[Emerging Tech] Protecting Businesses From Privacy Lawsuits With Richart Ruddie

Richart Ruddie is the Founder of Captain Compliance, a data privacy and compliance software platform that helps organizations navigate complex data protection laws and automate compliance. He is a serial founder and entrepreneur with a track record of building and exiting successful online businesses. Richart is recognized as a privacy expert and often speaks on data privacy and regulatory risk at industry events. His work focuses on empowering companies to build trust with customers and avoid costly legal issues related to privacy.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:13] Richart Ruddie discusses the impetus behind founding Captain Compliance and the escalating risk of privacy lawsuits

• [4:56] What cookie consent banners really mean for businesses

• [6:19] Why B2B and software companies are not exempt from privacy laws

• [7:48] Common mistakes companies make in privacy policies

• [11:32] Richart talks about privacy challenges facing healthcare and financial services firms

• [15:09] Why Captain Compliance is not an AI-first company

• [16:15] Using AI internally while keeping customer experience human-first

• [24:19] Competing in the privacy compliance market and winning the mid-market
  

In this episode…

Many organizations inadvertently expose themselves to legal risk through data privacy oversights, often despite their best efforts to comply. With regulations evolving at breakneck speed, a single misstep — such as an outdated policy or a faulty consent tool — can lead to costly lawsuits. How can your organization stay compliant and protected while continuing to scale and prioritize the customer experience? 

Richart Ruddie, a passionate advocate for data privacy, tackles these very issues by offering a comprehensive software solution designed to help businesses navigate data privacy laws and prevent costly litigation. He explains how even B2B and financial services firms are at risk, emphasizing that privacy requirements aren’t just about marketing — they’re about protecting employee and customer data from breaches and misuse. Richart dives into real-world examples where a lack of compliance led to massive fines and job losses, illustrating the high stakes involved.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Richart Ruddie, Founder of Captain Compliance, about building trust and protecting businesses through innovative privacy compliance. Richart discusses not only the technical challenges of privacy but also the immense value of a customer-obsessed culture, scaling personalized service, and the importance of staying ahead of ever-evolving regulations.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Richart Ruddie on LinkedIn

• Captain Compliance

• "Outsmarting Cybercriminals in Finance With Brian Edelman" on The Customer Wins

• "[Emerging Tech] Reimagining CRM With AI for Advisors With Thomas Clawson" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Scaling With AI, Collaboration, and Team Culture With Tracy Lee" on The Customer Wins

• Ryan Dale on LinkedIn

• One Step GPS

Quotable Moments:

• "And it’s like, ‘We could have saved so many jobs for this company by being proactive versus reactive with privacy and compliance.’"

• "About 80% of sites we review that have consent mechanisms aren’t configured correctly, creating huge risks and opportunities."

• "Going above and beyond for the client — showing we care about their success — means we will win in the long run."

• "If the AI is hallucinating and it’s incorrect information, guess what? You’re at fault under new AI governance laws."

• "I don’t think clients ever appreciate us as much as we appreciate doing it for them; we do it for our long-term success."

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Proactively audit your website for privacy and tracking compliance: Many companies unknowingly use misconfigured trackers or consent tools, and regular audits help identify risks early and prevent costly lawsuits.

2. Keep privacy policies accurate and up to date: Copying generic or outdated policies can expose organizations to penalties, while clear and truthful disclosures demonstrate good-faith compliance.

3. Implement proper consent mechanisms for users: Providing visitors with clear options to opt in or out of tracking respects privacy rights and reduces legal exposure.

4. Prioritize data privacy in customer experience: When customers feel their data is respected and protected, trust, loyalty, and brand credibility increase.

5. Go above and beyond to support customers during compliance challenges: Providing hands-on guidance during complex situations can prevent major financial consequences and strengthen long-term relationships.

   
   

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Brian Edelman of FCI, Thomas Clawson of Slant, and Tracy Lee of This Dot Labs. Today is a special episode in my series on new and emerging solutions, and today's guest is Richart Ruddie, founder and CEO of Captain Compliance. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.

Instead. Get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Ryan Dale of One Step GPS.

Go check out his website at OneStepGPS.com for all your real-time GPS tracking needs. All right. Richart Ruddie is the founder of Captain Compliance, a rapidly growing data privacy software company. He has previously had multiple successful exits between software and digital marketing businesses and was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and many more. Rich, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Richart Ruddie: 01:47

Hey, thanks for having me. And no, no SNL monologue to kick off.

