How DPOrganizer CEO Alicia Hatt grew DPOrganizer to $9.1M revenue with a 20 person team in 2024.

uh so yeah DP organizer is a judgment data protection management software basically the CRM for your data privacy needs and yeah today here to talk to you about the nine things you should ask your super customers to do for you by asking what you can do for them so let's meet the super customer they are our ultimate user who not only drives engagement but also helps us to optimize our solution offerings and help us enhance customer experience and accelerate our business growth why are they super customers they're highly engaged very vocal and they're your collaborative partners we want highly engaged because they advocate for your business you want very vocal because they'll give active and direct feedback to help you hone in on your offering and you want them to help you collaborate because you can innovate faster when you work together and it doesn't matter which business we're in uh we all our customers especially in the tech industry we're using our customers so you know we have several customers where we use their Tech stack and then work together so it's a mutually beneficial working relationship and we've heard over these two days many speakers talk about the fact that you can't really get someone to do something for free but you can do something that helps you both silver yeah the next 18ish minutes we're going to talk about how these three kind of areas work together inspiration collaboration and Innovation we're going to talk about how Innovation leads to advocacy collaboration leads to Excellence and Innovation inspires success and yeah we're going to kick off by talking why at least for us we're why we are boring you know we work in a not very known or hip thing that you want to talk about data privacy something we all care about and data protection is the way we go about doing that depending where you live we're based in Sweden we care about gdpr if you're in California it's a California consumers production Act but we were started by data privacy lawyers that want to make a tool that was Purpose Driven so by knowing we're boring and we're very honed in on one specific area we can force ourselves to make ourselves more interesting by acknowledging that we're boring and how we do this is we made it our mission to build our business by listening and collaborating with our customers we are passionate Geeks we feel there's great power in staying true to your inner geek learning about compliance staying up to date with digital transformation you know consumer rights and for every country there's these are different rules or regulations or they have nothing which in itself is something you need to be aware of what's coming with AI how we are doing this we are obsessive about staying focused on top of the ever-changing nature of our core the law and it's some countries it will take years to put something new into place but in other places they'll release you know outcomes of wow well better said you'll hear about fines that our customers or your customers may have experienced and then things will iterate in real real time we believe in our purpose we're about providing peace of mind not a product and yeah like I mentioned just thinking about the daily statute changes there's no global standard what applies to you does not necessarily apply to me what applies to your customers doesn't necessarily apply to us um it's you know specific to our business we're dealing with a lot of people that are dpos or Chief privacy officers and they still doesn't matter if it's you know a 25 person company that works with a bunch of larger companies or a large company often it's one person that's a loan and they're responsible for making others in the organization care about them and we have to help them provide peace of mind you can do what we do not as well in Excel but how do you sell the story how do you visualize what you're after and with this one we're you know constantly checking on ourselves in terms of the benefits to our customer rather than what's profitable so what's the takeaway of this first section yeah inspiration about is about advocacy you want them to work for you but you need to work for them it becomes a self-fulfilling business engine we know that when you do something negative more people hear about it when you're positive and we want to operate in the background but we want you to know and we want all our customers to know what we're doing well and the fact that we're in this together the how for us referrals yeah we want to refer each other to our businesses I mean these two great days we're dealing with lots of CEO founders you probably use them they might be their your competitors but if you learn about each other's businesses similar to your customers you can give back as well as get back and this leads to increases of Revenue through upsells for us it's about landing and expanding we want the clients to grow with us over time and we want them to share our content they become great brand ambassadors often when they are these one-man bands they want you to help them sell the narrative for the next year they want to you know for example use our e-learning tool to educate their colleagues to understand why do we care about that and that's the great thing we're hearing more about these Chief privacy officers because we're putting someone in a c-suite that actually is in the discussions about why we care what's happening and what will happen oh if you can't tell I'm nervous I am and I'm rambling and I apologize for that but I don't do this regularly yeah moving on to the sex and second section with collaboration we want to be in that always in beta mindset we want to be hearing in real time from our CS colleagues oh I wish your tool did this okay how can we make that happen we do in our organization updates every Thursday we push it out to our customers but we also update our team members so they know what we're doing to make their lives easier and yeah this is kind of going with that never be perfect never assume you're perfect and keep striving forward for us because the rules and regulations are constantly changing and we have to adapt to the times I mean we were talking about chat GPT and how this could potentially benefit or challenge our business it gives us a good opportunity to constantly be adapting what we're putting out on the market the how we built it for our customers not for ourselves our Founders were data privacy lawyers and they wanted something that was purpose built for people like them so it was about something that functions well easy to use and that's the feedback that we strive to maintain as we grow your user is probably not the buyer for us we have about 2 500 users in 25 countries and we don't have that many customers so who's buying our product is not usually the end user that's doing it the day-to-day it might belong to the I.T budget it might belong to the legal budget sometimes even the HR budget and so we have to really drill down on who it is are they the DPO that signs the contract probably not but does that DPO have to sell the head of legal on it most likely so when we started from going from lawyers to dpos and yeah now to privacy officers that's where we focus first but now we really want to focus on everyone else and that's why we continue like I said to have good usability we want to be simple because simple is better and we always as humans want simple over better or how we find out who in the organization is actually using our tool and we reach out and get their input we want them to use the tool we want a high touch point we want you in our tool every day whether it's updating e-learning courses for their colleagues or just to check on what's Happening we want and we're constantly striving to have more features because if you're using it daily you're more likely to get what we offer out of it and to understand what we could do better so our daily users tend to be our best super customers kind of touching on that last Point here too but creating intuitive experiences we want to listen first observe second to build third and then break it in build again we were established in 2015 gdpr came into play in 2018 and since then we are by far a different company of course we still do similar things but we now touch more points in the organization we're working a lot more with integration so we can partner with different organizations to kind of adapt for what they specifically need and make it more tactile get get in their slack getting their Office 365 we want people to be pinged with this and we also want them to be able to share it with others and this kind of touched on yeah don't build the features build the intuitive experiences so when you go out and you get feedback it's like oh it didn't flow this way I personally think differently than our end users because I'm not a privacy professional I don't come from a legal background but I want it to feel intuitive so that we can make you want to use our software how we have to observe our super customers like I said we have 202 500 plus users but not that many customers and our super customers aren't necessarily the ones that have the most users but they're going back to that point is there in the tool daily they're thinking about what they'd like to see often when you're a bigger organization when you're up for renewal you might need to go out and compare three options depending like municipalities in Sweden they have to come with three quotes they have to have sat through the demo they've actually have to get the proposal and we want that feedback we want you to go and try our competitors and realize that we're better easier to use and you know better for you might not be...