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!