Girish Redekar, co-founder and CEO of Sprinto.com is a programmer who loves building products. Before Sprinto, he co-founded, bootstrapped and successfully exited a 2500 customer SaaS company, Recruiterbox. Across the two startups, he has delved hands-on into most aspects of running a SaaS company, whether it's writing code, running product, or doing sales and marketing.Sprinto is a software platform that helps SaaS companies obtain security & privacy compliances, and clear security reviews and close enterprise deals faster. These compliances are necessary to close high-ticket deals. Conventionally, obtaining these compliances takes months of laborious and painstaking effort. Sprinto automates the manual work, and gets you there 10x faster. In this episode you will hear Girish Redekar’s take on how the SaaS landscape is rapidly moving to a field full of regulations, compliance and security reviews for a better customer and business experience. You will learn how Sprinto is providing a solution to a problem that takes a lot of time, energy and money to companies that have to embrace these regulations in order to have a significant expansion.Key takeaways in this episode:Spend more time focusing on the problem instead of the solution so you can understand your customers better and how to frame your ideas.Compliance and security reviews will become more applicable to every SaaS company. It is necessary to have an affordable and automated solution to manage this. Critical thinking and asking realistic questions during customer discovery is the only way to remove any bias we might have towards our product. The early daysWhile running his previous start up (another B2B SaaS), Girish got to a point where he had to face a big variety of questions related to security compliance that had to be answered in order to take his company to another level. Realizing that each SaaS company had to go through this situation in order to close larger deals, Girish founded Sprinto, a company that will provide compliance solutions to these problems in a very easy and affordable manner.Lessons learned along the way: Due to his programer personality, it was very usual for Girish to have a first impulse to bring an idea to life without spending a correct portion of time to determine if he was actually targeting a real or a large enough problem. Learning to spend more time in the problem space allowed him not only to fully understand the customer’s needs but also be able to suggest solutions that would click with the main pain points.Framework used for customer discoveryOne important aspect in order to be effective in providing solutions is to get rid of any unconscious bias present during the process of interviewing clients. As a founder, there is always a part of you that wants your idea to work and this might affect the objectivity of how you view the market or the problem itself. It is very usual to be involved in asking questions in a leaning manner where you are trying to reinforce the idea that your solution is the one needed. Detaching from that and asking questions such as “If you were to build this tomorrow, would people actually buy it?” or “Is this something that people really see as useful?” is a more useful approach during the stage of customer discovery.Current context for SaaS contextThere are 2 things happening in the SaaS universe right now: There is a massive explosion of SaaS companies. 10 years ago, there were 300 listed companies and today, there are around 8,000 companies. The fraction of these SaaS that are going to need compliance and security reviews is also increasing. In the past it was only required for companies that sold products to Fortune 500 companies, but that is changing very rapidly as technology is more accessible to everyone.. Sprinto as a trust currencySince all these regulations are becoming more and more applicable to all the SaaS companies in every single field and with no exception, Sprinto provides an affordable and automated option for all those companies that might not have the time, money or space to go through this process. So whether you are a bootstrapped or early stage company, Sprinto makes sure you have a leveled field so the features of your product can compete with billion dollar SaaS companies. Listen until the very end to gain all the value from this episode!Don’t forget to follow our podcast for more future episodes and leave a review if you find value in this series!Connect with Shayak:Girish Redekar on LinkedInApply to be our next guest speaker here: https://bit.ly/wtsguestspeakerapp
