In this episode, I talk with Dan Pidcock, founder of Glean.ly, an online platform that allows enterprise UX teams to better manage their UX research. We discuss Dan’s experience and background in UX and how his role in the creation of the Atomic UX framework led to creating an enterprise SaaS business.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers in the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.
Hey, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m here today really pleased to be joined by Dan Pidcock, founder of Glean.ly, as always, as you you should know by now, if you’ve heard the past episodes, I’d like guests to introduce themselves their business and give us their elevator pitch before we kind of dive in and find out a little bit more about how you got to where where you are now. So yeah, good morning, Dan. Thank you for joining us.
Daniel Pidcock
Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. No worries. So yeah, over to you tell our listeners about you and your your business. So my name is Daniel Pidcock. I’m a UX researcher and designer, and I have a product called glenlee. Glean.ly is a knowledge repository. So that especially aimed at large organizations, because they have the most difficult problem to solve with keeping hold of all the knowledge. So it’s originally designed as a UX tool to be a place to store all of the learnings from UX research. And but actually, one thing we’ve learned through building it is knowledge affects every part of the business. So the most common thing that we’re solving, for the people that use it is kind of spreading knowledge throughout an organization, finding all of those different teams that have learned things that can help other people, and increases the retention of knowledge. And it means we don’t forget it all. Especially larger companies tend to have very short memories. But actually, the biggest benefit is the innovation and collaboration that comes out of such a thing. Cool. Fantastic. That sounds interesting. And yeah, we’ll dig into what that looks like and a little bit more detail. So you mentioned your background is is working in UX. So what was it that that led you to kind of try and create Leelee in the first place? Well, I was actually working for just eat the large one, the world’s biggest food takeaway organization. And I actually ended up becoming the head of accessibility for the company, kind of accidentally, actually. So we, the problem we had is we had a small team of mostly people who had other jobs and other roles within the company as well, working on the project, and we were getting knowledge and research data from the whole company. So we had over 140 people just we’ve researched their names that other people, business analysts and project managers all sorts of had knowledge and evidence that would help us with accessibility. And it was just impossible to handle. Right? It was just, it was like a tidal wave of information. And we already had a programmatic at the company that everything was done with reports and those reports to be written and then put into Google Drive. We used to call it Google grave, because it’s where research went to die. And we, we knew this as a problem anyway. But when it came to the accessibility team, it suddenly was it meant that we were unable to really handle and perform as we would like to. So I started looking into what what products, what processes existed already. And there wasn’t really anything all the products out there had really been designed by startups for startups. So it’s people working on a small project with very tight scope. And I mean, context is the word I use 1000 times a day, but that you’d have the context of this particular app that does a particular thing. And a company like just eat where they have hundreds of brands around the world. And they have hundreds of aspects to that brand. You know, you’ve got the customer facing things. We’ve got restaurant, internal, even, like they had their own custom tools for marketing and AdWords and things like that. So it’s insanely complex.
And, yeah, so having having a system that allowed us all to contribute and collaborate, but also had the context of so many different cultures and products and brands and such like was impossible. So I set about developing a process and I should say it wasn’t me that solely that invented this was very much a product of hundreds of people but but particularly some of my teammates, I always shout out David Jakes who was a real key person who kind of I suppose he put me on to the solution that became atomic UX research. So he was drawing on a board like how you could different knowledge could connect to other different knowledge, and how we could break things down. And it reminded me of the design process, which is atomic design, where you break down UI design into its constituent parts. So every web page is made out of molecules and organisms, and each organism has atoms. And it’s thought, well, actually, we could probably do the same with knowledge. And if you when we tried to break down a piece of knowledge, we found it had four distinct conjugate parts, where we learnt it, which is what we call experiment, what we learned the kind of factual information that we learned, which we call the fact, what that actually means how that’s relevant to us, which is the insight and then what we’re going to do about it. So what we call the recommendation at the time, we call it a conclusion.
And that sounds very simple. And it is very simple. But it’s actually incredibly powerful. And by having been able to use each of those elements as nodes of information, it means we could kind of network, all the knowledge, you know, Matt knows this, I know this, we bring that together, and it tells us something interesting. And that leads us into a different direction from going in that direction, we learn more things, we can connect things up. And maybe what we thought we knew early on, we find isn’t true, or is less relevant for different parts. But maybe we’ll find other aspects that take us just kind of grow that information. So we’re able to create these kind of self managed notes, which meant that a massive company like just deal with 1000s of 1000s of people creating knowledge could all input and take out.
