How Thoroughpass Turned Enterprise Sales Friction into a $98M Company
Every successful startup begins with a pain point. But the most valuable ones emerge when founders realize their frustration reflects an entire industry ready for transformation. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Austin Ogilvie revealed how enterprise security reviews – traditionally a major sales bottleneck – became the foundation for Thoroughpass’s rapid growth.
The Pain Point
The story begins at Yhat, Austin’s previous startup. As they started landing larger clients like “Intuit, doximity, Stripe, PayPal, Johnson,” they encountered a critical challenge: enterprise security reviews were becoming a major obstacle to closing deals.
The impact wasn’t just operational – it was financial. As Austin explains, “If you’re a software company and you don’t take security and privacy controls seriously, not only is that a bad thing to do because it puts the company theoretically in jeopardy, but it also is really damaging to streamlined sales.”
Identifying the Market Opportunity
What made this challenge particularly interesting was its systemic nature. Every B2B software company selling to enterprises faced the same bottleneck. The scale of the problem became clear when looking at enterprise vendor portfolios: “You take a bank like JPMorgan, who led our series B two, three years ago, they have 5000 software vendors. That’s an incredible amount of risk.”
This wasn’t just about individual companies managing risk – it was about the entire B2B software ecosystem needing a better way to handle security and compliance reviews.
Building the Right Solution
Instead of creating just another compliance tool, Thoroughpass identified a fundamental inefficiency in the process. As Austin notes, “If you’re passively collecting all of the digital exhaust that’s relevant in compliance audits, that’s great. But if you have to export all the data and go talk to a separate cottage industry audit firm, it really defeats the purpose of all of the automation in the first place.”
This insight led them to build tools not just for companies collecting compliance data, but also for auditors to leverage that structured data effectively. They positioned themselves at the intersection of three growing markets: governance and risk compliance (GRC), IT auditing, and third-party vendor risk management.
Executing the Vision
Rather than getting distracted by competitive noise, Thoroughpass maintained laser focus on their core vision. “We just ran our playbook, we just ran our game, and we’re very focused on serving our customers with the best experience for getting through it audits in a way that we ourselves would want,” Austin shares.
This focus paid off dramatically. While his previous startup took four years to reach $1.5 million in ARR, Thoroughpass hit that milestone in just 12-13 months. Even more impressive, “the one to 10 million we achieved in six quarters or something like that.”
The Future of Enterprise Sales
Looking ahead, Thoroughpass aims to become “this single pane of glass where all software companies come to manage their IT audits across any of these standards.” As software companies increasingly evaluate each other’s security practices, the opportunity continues to expand. “If Slack is selling or buying something from another software company, they’re now engaging in these kinds of third party vendor risk management problems.”
Key Lessons for Founders
Thoroughpass’s journey offers crucial insights for B2B founders:
- Look for sales friction points that affect entire industries, not just individual companies.
- When you find systemic inefficiencies, solve the complete problem rather than just automating part of it.
- Focus on removing obstacles to revenue generation, not just operational improvements.
The result? A company that’s not just solving a compliance problem, but fundamentally improving how B2B software companies go to market.