Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
Growing a business to tens of millions in revenue is incredibly difficult. Doing it with novel (and sometimes unproven) technology like GenAI is even harder. But that’s what Glean—an AI assistant for enterprises—has done in just a few short years. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Dan Fergusson, Glean’s Head of International Business, explained more about the company’s journey from MVP to $40+ million in revenue.
Key takeaways:
- Your product needs to solve a painful problem and be built in a way that fits into your ideal customer’s work style.
- Look for ways to build continued credibility in the market, such as partnerships, investments in your brand, and leveraging (anonymous) user data to demonstrate value.
- While your customers might be unique, look for common ground between them—that could be your opportunity for explosive growth.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
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Today, Glean is a GenAI unicorn that’s raised over $300 million. But it obviously didn’t start this way.
Now Head of International Business, Dan Fergusson has been at Glean in since the early days. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, the Toronto-native pulled the curtain back behind Glean’s growth journey to over $40 million in revenue.
First principles: A pain-driven MVP
Politicking and networking aside, venture capitalists fund companies with significant scale potential in a large market. In simpler terms: you need to address a problem a lot of people are willing to pay good money to solve.
In Glean’s case, it’s the tedious process of figuring out organizational intelligence and context. From new employees on day one to seasoned team members who took a long weekend holiday, a lot can get lost in the milieu. Originally built with traditional technologies, the team added GenAI to drive even better results for customers.
“[GenAI is] making it even more accurate and even more accessible, because you don’t need to know that something’s even out there,” said Dan. “You can just ask a really basic question, like, ‘I was out of the office; what happened last week?’ and it’ll respond with, ‘These are the top documents people made, and this is what everyone was working on.’”
From MVP to $1 million: Finding champions and building trust
The team built Glean’s first iteration and began a process of testing with 30 different organizations. But for any founders hoping for a shortcut, Dan has some bad news: it was pretty much all brute force at the beginning.
“It was really direct,” said Dan. “We went after early adopters who were looking to solve this enterprise search problem for a long time.”
The team charged steeply discounted rates initially to reflect both a market transaction and honour where the product was at that time. Then they worked closely with early adopters, collecting feedback and iterating on the product.
After a year of initial testing, Dan said they began converting all members to full plans (or at least went from steeply discounted to simply discounted). They also went to market with a full solution, adding net-new customers that brought revenue to around $1 million. He added that converting all the early adopters was a major signal of initial product-market fit, pointing out that if some folks hadn’t converted, it might have meant the product was not yet mature enough to go to market.
“It’s all signals at that stage because that was just after launch,” said Dan. “And you don’t convert all of them at once either. You’re collecting them throughout the year and getting annual contracts set up.”
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From $1 million to $10 million: Selling the full product
After completing the initial phase, sales motions focused on user analytics; they could confidently show that, on average, people were using Glean more than they used multibillion dollar social media apps like Facebook or Instagram.
Dan said the lesson here is not just to sell using real data about the value a customer can get; it’s also about being diligent in the testing phase so you build a product customers want to use. By working closely with beta customers, the team built a user interface and integrations that made Glean feel like it was always there—this meant customers didn’t need to adjust their working style to benefit from the platform.
“We can connect every single app and then bring them into the clean interface, which can be customized for a company,” said Dan. “We can be the vessel that helps bring GenAI to the company.”
From $10 million to $40 million: Scaling with partnerships
As the company continued to scale, building trust became the next major hurdle—a tall order for a relatively new company selling a brand new technology in a crowded market.
Glean’s response was to begin partnering with tech juggernauts like Google and Amazon, plus build regional partnerships to gain a geographic foothold.
These partnerships served two purposes:
- Building a customizable product: Glean would happily build on Google Cloud, AWS, or any other infrastructure a potential customer used.
- Credibility: Enterprise buyers like knowing they have full control over their ecosystems, so Glean’s use of trusted infrastructure partners became a selling point.
The company also raised a $100 million Series C round in 2022, helping them bolster their own brand and marketing efforts.
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$40 million and beyond: Data-driven storytelling
On one hand, the awareness of GenAI has meant more people willing to chat with Glean and more intuitively understand its platform. But it also meant thousands of new market entrants vying for attention and dollars under the guise of “bringing GenAI to the enterprise.”
So far, Glean’s response has been to carefully ride the hype, focusing on building trust rather than flash. After raising a $200 million Series D, Dan explained the company is prioritizing a few elements as they continue to scale:
The holistic customer experience: Building within a company’s existing security infrastructure means the company can demonstrate they not only understand how to solve the main problem (information recall) but also that they understand the buyer’s entire work ecosystem.
The data story: The sales team continues to bring (anonymized) data into sales conversations; this helps enterprise buyers de-risk the decision to try Glean, since they know that the trend suggests their employees will have no trouble adopting or finding value from the platform.
The partnership track: Selling through partners provides both new market access (in geographies where Glean didn’t already have coverage, such as Japan) and local credibility that would otherwise be very expensive, if not impossible, to build organically.
Today, Dan’s role as Head of International Business has him quite busy; he manages a handful of employees across Canada, the UK, Singapore, and Australia. And from his Toronto home, Dan is regularly on the phone with customers across Europe and Oceania.
Speaking with global enterprises in wildly different industries and markets, Dan expected their needs would be similarly different. But when it comes to GenAI, he’s noticed a shocking similarity.
“I get to hear a whole bunch of different clients trying to figure out how to use generative AI and different technologies in a whole bunch of different places around the world,” said Dan. “And there’s a lot of similarities across places you wouldn’t even think of, like Germany and Singapore. Right now they’re all trying to use AI to do something in their business or test it out and find things that work.”