Richard Walker: 01:52

Oh, man. No jokes. Okay, fine. We'll get to the jokes later. All Alright, those who haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company.

So rich. I want to understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?

Richart Ruddie: 02:13

Yeah, absolutely. So what we do is we're data privacy and compliance software. So there are tons of regulations, regulations and other laws that have been out all around privacy law and compliance and wiretapping. And what's happening now is there's huge surges in litigation for companies and business owners that are not complying. So if they're not complying and they have everything from Facebook trackers to LinkedIn insights tag on their site to TikTok for remarketing or session replay technology, all that needs to be disclosed.

And right now, what's happening is a lot of companies just don't know any better. They don't have it. I always talk about the example of a client who has a few hundred employees and they didn't have anything on their site, and they did a call with us. They understood the need for it, but they weren't ready to sign up. And then they got hit with a $5 million class action lawsuit and almost put them out of business.

And it's like, we could have saved so many jobs for this company, and just so much we could have done by being proactive versus reactive. So that's one thing we always push out is like, don't be like some of these really, really egregious cases where jobs are lost. Employees that count on this sort of income to feed their families can be pushed out of business because of a privacy and compliance lawsuit. So we're helping on that end. We're also helping on the end where once our software is installed, if they do see one of these letters that comes out, or a demand or a request for information to see if they are in violation, our auditing tools are able to actually show that our software is working.

It's respecting privacy choices and not in violation. And we just had a major brand have one of these demands come out, and we showcased our audit for them, and we immediately got the case dismissed for them. So that was really a big win for helping out our clients and their constituents. So and then at the end of the day, like Tim Cook says, you wouldn't like it if somebody was looking at you peering over your shoulder while you're typing in your phone, who you're texting, what sites you're going to, what you're looking at online, and then also you're seeing ads because of it. Well, the same thing is really applicable online and that's what's happening.

So it's really good to give users the ability to actually opt in or opt out of tracking. So we provide that ability for businesses to give that to their, to their users. And, it's been a really fun journey so far. And we're just getting started.

Richard Walker: 04:44

Okay. Look, I'm going to be a little bit ignorant and naive about all this. So are you saying when I go to a site and it says allow cookies, disallow only the minimum, that is that what you're talking about? Is that the privacy tracking stuff?

Richart Ruddie: 04:56

That is one of the core pillars of privacy. So starting really with getting a lot of notability in Europe with the GDPR ruling about a decade ago, let's just say roughly what happened was there was a lot of spying going on, and all the sudden it's like, hey, wait, we're being retargeted. These algorithms are retargeting. And look, there's people I see and they're like, oh, I read this online. We're like, that's not true at all.

Like you're obviously being fed by the algorithm. This is total nonsense misinformation. But you know, it's all about keeping our eyeballs on the computer on screen. Right. And keeping one's attention.

So yeah, it's all about respecting that sort of privacy. And if you've noticed, you've gone to a site you might have been at Cargurus, for example, right there, you know, in some privacy issues right now, and all of a sudden you're looking at a car and then all of a sudden you're on a different site. You're like, wait, Cargurus is serving me ads. Like for the same Cadillac I was looking at, or Ferrari or whatever color, you know, that's all tied into this? Yes.

Richard Walker: 05:55

Okay. So that makes it sound like this is really targeting retail commercial products. I mean that individuals are buying B2B . This is why I feel like I'm naive. We're not doing maybe any of the things that people are doing to retarget. We're not that sophisticated, possibly rich.

But how does this affect B2B companies and software companies? Just because that's where I'm coming from?

Richart Ruddie: 06:19

Yeah, and they have to comply too. H&M is just one example of paying a multi-million euro fine because they weren't processing their ex-employees data properly. So for example, you may have an employee or ex-employee and once they leave you have their social security information, right. You may have their bank account, you have their home address. You have a lot of really sensitive information.

They can come to you and say, hey, you know, I'm not here. Can you please delete this? Because if you get breached also, then that data becomes public. Also, their identity can be stolen. There's all sorts of cascading effects that can come about.

So businesses actually have to comply as well. And there's different laws in different states. So Texas has a law. Florida, where I am, has a law. New Jersey recently came out with a law.

