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 GBT, S4 and DMC and the like, and how all these comes into play in building a category leader

Key take-aways

3:10 – Genesis of RFPIO

7:28 – Founding team formation

8:54 – Deciding who to be the CEO

12:03 – Product pricing

15:19 – GTM approach

17:17 – ICP & Outbound sales

18:44 – Funds raised

21:00 – Org structure

22:02 – Hiring scene in US & India

22:20 – Customer funded business

25:50 – Getting the first customers, the journey from SMB to Enterprise, price evolution

26:56 – No concentration strategy

28:49 – GBT, S4 and DMC

29:24 – Sales team’s influence on other teams

29:57 – Sales team compensation structure changes

32:47 – Customer advisory board

36:32 – Sales and implementation partners

38:11 – Culture building

42:21 – Inputs to founders on networking and fundraising

44:18 – One of the top mistakes done

Happy listening! 🎧