"Why Sprinto Ran 10 Audits Before Signing Their First Customer"

What Everyone Says

Ship fast. Get the MVP out. The prevailing wisdom is clear: put the smallest version of your product out there as soon as possible and start getting customers.

It makes sense. Why spend months building when you could be learning from real users? Every startup blog, every accelerator, every VC repeats the same thing. Launch early. Iterate. Speed wins.

And for most products, that's solid advice.

Why That's Wrong

But here's the thing. Some products can't be validated with an MVP that barely works. Compliance is one of them.

Girish Redekar and his co-founder at Sprinto knew people needed what they were building. They'd lived the pain themselves at their previous company, RecruiterBox, where getting a SOC 2 report meant hiring a consultant and spending "a few months and tens of thousands of dollars."

The market risk was low. People were already searching for solutions, asking in founder groups, talking to their VCs about it.

The real question wasn't "will people buy it?" It was "can this actually be productized?" Sprinto sat squarely in what Girish calls the high product risk zone. If you ship a half-baked compliance product, the auditor fails you. Then your customer fails. Then your reputation is done before you start.

What Girish Did Instead

Everyone said build an MVP. Girish went and got audited. Over and over.

Sprinto's team started hiring auditors to audit them. Not to get certified. To learn. "The first audit was entirely manual. The second one we had some spreadsheets in place. The third one, we had some product in place and it was all happening behind the scenes. The auditors never got to see it."

By audit number ten, they had it nailed down. They understood exactly what auditors look for because they'd been through the process that many times.

Their mental test was simple: "If everything that we are doing in Sprinto is a black box and the only thing that comes out of it is what an auditor sees, how much of that black box is automated underneath."

The auditors didn't care how the work got done. They just needed what they needed. So Sprinto reverse-engineered the entire process from the output backwards.

Then when they finally went to their first beta customer, they had real confidence. Not startup optimism. Evidence-based confidence from 10 completed audits.

The result? They landed 30 to 40 customers very quickly within months of launching. Some big names too, including HP.

The Principle Underneath

Girish made what he calls "a counterintuitive jump." He understood that the risk wasn't in the market. It was in the product. And the fastest way to de-risk the product wasn't to ship it. It was to simulate the entire end-to-end experience before a single customer touched it.

This works when your product's value chain has a gatekeeper you can't control. Auditors won't lower their standards because you're a startup. Regulators won't give you a pass. If the output has to be perfect, you need to work backwards from that output.

Girish calls it the intersection of "unsexy and boring" problems that nobody wants to touch with a ten foot pole, but that are genuinely valuable. That boredom is a moat. Nobody else wanted to sit through 10 audits voluntarily.

Should You Do This?

Do this if your product has a deterministic output that must meet an external standard (audits, certifications, regulatory approvals). If the gatekeeper can't be charmed or shortcut, you need to master the process before you sell it.

Skip this if your main risk is market risk. If you're not sure anyone will buy what you're building, ship fast and learn. Don't spend months perfecting something nobody wants.

One question to ask yourself: is your biggest fear "can I build this right?" or "will anyone care?" If it's the first one, maybe you need your own version of 10 audits.