Right now there's 20 states with laws that kind of say, here's what you can and can't do with an individual's data. Even if they're employees, they still have data subject rights. So businesses still have to comply with it. And even as a B2B sort of business, if you have trackers on your website, which we could go and do a live scan now, you should have some sort of consent mechanism and disclosure just to make sure that you're protecting visitors to your site. Because just because you're dealing with businesses, there's still individuals still going to your website and potentially being retargeted with ads and so forth.

Richard Walker: 07:37

Yeah. Okay. So does your software then plug into my website, is it external and scan my systems? How do you actually enforce or know that I'm being compliant other than I said. So in my privacy policy?

Richart Ruddie: 07:48

Yeah, definitely. And you'd be shocked how many people say things in their privacy policy that are not true. That is something that I've really come to learn in, in the building of this business. So there's so many people who have things that are just misinformation, either because it was just copy and pasted from a different website, and the webmaster just didn't even take care. And that happens all the time.

And they say, oh, you know, we just copied it. And I'm like, well, did you actually look into any of this? Is any of this true? Like, who's going to be responsible if your client gets in trouble? And then the web marketing agency kind of, you know, looks around and says, okay, maybe it makes sense to pay for your software, not be liable for this.

And we're like, yeah, definitely. So it's definitely good to have correct information, your privacy policy. But we tie in through a tag manager, if you're familiar with Google Tag Manager or any of those sort of tools, and we tie in with the website and once we're tied into the website, then we're able to pop up the consent mechanism. And then once somebody either opt in or opt out, it then takes action based on that. And what we find is actually about 80% of sites that we review that have some sort of consent mechanism are not configured correctly, and obviously creates a great opportunity for us to say, hey, like you have one, but it's not actually working.

And that's what's called a dark or deceptive pattern, which is a whole nother issue. And the FTC, especially in Texas, has been going after companies and attorney generals in the state of Texas, attorney general and the state of New York. Attorney general's been really aggressive coming after companies that are improperly configured. And then the FTC is starting to take notice and come after companies. And one mental health company also ran some issues, and they ended up filing bankruptcy as well, just after a class action was filed.

So there's so many headwinds every which way. Even if you do stand it up, it's got to be stood up correctly.

Richard Walker: 09:38

And so we talk a lot about cyber and the risk of cyber attacks and things like that. You're talking about just simply telling people their data is private, but it's not being private or having an obligation to keep it private and not doing it. I'm still curious, does your software help draft a better privacy policy? Does it analyze it and compare it to work, or is it really just plugging in and surfacing that message, saying, hey, this is what we do or don't do, or we're turning off your system if you don't. Sorry.

You're tracking if you don't want it.

Richart Ruddie: 10:07

Yeah. Great. Great question. So it's actually built with the help of a senior privacy attorney at Am law. 200 law firm attorneys have gone through.

And we built out a whole questionnaire. And it's a decision tree that goes many, many ways in which it's determined based upon what choices are filled out. And it's all about whatever data handling practices they have, where they operate, how users can opt out, all that's compiled into our privacy notice. And it's actually really cool because it's totally dynamic. So we built it based off of their questionnaire that's filled out.

And then once it's built there's new updates. So here in the US there was a new privacy law that came out recently, last month. When that comes out, we automatically push updates to everybody's privacy notice with the proper supplement to adhere to that new privacy law. Tcpa may have new laws on text messaging. Whatever new requirements are coming out, we're continuously adapting and updating, and in that sense, we're making sure that the clients are up to date and then obviously they're protected.

And also it's good to just have good privacy hygiene. So it's a win for the consumers as well.

Richard Walker: 11:14

Yeah. Okay. So I don't know if you know this. I mean most of the people I talk to are in the wealth management industry on the show. That is.

And so a lot of my audience are financial advisors and financial firms. Do you see them having this challenge and adapting your software like yours to to overcome it?

Richart Ruddie: 11:32

Yeah, definitely. It's so I'll jump for a second to another healthcare company and then we'll go back to the finance. But there is a healthcare company. Somebody was pitching me on investing in this company. Took a look at it.

I ended up reconnecting a few months ago when I drove by one of their locations and I said, hey, I saw your location. You know, just catching up. How's business going? And everything. And yeah, good.

We're doing XYZ raise, we're expanding, we're doing this and this and then. And that's just a heads up. You should just be conscious of what's going on in the privacy world. And they're like another one of these, okay we'll get to it. We just have so many initiatives.

