#203 – Stine Mangor Tornmark, CEO of Openli - on compliance as a competitive advantage

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to ​​help companies build trust towards their customers and close deals faster by putting their privacy compliance on autopilot. My guest is Stine Mangor Tornmark, Co-founder and CEO of Openli.

Stine has 10+ years of experience as a lawyer from Plesner law firm and Trustpilot. At Trustpilot, she built up Trustpilot’s Legal and Compliance teams and processes from when the company had one office with 70 employees to 850 employees across the globe. She believes that privacy is a fundamental right every individual has and should have.

She realized the struggle she had at Trustpilot to comply around privacy - and that's a large company with deep pockets and a large legal team. Imagine then how small and medium-sized businesses struggle. It's almost an impossible task.

And that's why she co-founded Openli in 2018, a Legal Tech startup that's on a mission to help companies become better data citizens.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Stine to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the world of proving compliance around privacy data as a business. We dig into why this is the case, and why it's so hard to solve. Stine then shares the approach they've taken to solve the problem - and the hurdles she had to overcome in doing so. We discuss what it took to create momentum and end up with a customers base that's close to 100% referenceable and how that required them to think differently about what their product needed to be all about.

Here are some of her quotes:

In 2018, I was sitting at a lunch table complaining and really just emphasizing the difficulties of ensuring compliance across all these different nationalities and countries. And my co founder said: 'there has to be service out there, Stine. There has to be.' And he started looking for one and we couldn't find any.

And you know, when the butterflies start to flap and you get the tingling in your body. That's how I felt at that point. And that's why we founded Openli.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Where to strategically focus your investments when you're starting a SaaS business 2. How you turn something that's perceived as a cost of doing business into a competitive advantage for your customers 3. How to go about creating momentum when nobody is looking for your SaaS solution 4. How to keep your SaaS business on track when adversity hits - and how to come out stronger?

For more information about the guest from this week:

Stine Mangor Tornmark • Website Openli