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Conversation
Highlights

 

Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech’s most innovative B2B founders. In today’s episode, we’re speaking with Sudhir Bhojwani, CEO and Co-Founder of Oro Labs, a procurement platform that has raised $59 Million in funding.

Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: 

  • The Unique Value of the Bay Area: Sudhir reflects on his early experiences in Silicon Valley and how, despite the global flattening of the tech industry, the Bay Area’s unique culture and access to venture capital continue to make it a special place for tech innovation.
  • Discovering a Passion for Procurement: Sudhir shares how his tenure at Ariba and SAP introduced him to the procurement sector, sparking a passion for solving the complex challenges within this space.
  • The Vision Behind Oro Labs: Describing Oro Labs as a smart procurement workflow orchestration platform, Sudhir outlines his ambition to bring procurement technology on par with CRM and marketing tech through a more integrated and flexible ecosystem of tools.
  • Educating the Market: The journey of educating the market about the concept of procurement orchestration and the challenge of defining a new category within the industry are highlighted as key steps in Oro Labs’ path to success.
  • First Customer Wins: Sudhir emphasizes the importance of leveraging the founding team’s reputation and expertise in procurement to secure early customers, underscoring trust in the team’s ability to address and solve identified problems.
  • The Future of Procurement: Looking ahead, Sudhir envisions a future where Oro Labs has significantly reduced friction in procurement, improved supplier and buyer relationships, and positively transformed the procurement NPS.

 

Actionable
Takeaways

Identify and Address a Specific Need:

Stoyan's realization of the inefficiencies in cloud spending management led to the creation of Costimize. For entrepreneurs, it's crucial to identify a specific problem that is deeply felt by your target audience. Dive into niches where your expertise can offer significant value and differentiate your solution.

Leverage Your Background to Uncover Unique Insights:

Drawing on his experiences from working in banking and M&A, Stoyan recognized the need for more sophisticated cloud financial management tools. This underscores the importance of using your past experiences to gain unique insights into the challenges faced by industries you're familiar with, potentially uncovering underserved areas ripe for innovation.

Educate Your Market:

Particularly in emerging or complex fields like FinOps, dedicating resources to educate potential clients about the significance and benefits of your product is crucial. Create educational content and stories that resonate with the challenges they face, guiding them to understand the value your solution brings.

Adapt Your Positioning as Your Product Evolves:

As Costimize transitioned from a savings-focused tool to an operating system for cloud finance management, its market positioning evolved. This highlights the need for startups to continuously refine their messaging to align with product developments and market expectations, ensuring relevance and clarity in how the value proposition is communicated.

Build for Integration and Automation:

In today's hyper-automated business environment, designing your product or service to easily integrate with existing systems and automate tasks can significantly increase its appeal. Stoyan emphasizes the importance of creating solutions that act as digital agents, capable of performing tasks within a larger ecosystem, thereby enhancing operational efficiency for clients.

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