We're growing. Somebody was at a conference that I know runs into one of the founders there, and they're asking how much they have to pay to settle a case like this. So ironically, not knowing that we had talked, they put us on, on, on a, on a chat and say, hey, like, I think you two should really talk. He can help you with, with this issue. So I would say healthcare is like number one for healthcare and then like consumer products or the top two just because they're running a lot of marketing Texas technology.

And then I would say financial services is probably the third. They deal obviously with very sensitive data as well. Unless it's like a bank or some of these other ones, they're not necessarily dealing with a wealth manager like a smaller one isn't dealing with hundreds of thousands of data points from different states. So they're not as much at risk of that. But if there's a data breach, which is very common, then often that triggers all these other issues.

And then in the state of California, if there's exfiltration of data or a data breach, then individuals can then go ahead and sue. So it's good to have both good privacy notices. And the more you disclose and things like that, when the regulators come and look and say, oh, you buttoned everything up, this was this, you know, really unfortunate, you know, threat actor that came in. It also helps with lowering the sort of threshold of what they're going to potentially find you with or what sort of remediation would be needed. And also with our software you can opt out.

So the data subject requests software that we built also makes it because a lot of times you're finding the number of records breached. If somebody is opting out and they're not in your database anymore, that's one less, you know, few thousand dollars you got to pay. So there's so many different reasons why this is important for financial services, healthcare, consumer products. But financial services are big. We're talking to some pretty well-known financial finance names that if I were to say the name, you'd be like, oh, well, that's everybody knows that name.

So hopefully in a few minutes.

Richard Walker: 14:11

Rich I'd say I have their forms in my library. Yeah, we have all the forms. No. Look, I think in our industry we tend to focus on how do we secure the data, how do we not have the breach? I'm not saying we don't look at privacy because everybody does too.

But maybe it's just me. I was so scared when Massachusetts came out and said, now any breach, it's like a $1,000 fine per record. Breached.

Richart Ruddie: 14:37

Bingo. Yep.

Richard Walker: 14:39

That's the kind of money that would put me out of business overnight. If we have that data in our system. Right. So, the first thing we do is try not to have your data. And then to the extent we do, we do so much to secure it, so much to secure it.

Because I got to sleep at night. But you're, you're elevating this point of like the privacy on your side of what you say you're doing or not doing is so super important as well. All right. Let me shift gears a little bit. Did you start your business with AI?

Are you an AI driven AI first company?

Richart Ruddie: 15:09

You know, I think because I came up with the idea and the genesis of it before the big AI boom, and I was an early adopter of open AI, even in their beta testing before it publicly launched on November 22nd. I wonder if I wasn't already deep into this. Would I have chosen another AI business? And if so, what would it be? And I've never come up with something like, oh, I would definitely do this.

And I've had some loose ideas, but nothing that was like concrete. And a lot of the ideas that kind of just floated around ended up just becoming part of OpenAI or Gemini or one of these. So. We use a lot of AI that's fueled our growth in a bootstrap sense. But we're not an AI company.

We're really just not. So investors that we talked to would love, you know, more AI focus, but we're just using AI to accelerate and build a lot faster. But we're not an AI company at the end of the day.

Richard Walker: 16:04

So your product doesn't have AI driving the product features or capabilities. You're just using it in-house to try to build a product faster or do communications, etc.. Is that what I'm understanding?

Richart Ruddie: 16:15

Yeah, exactly. So and there's an AI governance component we've done while we were building the product, there was a fortune 1000 client that came to us for some AI governance work, kind of, you know, got us our foot in the door, which actually we're talking to them now about doing more privacy software for them. But we use cursors in a lot of these tools all the time. And there's some AI component to it, but we're still human focused. There'll be some customer service and CSM stuff that will be AI driven.

But one of our really big things and I know we've talked about this, hence how we ended up on the podcast is like, I always believe, going way above and beyond for the client. And if we can do that and we can really show the client that we care about them, we care about their success, that we will win in the long run. And we're almost like Ayn Rand's fountainhead, right? We're just slowly taking little micro steps and improving. But in the long run, we're going to win.

I plan to be the captain. The captain is going to be the champion across the board. But that's just coming from little small micro improvements and little wins every single day. And it's adding up day by day. And there was a client in my old business, she was going to get fired because she had gotten a DUI.

