Growth as a start-up with Third Prime

Our Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, Austin Ogilvie, sat down at Third Prime‘s Annual Meeting in Nashville to discuss navigating growth as a start-up. He was joined by Octane’s Co-Founder and CEO, Jason Guss, and NewtonX’s Co-Founder and CEO, Sascha Eder. Below are some key takeaways from the discussion, including pro-tips on growth, strategy, and more insights.

Modifying operations and strategy in response to current market conditions

Many economic factors have been changing. In the face of challenging and volatile economies, it makes sense to monitor different items, such as:

• Targeting gross profit spread by reorganizing your resources and focusing on efficiency. This can include pricing optimization, servicing expenses, and others. This allows for you to stay on track to increase your growth and ROI.
• Liquidity and leverage are essential. Businesses need to be open to equity but operate the business as if nothing is coming in. By doing this, it solves for future scenarios of the economy that we have no control over.
• In the current market, lowering your cost and pricing could result in losing out on value. You need to turn the conversation around to the value you are creating for your customers.
• You can’t control the economy, but you can control what you do as a company. Streamline your operations and see what you can do to ensure your business is strong despite any economic turmoil. 

Building a long-term competitive edge

Businesses play to win. Thoropass, in particular, is confident about competitive intelligence starting with analytics. These analytics are used to understand where our solution is the most competitive and where we see the most friction. It is top of mind.

When thinking about the differentiation between competition, it’s a matter of understanding customer needs. Mid-sized technology companies need to meet certain compliance and security standards, while smaller start-ups may have different needs and requirements. At Thoropass, we focus on a myriad of frameworks offering multiple solutions across the board so we can provide the right kind of value for each customer. 

Additionally, Thoropass has written every line of code from Day 1 and designed the product with standards in mind. We now see it pay off when we have frameworks companies need beyond SOC 2. 

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AI and the compliance space

The compliance space has a huge opportunity for auditing and utilizing LLMs (Master of Laws). It’s easy to copy and paste sensitive data from ChatGPT and similar programs, but that can cause serious compliance problems. There is a flaw in that sense and something to look out for. But there is potential to leverage AI, which is clearly where the future is headed.

Final thoughts: Looking for a later-stage investor

There are differences and similarities between early and late-stage investors. Third Prime had an incredible address book and was able to share that with Thoropass. The types of people you connect with through early investors are important (engineers, marketers, etc.) It was great to utilize those factors in our earlier journey. You should always look for investors that play a role similar to Third Prime’s and for the growth stage you’re in.

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