#229 - Justin Beals, CEO Strike Graph - on creating both value and resilience

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help Enterprise B2B SaaS vendors shorten their sales cycles by 50-75%. My guest is Justin Beals, Co-founder and CEO of Strike Graph. Justin Beals is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and governance. He organizes strategic innovations at the crossroads of cybersecurity and compliance and focuses on helping customers get outsized value. In every startup he started, he focused on setting a foundational culture of employee growth. Based in Seattle, he previously served as the CTO of NextStep and Koru, which won the 2018 Most Impactful Startup award from Wharton People Analytics. Justin is a board member for the Ada Developers Academy, VALID8 Financial, and Edify Software Consulting. He's also an author and the creator of the Training, Tracking & Placement System US Patent. He's passionate about making arcane cyber security standards plain and simple to achieve. That drove him to co-found Strike Graph in February 2020 - which he leads as their CEO. Strike Graph is on a mission to enable its customers to earn revenue faster by completing security audits successfully and quickly. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Justin to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the security audit services market. Justin shares his lessons learned how he found a sizeable market that Strike Graph can dominate by developing a product that creates a shift in value by aiming to be different, not just better. His story about articulating what business he's really in and how he measures progress is a textbook example of how to create a company that's resilient no matter what crisis it'll find on its path. Here's one of his quotes "Every company is concerned with their revenue. We didn't want to be a security company. We wanted to be a revenue company. Our goal was to say close deals faster, with more confidence. And if we can shorten your time to close by 50 to 75%, you can imagine the amount of efficiency that an organization gets, you know, in revenue acquisition quarter over quarter, there are startups that I've worked at that that simple change would have saved us, we would have been a market leader." During this interview, you will learn four things:

That you create instant differentiation is you ensure the design of your solution amplifies the uniqueness of your ideal customer

Why your mission should be about 2 things: Immediate and apparent value for your customers

That a good exercise to repeat regularly is to start to look at what scales exponentially and what scales linearly

Why crystalizing what business you are really in can mean the difference between failing and becoming the market leader

For more information about the guest from this week:

Justin Beals

Website Strike Graph

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Release date

Lydbog: 7. september 2022