And her mugshot was these mugshot sites used to post your mugshot, and then they try to charge you an extortion fee to take it down. And she says, my boss is going to, you know, freak out about this. You know what happened here? You know, recently a college grad. You know, we all make mistakes.

And she called at three in the morning. And I answered. And by the time she woke up and got to the office, you know, nine in the morning the next day, I'd already fixed her issue online and saved her job. And I always used that case in point that, you know, going above and beyond, and it's like there's no other company or person she could have contacted the whole world that would have gone ahead and, and made sure that this was fixed before she got to work the next day. So I try to bring that ethos into our culture here, and it means a lot.

And, you know, it is definitely a hard work sort of society and culture that we built. And people are answering on the weekends when everybody else. And there was a client actually working on an integration, and the CMS partner had no customer support over the weekend, but we were there for them. And you know, that really stands out. So those are things I really am.

Richard Walker: 18:36

I love that stuff. I mean, first of all, I love that your answer is not, hey, we have to put AI into everything. It's human first, right? And because so many companies just said I'm AI, I am AI because it was a marketing term, etc. and I'm one of these companies saying we are an AI first company, meaning everything we do, we think, how can I improve what we're doing, how can we go faster, better, higher quality, etc. but the human part is really the connection here with the customer success and the customer experience in my view. And I feel the same way you do about going above and beyond.

We were just debating today like, where do we draw the line between what we can and cannot do and what we should and should not do with the customer? How do you guys define it? When a customer is asking you to do things that are just not your fault, not part of your system, but has some kind of connection to your system and they think you can help them. How do you draw that line?

Richart Ruddie: 19:26

Yeah. Have you ever read the book Delivering Happiness, the Tony Hsieh book from Zappos?

Richard Walker: 19:30

Yeah, a long time ago, but yeah.

Richart Ruddie: 19:32

Yeah. I haven't heard that for some reason. That just popped in my head right where they really had that customer obsession too. Hence why Amazon wanted to buy them. And we mean, look, we're not going to be ordering pizzas or for clients or staying on the phone with them for eight hours because they need somebody to talk to.

Richard Walker: 19:49

I know they would. Right. It's all psychology.

Richart Ruddie: 19:51

Yeah. But within reason. I mean, look, if a client like we've had clients ask, hey, we need help with XYZ attribution this. And like, there were things that were super technical that we went out of our way just because we're still at an early stage to like, help them and understand. And it helps us learn.

You know, here's your tech people who didn't set this up. Correct. And then we try to work with our people to give them. But I think every time we do stuff like that we're like, all right, maybe we can at scale figure out kind of AI and guides and things like that. That will make it easier.

But for now, a lot of the stuff we're doing is manual and tasks like that. When a client is asking just because it's good learning for us, and then we're documenting saying, okay, is there eventually a way that we can implement this for scale? But there's not a set rule or guidance at this point. But within reason, if the client is asking for something and to get those wins, I mean, we got a fortune 1000 client because the other vendor they were up against took too long to get back to them and to get with them and, you know, the back and forth. And we just got on right away and said, you know, we're young, we're hungry.

And they just two weeks ago said, okay, how's everything going? I said, we're growing, you know, but we're still young and hungry. And I said, okay, we're, we're going to send you more work. Then I said, okay, good. So the customer reception is starting to pay off.

Richard Walker: 21:12

I hope my audience is hearing this work. With smaller companies, you get more personalized service, more in touch with the people that are in the company because we're trying to grow. We're trying to be everything we can at that moment. And it's not to say that you can't keep that going as you scale. I mean, I'm in year 23, about to go to year 24, and we still do this, but it is harder to scale because it adds burden on your team.

I even wonder if we have had a customer satisfaction score of 99 to 100 for the past three years in a row. Rich, what do you think? Is that too high? Does that create too much burden to be? To try to keep it that high?

Richart Ruddie: 21:49

It's a good goal to strive for, right? It's in a past life. I worked as a valet at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, Florida, and they had their mobile and Forbes five-star ranking or whatever, and that was like all they cared about, right? You have to pronounce everybody by their name. You have to do this because we have that plaque on the wall.

And that's what keeps us, you know, at the rates that we can charge. And people come to stay here. And it's like a Michelin star for some people. Right? That's your three Michelin stars.

Is that sort of NPS score?

