stuff?

Well, one would imagine she’d need some kind of form page for entering the data. And there it was, the rst
thing I saw, right under Fields & Relationships sounded promising:

61. I clicked on Page Layouts and there was one SF already made called Pitch Layout
62. So I clicked on it (on the words Pitch Layout) and…
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 There was this list of Pitch elds in light text in a panel at the top of a long page. The panel kind of oated
there, always at the top, even when I scrolled around the stuff below it.

When I scrolled down I found a section labeled Pitch Detail and I realized it was showing a mock-up, like a
sample, of how the elds & values would look on the screen when you were entering a new Pitch record, like
on your laptop. They were just listed there in the order I’d created them, all lined up in one column on the left.
The right-hand column just had the one SF-created eld, Owner, at the top, with Created By and Last
Modi ed By at the bottom. Hmm…

Looked ok, but kinda super-lopsided. Not the best for impressing my user/boss (Riley). Here’s the thing, tho—
when I put the cursor over a eld, it changed to a four-directional arrow thingy…drag & drop? Yesss! When I
clicked down onto a eld, I could drag it around & drop it wherever the background had turned green, so:

63. I pressed down & held on the Contact Name eld in the left-hand column to drag it over to the
right hand column and I dropped it there under Owner and it stuck!

64. Then I did the same to drag Mobile under Contact Name (goes with contact info)
65. Then I dragged Email under Mobile (also goes with contact info)
66. Next, I dragged Follow Up under Email (needed for setting up next meeting)
67. And nally, I dragged Comments under Follow Up (good to review for next meeting)

Now, whenever Riley viewed a record or entered a new one (on her laptop), the screen layout would have this
nice 2-column look with the stuff she needed for the next meeting grouped together on the right. Way better.
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 I also wanted to hide the system stuff that Riley wouldn’t need—Created By & Last Modi ed By—so it
would look cleaner to her. Totally doable:

68. I rolled the cursor arrow over the Created By eld, just below Pitch Date, and a little circle with a
minus sign ( ) appeared next to this tiny little wrench icon
69. When I touched the little circle with the minus sign inside, a Remove label popped up to show what it
does, so I clicked & poof—it was good & gone

70. I did the same thing (Steps 68 & 69) for Last Modi ed By (under Comments) & then I noticed
both the elds I’d “deleted” from the layout had “undimmed” in the panel, like…ready to be dragged back
down into the layout later on (not that I would but…just in case)
71. Ok, so now this was looking like a decent, respectable layout & I wanted to try it out, like put in a record,
so rst I clicked the Save button up on the top left of that top panel:

But now how to get the layout to like…work?

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So, from the tutorial I did before—if you want to be working with the data, like actual records, you have to be
working inside an app, inside Salesforce. Yeah, weird. But apparently you can have multiple apps inside your
company’s Salesforce account because different people in the company have different jobs so they each might
want different apps to use on different parts of the data in the same database. Apparently, that’s why they call it
“enterprise software”—cuts across the whole company (not the Star Trek spaceship, sadly).

So far, all this was just in Setup mode—setting up the objects, elds, layouts, etc. Turns out there’s this thing
called the App Launcher with already built-in apps to let you enter, display, search, etc, on the actual data.

And to give everybody in the “enterprise” what they need to do their job, you can customize the built-in apps
(and/or make your own) by adding a tab that lets you access the data.

So before leaving Setup mode, I created a tab so I’d be able to add/view data inside the Pitches object:

72. I clicked Home, next to Setup in the upper left corner

73. Then, I scrolled down the left-hand vertical menu down to nd User Interface and clicked it to drop
down its sub-menu underneath
74. Then I scrolled down the User Interface sub-menu to nd Tabs and clicked that
75. That brought up a Custom Tabs panel with a Custom Object Tabs section containing a
promising-looking New button that I boldly clicked on
76. Then a New Custom Object Tab panel appeared with a drop-down menu by Object that let me
select Pitch
77. For Tab Style, I clicked on the magnifying glass to bring up a panel of choices and I chose the treasure
chest to signify my (potentially) future fortune :)
78. Then the old Next, Next, Save routine

Ok, Pitches tab done. No rocket science involved (so far). But now how to get out of Setup mode, nd the
tab I just created & use it to DO something, eg adding in data, viewing it & using it for stuff?

Ok, so there’s this little “waf e” thingy on the upper left, just under the blue cloud, like rain falling down? Right.
Anyway, if you run the cursor onto the dots, they kind of pulse and turn colors. (This is what passes for cool FX
in Salesforce-world, apparently.)

