Making it big in the ‘niche’ of RFP management
Ganesh Shankar started RFPIO scratching his own itch along with A J Sunder(Co-founder & CPO) and Sankar Lagudu (Co-founder & COO). During his stint as a product manager Ganesh had to fill out responses to the RFPs which ended up as a time consuming and frustrating process. When the trio looked out for solutions they found out that it’s a broken process and that there are no solid solutions existing in the market which got them to start RFPIO. What started as a niche product addressing one particular process later goes on to become a category leader in RFP management used by 250k+ users.Tune in to the episode with Suresh and Ganesh to take a journey on RFPIOs growth from serving SMBs to Enterprises, No Concentration Strategy, leveraging Customer Advisory Board, a peek into the interesting culture at RFPIO which includes GTTTD, S4, GIT and the like, and how all these comes into play in building a category leaderKey take aways5:51 - Genesis of RFPIO9:57 - Founding team formation11:48 - Deciding who to be the CEO15:57 - Product pricing19:51 - GTM approach22:05 - ICP & Outbound sales23:51 - Funds raised26:46 - Org structure27:36 - Hiring scene in US & India28:08 - Customer funded business33:16 - Getting the first customers, the journey from SMB to Enterprise, price evolution35:42 - No concentration strategy36:52 - GTDDD37:26 - Sales team’s influence on other teams37:59 - Sales team compensation structure changes41:14 - Customer advisory board45:26 - Sales and implementation partners47:32 - Culture building52:15 - Inputs to founders on networking and fundraising54:24 - One of the top mistakes doneHappy listening!