Richard Walker: 22:21

Well, but there's another side to it too though. If you give people that much attention and that much focus, do they become dependent on you in the wrong ways, like they stop doing self-service, they call you for problems that aren't yours. It's a question that I leave open. I don't know if you have that experience where people ask too much because you guys have gone above and beyond. You do have that challenge at times.

Richart Ruddie: 22:43

We've seen it. We've seen it once so far with a client that was asking for above and beyond just because they just didn't know. Right. And we're like, we're like this, you know, we want to build our own product, not, you know, focus on building and fixing, but we, we we stepped in. We did save the client millions of dollars, actually, in something that was misconfigured, that somebody else had done there and fixed that for them, whether or not they appreciate that, I don't know.

I certainly hope so. But there's I don't think the clients ever appreciate us as much as we appreciate doing it for them, and the reason we do it right for our long-term success. So yeah, I don't think it doesn't always translate. So there's always the client you go above and beyond and then they just want more. They don't realize, oh, you did.

You did this. I had one friend that owned an agency, and he actually said, I don't work on weekends. I was like, really? That's why he goes, because I just don't appreciate it. They don't give me the level.

I was like, okay, so everybody's got different viewpoints on it. And this is my hobby. So I work and I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurants, play tennis and do yoga. And that's pretty much my life.

Richard Walker: 23:55

So nice. Nice. Yeah. I do think that taking on these extra steps helps inform your product roadmap too. It helps you come up with innovations and ideas that you might not have had if you didn't work this closely with customers.

So first of all, why did you enter this space? How many competitors are you up against and where do you see this going that's making you guys so much different and going to win the day?

Richart Ruddie: 24:19

Yeah, I mean, on the content management side, there's a handful of players up there. One really interesting thing is one of the players. I'm not going to list them, but somebody just today at lunch said they have about 130,000 websites that are using them. The founder has come out and said our software actually doesn't work. Like the onus is on you as the client. We just provide notice.

And I was like, why would they just make a product that works, right? Like it is extra work to do it, but you make a much better product in the long run. So there's a handful of companies like that. There's definitely competition. There's one player that was recently sold for 1.8 billion in our space, another that just had a nice nine-figure exit that was actually started way back before all the privacy rules existed back in 2009.

Was this very early to space? And I'd like to say we're like, we're special because we play in the mid market, right? We can go down market and help the smaller, the smaller guys and we can go up market and help the biggest sort of enterprises as well. And we have that flexibility to go both ways. But we're really efficient right now for the mid-market who didn't have to deal with these sorts of issues prior to only having to deal with them now.

So there's not too many others. There's a lot that are on, like the lower tier of the market that are just basic plug-ins are the ones, like I said, that don't actually work. And then there's a few that are on the very enterprise high end really only target the fortune 5000 sort of clients. So I like to think that we can play in both. I'm a chameleon at heart I guess.

Richard Walker: 25:58

Do you have to? Well, do you play globally? Internationally. And do you have to be in this business?

Richart Ruddie: 26:04

It certainly helps. So there's companies that only specialize, like there's a small player that only specializes mostly in Italy. And they have a great dominance in Italy. They've tried to grow in the US but weren't successful in doing so. We have clients all over the world already.

We're still at a very early stage but are already growing internationally and in South Africa. Got clients in Europe, one in Australia that recently signed up. So it's literally global. It definitely helps because there's a huge market here in the US which we're tapping into, but there's also all the companies that are international or do business internationally, and then they have to deal with those laws. So we're able to play in all the sandboxes.

Richard Walker: 26:48

How do you then create an experience that works for everybody? I mean, are there different needs for different types of experiences with different cultures and language, etc.?

Richart Ruddie: 26:57

Yeah. So our software is actually adaptive based on the location. So it'll update both language and geo targets based on where the visitor is coming from. So privacy policy for example, if you're in South Africa and you visit a client who does business in South Africa, you actually get a South Africa privacy specific notice. If you go, I always use the example if you go to like Hilton.com and you look at their privacy policy, they literally have like 70 different links.

We made it where it's just one page, one link, and Hilton, if you're listening, or Dell Computers, who I've been told would love this. I was just listening to Michael Dell in a podcast with David earlier, so that popped up. We can make it very easy and readable, right. For privacy notice. So yeah.

So we're global. Somebody in South Africa can have a specific notice for them. Somebody in France will have an EU GDPR specific notice. So it's all specific based on where the user is.