Then, a little label appears to tell you that’s the App Launcher:

79. When I clicked on the App Launcher grid, it gave me a window of apps & I just chose Marketing
CRM Classic (aka Marketing, for short) because…hey, I’m a Marketing major (remember?) and
anyway it worked out bc there was a graph of fake sales data & some other random stuff but there
above it was row of tabs for accessing the data, including my very own Pitches tab sitting on the right
80. So I clicked on the Pitches tab label (NOT the little down-arrow) & I got a page that seemed like it
would list Pitch records if there were any, but obviously not yet, so then…
81. I clicked the New button on the upper right & behold—a form, just like my gorgeous layout
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 82. And it actually worked—I entered some fake data for each eld & clicked Save and…there it was, my
rst Pitch record, automatically assigned Pitch ID=P-000, as planned—haha!

Now to get the full effect of this next part, you need at least a few records into your database, so…

83. Use the Pitches tab and New button again (just like before) to add three (3) more Pitch records
with different random data (just make up stuff). Remember, Business Name was the only eld we
made required (hence the tiny red star by that slot label) but you should ll in every slot anyway just so
they’ll all look like real actual records. (To save clicks, instead of Save you can click Save & New to
get a new empty form to ll in each time.)

BTW—I noticed, when you’re entering data, SF catches certain typos, but not others. It lets you enter letters in
into a phone number eld (lame). But it does catch/stop you from entering an email address in the wrong format.
As long as the format’s right though, it takes it, even if it’s not a real, working address. So I had to be careful—
messed up data would NOT look good in my demo for Riley.

Ok, so the data was in there. Cool. Next, I wanted to try out the mobile app on my iPhone to see if I could view
the records I’d entered & even add a new pitch record that way, like Riley would want to. If you have a mobile,
install the free Salesforce app (Google Play/iTunes), open it up, click I Accept and log in (same username and
password) and just follow the veri cation instructions, click Allow & Allow again & you’re in!

84. So then I had to click Get Started to clear the “Welcome to the new..” panel & I saw this long Menu
(If yours looks different, tap the little 3 bar “hamburger” menu icon on the bottom right to get here.)
85. Then I tapped All Items (near the top) & I scrolled way down to nd my Pitches tab
86. I clicked on that and...voila—I saw Recent Pitches showing a list of Pitch IDs for the pitch records
that I’d just added on my laptop, so—kinda yay, but were those really my records? Where was the data?
87. I gured hey, it’s an app, right?—so I tried clicking on one and, true to app-world norms, it opened up and
I could click on Details to see all its elds &…it was mine, alright (so far/so pretty dang good)

The mobile version looked a bit different than my laptop, though. Instead of my clever-looking two-column layout,
the elds were just in a long single column—I had to scroll down to see everything. Not super-ideal but hey, it’s a
phone. Not a ton of “real estate” there. On a tablet, maybe. For now…oh, well.
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 The big question I was dying to know now—would it actually work as a mobile app?

88. At the upper right corner, I tapped on the gray circle icon with ... More to nd the Edit button
(turquoise pencil icon) and when I tapped that, it let me touch the eld values and change them however
I wanted
89. Then after I tapped Save, I went back to my laptop, used the Pitches tab and clicked on the Pitch
ID number of the record I had just edited and…behold(!), the changes I’d just made were there, good to
go, already—the magic of the cloud thing at work behind the scenes, apparently. (You might have to use
your browser’s refresh function to make that work.)
90. Back on my phone, I tapped the left-arrow at the top left (Androids, use your back buttons) to get back
to the screen listing the Pitch IDs and I tried out the New button at the upper right corner (like Riley
would do to record a new pitch)
91. I lled in the elds & clicked Save (top right) and the new Pitch record showed up on my laptop, as
expected, making me feel kinda…victorious (?) & only slightly geeky (slightly yikes!)

So anyway, it was working. I was…semi-thrilled. But it didn’t feel like blow-away-Riley level yet. Seemed like it
should show more than just the IDs when you click on Pitches—at least you'd want to see the names of the
businesses so you’d know what details you’re going to get when you click on one.

