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 better for everyone but we're not trying to be for everyone at this point um so when our super customers is an example go out show their colleagues they got the proposals the feedback we're looking for is we're maintaining that ease of use as we have more offerings that their colleagues are like oh yeah we love that e-learning module that you had where you explained what is gdpr or what is CCPA and what they liked what they didn't like and then we can get that feedback fix it and fix it till everyone their organization is going to be using it which leads us to the recap on yeah collaboration leads to Excellence we build things together to make better things and yeah honesty is the best feedback please reach out after and say what I could do better on this topic this is not something I've done before but I'd love to hear about it and it goes both ways when we're talking to our super customers they give us something we give them something because ultimately how they're using the tool we can get back for things that benefit in their organization and they give us with a more sellable product and something again not to harp on the point but we get them in the tool daily and we want to share the stage often we'll host webinars with our clients where they're actually go through their personal Journey with similar Industries about why they chose us what they like about it and who are we speaking to typically one person in an organization it's rare that we have a team of say five and so we want to make these dpos and cpos lives Easier by allowing them to do more with less budgets are type tightening up they have to convince the the CEO to to keep our tool but they have to show what's driving value outside of their role in the organization often you can have huge multinationals where you have one lawyer responsible for everything and the CEO is like we'll just go back to excel you don't need this we don't need the visuals it doesn't matter we just have to do that well why should they care why should the CEOs care because in a lot of M A processes you need to say you are gdpr compliant you are doing the right things and often through a sale of a business if that's not true there'll be clawbacks and the investors benefit and yeah the last point we want to co-author content we want you and our customers to write and participate together especially with testimonials testimonials are great they tell a journey we've heard a lot of people speak about how testimonials can benefit your business and for us it's when you go through what that customer experienced you know we've had customers in the tool in 30 minutes and that's a rare occurrence but for them it was so exciting that they didn't have to buy an onboarding process they could just start throwing their data in our software and it's great but when we have that kind of written testimonial we can use that with our product team and think about what would have benefited them sooner and what will benefit them later so coming into the last section on Innovation the value of constant testing a plan is only as good as how hard it is tested we want our customers ideas we want ways to execute we want our colleagues to sit in a room and talk about what we could be doing two months from now six months from now in a year from now we know that especially in Tech it's going to move quicker and we need to adapt and prototype what comes next more in real time and yeah for us nothing is precious until it works but we want to share it so we can test it and actually get it to work beautifully the value of relevance we talked about how we make it relevant for the c-suite when they don't need to care they have they have someone to help with that in a lot of organizations but we want that shared need shared time shared resources and shared beliefs we're always struggling with it only matters to me but it matters to all of us you know we all are affected by data privacy and our personal and professional lives and so we can get a lot out of it by just discussing it because it's not always about the business often that person has a self-interest to make it work better so the hell yeah make it relevant to every user or make it so easy to use it starts to matter and that's what I've mentioned a couple times from this talk that ease of use is what we're going for we don't want to be for everyone but we want that person that wants that easy touch point that encourages them to get in our tool early and often and then the value of collaboration Tech Innovation people Innovation process Innovation and marketing innovation collaboration is the fastest way to innovate fast how seek out your super super customers early on they will be invaluable to your businesses and your business model and your business growth yeah our last takeaway Innovation inspires success Innovation through collaboration is the accelerant of success how success comes in test test and test again don't be afraid to fail fail early and often share your user research say what's on your mind and work together and nothing is more powerful than seeing it the reality in action and ideas are team sport so constantly invite collaboration for new ideas over the last 20 minutes we've talked about how inspiration is about advocacy collaboration leads to Excellence and Innovation inspires success and for us we're constantly at various points in time trying to move across these silos but they all flow together when we say we talk about and share our content create those brand ambassadors they're the ones who are helping us plan our webinars our case studies in kind of bring about the next um super customer and ideas are a team sport we can't do it without our customers we constantly want to learn we want to grow and we want to hear from them and this hasn't been always the case when you're early on you're a little bit afraid to to say where you're struggling you don't know this touch Point how do you make it intuitive and so for us you know when we have like some customers that sign on for multi-year deals you're a little bit less worried about failing with them because they have a shared interest they're going to stay in your tool they're going to use your tool and they're okay to go on the bumps along the way and not every idea or updates can appeal to many people you know with our Thursday releases not everyone notices and that's great because if one person has something we avoid anyone else having that experience because of one super customer at least that next Super customer is like oh it was Flawless for this upon of time or the customer success team actually took my feedback and a Thursday later they had implemented what I was after and what we were hoping to do together and as someone who doesn't have thousands of customers we only need a couple good super customers to breed the next generation of super customer So yeah thank you for your time man awesome [Applause]