Richard Walker: 27:55

Man you guys must have a huge library of rules that you have to manage then. And keep all this compliance information up to date. That's got to be hard.

Richart Ruddie: 28:02

Yeah, definitely a lot. But that's part of the fun in the building. When I first looked into the business, I was like, oh, this can't be that hard. It's not rocket science. I thought, oh, you build it in three months, then, you know, did a deeper dive into it.

I was like, okay, this is actually very complex, much more than what meets the eye to really do this. Right. So and that's why it took over a year of really initial building. But once we were out and we're continuously iterating. It's cool to see and like, it's kind of like the founder of Raising Cane's says, you know, if somebody else is going to compete like they don't know what they're getting into, right?

They have to have the hustle and the grind. Like I'm not worried about it. So it keeps me, you know, at bay from worrying. And even somebody who's a friend in the industry I said was coming out with something. And I said, hey, are you coming out with this?

Like good luck. Oh, yeah.

Richard Walker: 28:47

No, I hear the same thing with forums, man. People think, oh, forums are easy. I'm telling you, anybody can build one form. Can you build 43,000? That's a different story.

Yep. Right. And the nuance of it. So I can only imagine. In fact, this is where I think I'd probably be.

The number one use case in your world is how do you bring all this information together and sort it and everything else. But I will bet not even that is a good use for AI because of hallucination, misinterpretation and things like that. Have you guys played around with that?

Richart Ruddie: 29:17

Yeah. So if you are hallucinating or the AI is hallucinating and it's incorrect information, guess what? There's AI governance laws of what you can EU AI act. Different states are coming out with broad kinds of AI acts that aren't necessarily but auto sales, auto automated decision making technology, right. If you program your AI, somebody who applies for a car loan, if they go ahead and they are automatically denied, but the AI got it wrong, you're at fault, right?

And then all of a sudden you got discrimination, you know, suits and things like that. It can be problematic. There is a tool that we're going to be building a compliance atlas that will have and that'll be AI driven with news updates and what's happening and things like that. So right now we create a ton of valuable content for people to read. We're going to kind of organize that on both a state and country specific and then different laws, and really help people through that, through that kind of portal and setup.

So that's the most AI probably product that we have coming out early next year, I would say.

Richard Walker: 30:16

Yeah, dude congratulations man. This is awesome. We're getting to the end here. So I gotta get to my last question, but before I do that, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Richart Ruddie: 30:27

Yeah, definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. If you have show notes, we can drop the link in there and then visit captaincompliance.com. If you have a website that you want a free audit and you want to check out and see what we can do to help, we would love to help any, any of your audience. Just go and let them know that you came from the podcast here, and we'll give you a free audit and take a look and see what we can do to help you. And then I'll personally respond as well if I see the emails come in.

Richard Walker: 30:55

Nice, nice. That's awesome. All right. So this actually is one of my favorite questions to ask people. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Richart Ruddie: 31:05

Yeah, definitely. I'd love to read, but I would say definitely I would shout out to my mother and, you know, things that she instilled in me even as a child and growing up and telling things about, you know, I guess the dream of just what life can be, right? When you work hard and you dedicate yourself to something. I'm also in a handful of these business networking groups. Ypo has been a really great network and organization that I've been in.

Found my CTO and co-founder through there recently also joined the one that gave me this cool founder Hat Founders Club. So shout out to Aaron and Chris, the founders there. They've really done a great job of organizing a slack community and network of founders that are driven and hungry and just want to support each other. So I think these support groups are great. They're great to network, great to bounce ideas off of.

Hey, I'm looking at doing X, Y, Z campaigns. Who else has done this? And sometimes you're able to save a lot of money because you're not going down the road for something that's been bad, or you get recommendations for something that works really well, and you say, okay, yeah, I've been looking at this, you know, who's a trusted source. Obviously if they're in this network, they've had some level of success to get here. So I find that stuff to be really helpful.

Richard Walker: 32:19

Yeah, no, that's had a huge impact on me. I've been able to find great people, great tools, great resources. That's how we met, actually. So yeah, I have a lot of appreciation for that. All right.

I gotta wrap this up. So I want to give a big thank you to Richart Ruddie, founder of Captain Compliance, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Richart's website at captaincompliance.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier.

I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Rich, thanks so much for joining me today.

Richart Ruddie: 32:57

Yeah. Thank you. This was awesome.

Outro: 33:00

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