#298: Bootstrapping RecruiterBox to Successful All Cash Exit with Girish Redekar

Girish Redekar is the founder of RecruiterBox, an IT pro and SaaS business expert. In this entrepreneur story, Girish talks about how he started his SaaS company and stood out among the thick competition to then sell internationally for an all-cash offer.

In this episode, Girish discusses how he bootstrapped RecruiterBox and prioritized customer feedback for product development. He then talks about how he never made more features at one time than the company could afford, because many SaaS businesses go bankrupt when they invest too much into making new features without first acquiring new customers. From there, Girish talks about how he created an automated sales system with a very small sales team. This allowed him to scale RecruiterBox to 2,500 customers internationally, which he then sold to an American private equity firm for an all-cash offer. If you want to discover secrets to scaling a company using repeatable systems, this episode is for you!

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What You Will Learn

What kept Girish on the entrepreneurial path after going two years without anything to show for it.
How Girish realized that he was undervaluing what he was building (RecruiterBox).
How Girish approached building a new software and why it needed to be better and easier than a simple spreadsheet.
How Girish came up with his main KPIs while growing RecruiterBox.
How Girish prioritized product development and feature requests based on mass customer feedback.
Why Girish never spent more than the company made on marketing, product development, etc.
How Girish sold RecruiterBox with automated systems and very few salespeople.
How Girish and his leadership team confronted their out-of-the-blue offer with RecruiterBox.
How Girish sold RecruiterBox internationally without an investment banker.
How Girish was able to walk away with an all-cash deal.

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Bio:

Girish Redekar is CEO and co-founder of Sprinto.com., a company that helps SaaS brands become SOC-2 compliant, close enterprise deals faster, and pass vendor security assessments easily.

Previously, he built and bootstrapped RecruiterBox to over 2,500 customers and over 50 employees in the U.S. and India. The company was acquired by San Francisco-based private equity firm Turn/River Capital in an undisclosed all-cash deal (no stock or earn-outs). RecruiterBox was profitable throughout its journey.

Girish is a passionate programmer and entrepreneur, keen on helping other SaaS businesses demonstrate security chops and close enterprise deals faster.

Interview Quotes:

08:58 - “Because we were broke, it meant that we had to teach ourselves programming. In hindsight, I think the most useful thing that happened was that we taught ourselves programming and how to build these things ourselves and we got pretty good at that.” - Girish Redekar

11:23 - “[In India, being an entrepreneur] is relatively harder, given which pocket of India you are from… It is changing today, especially from fourteen years ago when I started.” - Girish Redekar

17:00 - “I think I undermined the value of the thing we were building. That was one of the lessons from the journey, for me.” - Girish Redekar

20:22 - “We never lost sight of the fact that [the customer] is a person and if you don’t give them what they want, they’re probably not going to use you.” - Girish Redekar

28:51 - “There’s always a lot of low hanging [fruit], things that you can do. You can build a feature or fix a bug. Things which, if you put in the main pipeline of your product, they will always seem distracting.” - Girish Redekar

38:28 - “You know the saying, ‘If you have a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail’? It was kind of like that.” - Girish Redekar

44:03 - “There was a certain trajectory we couldn’t surpass. It was important for us to be cognizant of that fact.” - Girish Redekar

44:22 - “It is possible that the growth of RecruiterBox is actually bottlenecked by the founders. There is a possibility that another owner or management team could do a better job than us at running the company.” - Girish Redekar

55:15 - “There is a lot of worry and it’s good to take a break.” - Girish Redekar