#232 - Dr. Patrick Oehler, Co-CEO Retorio- on niching down to drive momentum

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us spot, hire & develop the right team for our performance culture … by amplifying the people characteristics that make our business remarkable. My guest is Dr. Patrick Oehler, Co-Founder, and Co-CEO of Retorio. Patrick Oehler was born in Munich, Germany. After graduating from high school, he studied information-oriented business administration at the University of Augsburg and Management & Strategy at the London School of Economics (LSE). Subsequently, he completed his doctorate in Organizational Research at the Technical University of Munich, where he researched behavioral patterns in organizations. This is where he and his co-founder and co-CEO Christoph Hohenberger stumbled upon a big idea that would spark the birth of Retorio. Retorio is on a mission to create a world where people feel accepted, satisfied, and fulfilled in their work, relationships, and company culture. How? By spotting success patterns in teams, hiring matching talents, and developing them into top performers. And this inspired me, and hence I invited Patrick to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we do recruitment today, particularly in large organizations. Patrick shares how 'simply' changing the order of doing creates a revolution - one that creates unbeatable organizations. He digs into how he created traction by niching down and homing in on the most valuable and critical use case. He shares a fascinating story about how he ignored advice from investors on who to target/ not to target - and with that, found a market that's prepared to pay a premium and now represents 80% of the revenue. Last but not least, he shares his experience on what it takes to create a software business that cannot be ignored. Here's one of his quotes "Our investor told us 'don't sell to these clients because they're way too big, they're way too complicated - don't do enterprise sales. You don't know how to do that. You must go for the small ones, this way you can scale way more quickly.' And we always tried to do that, but then once again, the enterprise clients signed up and they were like, 'We're gonna pay more, and we're gonna pay more.' And they offered us big amounts of money to use the technology. And at some point, we said, okay, maybe we should stop resisting.' During this interview, you will learn four things:

How flipping the process can be the key to creating a product that creates a revolutionary impact

How a compelling vision can attract critical resources to your startup that are even prepared to work for free

How to break the barriers to getting customers to sign up for demos

Why your go to market should be ultra specific, even though your platform can support 100s of use cases

For more information about the guest from this week:

Dr. Patrick Oehler

Website Retorio

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Release date

Lydbog: 28. september 2022