And maybe you wouldn’t even need to click if some of the main detail elds were also showing up in the list,
along with the IDs. Seemed like there had to be a way:

92. On my laptop, I hit the App Launcher again like before & selected the Marketing app again
93. Then I clicked the Pitches tab (the label, NOT the down-arrow) and then, on the upper left, next
to Recently Viewed, I clicked the down-arrow and selected All, hoping to see more of my data
but still there was just that (nearly) useless list of IDs with nothing else so...
94. Looking for Pitch tab settings, I tried the little gear icon toward the right, below Change Owner
(NOT the Setup one at the very top right by the bell) to see what was in the drop-down
95. Near the bottom of the drop-down, hah, I found Select Fields to Display & clicked it

96. A listbox magically appeared, listing the Available Fields on the left and Visible Fields (with Pitch
ID only) on the right & suddenly I “got it”—I clicked Business Name to highlight it and then I just
clicked the little right-arrow to move it over to the Visible Fields side
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 97. Then, I thought “There’s probably room for a couple more—what would be the most important ones
Riley would want to know at a glance?” and I clicked on Investment Amount to highlight it and
used the right arrow to move it over to the Visible Fields list on the right the same way…& same for
Equity Percentage, so it sat at the bottom of the list
98. Then I clicked Save and…there was my list of records, all columns & rows, like a good little database &
set up just the way Riley would need for getting stuff done better/faster/smarter

99. Then, I clicked the tiny little pin icon on the upper left by All, to be sure this listing would be the one
that showed up whenever the Pitches tab got clicked
100. Then I thought “Uh-oh, wait—this enterprise deal means Riley will have her own login to this same
database—but will the Pitches tab look the same for her?” so I clicked the little gear again (NOT the
Setup one), found Sharing Settings on the drop-down & clicked it
101. I was right, sort of—it lets you make the list viewable by just you, or everybody (all users) in the
“enterprise” (eg me & Riley & her partner, etc) or by just a certain group, but it was already set to All
users can see this list view, so I just left it that way and hit Cancel
102. Then, just to be sure, I tried clicking on one of the Pitch IDs and indeed, that was how she could “drill
down” to see all the details, instead of just the key ones I had picked (and later on, if she thought some
other elds should be the ones to show up rst, I knew that would be an easy x, now that I had the
hang of this)

So now I felt like I had my MVP (you remember, right? — “Minimum Viable Product”) so I could have stopped
there but…

I just wanted to add a little more polish before the big unveiling so I tried this Compact Layouts feature (see
below) that I’d noticed on the Pitch object settings page before. I had a hunch it was for setting up layouts for
small displays, eg, phones, etc. Turns out I was right:

103. I clicked on that Setup gear icon at the upper right corner, by the bell, and then, on the drop-down that
appeared, I clicked Setup (do NOT click Service Setup–never use that one)
104. Then, I clicked on the little down-arrow on the Object Manager tab next to Home on the upper
left and selected Pitch to go to the Pitch object settings
105. Next, on the left-hand vertical menu, I clicked Compact Layouts
106. Then, on the Compact Layouts panel, I clicked New
fi
fi
fi
 107. On the Compact Layout Edit panel that appeared, I entered “Pitch Essentials for Phone” in the
Label slot
108. When I tabbed, the Name eld auto- lled with “Pitch_Essentials_for_Phone”
109. Under the Available Fields listbox, I highlighted Business Name and clicked the Add arrow
button to move it over to the Selected Fields listbox
110. I did the same for Investment Amount and Equity Percentage since those are the key things to
know for each pitch
111. Then I clicked Save
112. On the next page that came up, I clicked Compact Layout Assignment

113. Then on the next page, I clicked Edit Assignment

114. For the Primary Compact Layout pull-down menu, I selected the layout I’d named Pitch
Essentials for Phone
115. Next, I clicked Save to lock it in

When I went to my iPhone and clicked on a speci c pitch—there was a nice header at the top of that pitch’s
screen, showing the Business Name, Investment Amount and Equity Percentage–all the essentials
so you might not have to bother drilling down into Details when you’re in a hurry (like Riley always is).
fi
fi
fi
 That’s when I knew I had it. It worked, looked good & was useful for actually doing stuff. Real stuff. Big-deal stuff.

I could picture Riley, sitting in her car with her phone outside some slick hot-shot VC company, adding her
comments about how the big pitch meeting just went, and she’s using Max’s mobile app!

And I’m not even a geek (as we’ve established), but I have to admit SF makes it easy to put this stuff together and
when it’s done, it’s very…gratifying? Ok, fun. It’s honestly fun. There. I said it. But only in a totally, seriously non-
geeky kind of way.

Next step is to show Riley. Hopefully she’s going to be so blown away (has to be). If so, maybe this blog gig will
turn out to be kind of “distinctive & impressive” after all? If anybody’s out there—my “followers”—stay tuned…

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