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 leader


Key take aways


5:51 - Genesis of RFPIO


9:57 - Founding team formation


11:48 - Deciding who to be the CEO


15:57 - Product pricing


19:51 - GTM approach


22:05 - ICP & Outbound sales


23:51 - Funds raised


26:46 - Org structure


27:36 - Hiring scene in US & India


28:08 - Customer funded business


33:16 - Getting the first customers, the journey from SMB to
Enterprise, price evolution


35:42 - No concentration strategy


36:52 - GTDDD


37:26 - Sales team’s influence on other teams


37:59 - Sales team compensation structure changes


41:14 - Customer advisory board


45:26 - Sales and implementation partners


47:32 - Culture building


52:15 - Inputs to founders on networking and fundraising


54:24 - One of the top mistakes done


Happy listening!