And also the I suppose the thing that really kind of was the reason for its success is that it also was just a better way of understanding the research we’re doing. And fundamentally, when there was lots of people who actually don’t don’t use the atomic process as a repository system as a way to scale up a knowledge repository, but actually just use it as a way to synthesize what they’re learning. And it’s actually really powerful, just in that respect, which is completely accidental. It’s just pure chance. It also helped that was a famous guy called Toma, Sharon, who at the time was head of UX for we work, I think he’s Goldman Sachs now. So he was working on a very similar problem, which he also called atomic UX research. So we got in touch and had a chat. And actually what he was doing was almost kind of a part of what we were doing. So we kind of I don’t know what you’d call it aligned our processes together. And because he is so well known, and so well respected and amazing guy, that really, I mean, meant a lot of people took it seriously. And very quickly, it went around the world. And I think for most part, I would say now, almost all UX, people would have at least heard of it, if they haven’t tried it, or using it.
Yeah, or have a good idea about what it is. Yeah, so it’s been quite, quite amazing for me to see that. See this thing that I’ve been a part of, I remember the first time I spoke at a big conference in Brighton. And people came up, one group came up to me, and they’d flown in from India, and they were using an agency in India. That’s crazy, you know, people around the globe using it. And part of I actually left justeat to kind of pursue this, this concept and went to work with a few other organizations to see how we could use this process within the organization. But it’s very clear that we needed a specific tool built around this process. And that’s where it came about. So the past three years or so, we’ve been building this custom software to be this kind of scalable repository system. It’s been used by some really big brands. It’s yeah, it’s a it’s still very much a startup very much kind of got a very mature product now but we’re just getting to that point where we’ve got to that point now where we’re looking to scale the product up but we’ve got some really impressive customers we’re coming to the first the first customers are coming up for their three year renewal just spoken to the first few customers that are due to renew for their third year and all three of those are given a thumbs up saying they’re going to be doing it so yeah, it’s reassuring that after three years they still they’re still valuable to them.
Matthew Todd
Yeah and and just for people listening you know there any kind of companies that that our audience might know that you you’ve got as customers?
Daniel Pidcock
Is it mostly UK demographic?
Matthew Todd
Mostly yeah.
Daniel Pidcock
So UK brands will probably one the biggest is Adobe, the software giant, I think most people around the world, we’ve heard of that aberle group, particularly confused.com, we’ve got Slimming World, there’s quite a few. Most of the customers, which are very few of our customers are UK based. There’s a good spread around the world got a particular for some reason, particularly popular in France, which I love, because it’s an excuse to get to Paris every now and again.
So I’m very happy about that. So a lot of the especially larger brands, you know, so one of our biggest customers a company called Heidelberg cement. And I have to be honest, when, you know, I had a meeting set up with them, I was like, okay, you know, it’s Mr. Heidelberg, down the road cement company. I didn’t realize it’s just it’s one of the biggest companies in the world are never heard of them. And it’s always interesting to me, one of the things that’s really kind of been interesting through this is seeing how UX and research and knowledge management is approached and all of these big companies that may be you almost almost don’t think of, and there’s so many different things happening all around the world, that, you know, you always have the big brands, you know, Tesla and Google, and you know, all of those kinds of tech brands. And you don’t realize that, yeah, just the company that provides the concrete that builds everything. They have an incredibly intensely complicated tech infrastructure. Of course, they do it make perfect sense, but we just don’t think about it. And then some many ways, there’s so much bigger and more interesting than the Ubers of the world.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that’s interesting as Yeah, a lot of big businesses that you might not necessarily hear of in the media, but are actually underpinning, you know, so many other businesses and are massive in their own right.
Daniel Pidcock
Absolutely. It’s one thing I’ve always thought with, with companies I’ve worked with as a kind of UX consultant, or when I work directly with customers, quite rarely, is it the really sexy brands that have the really sexy projects? Normally, they’ve kind of solved things already. And, you know, it’s when you go to those, those boring sounding brands, that, or the companies that are doing something, either quite niche or maybe a bit dry, and you think, well, this isn’t gonna be much fun. And then they show you the problem, you go, Oh, my Lord, we can do something here. There’s something really exciting to achieve, you know, and you come away with real sense of achievement. I think we’re both.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And, and when it comes to working with companies of that size and scale, obviously, you said earlier on that the, the product is really and the process is really designed for companies that operate at that, at that scale, the only kind of challenges you faced kind of going directly into enterprise companies, rather than you know, starting with the smaller businesses.
Daniel Pidcock
It’s a different problem. I think, the reason we were focused on enterprise, so obviously, I was trying to solve this within a blue chip enterprise, you know, footsie 100 tech company, there was nothing serving those companies. And so that’s where there was definitely a massive gap in the market. And that’s where the biggest challenge was, and the reason it wasn’t being served. So that’s where the biggest opportunity was, and I very much believe in designing for extremes. So they, those extremes could be that the company is really big, but it could also be the company’s really small, maybe the extreme is that they just haven’t got anyone dedicated to research, for instance. But in this case, it’s that they’ve got some of the companies I work with, they have whole dedicated insight management teams, they’ve got people, teams of people just there not to do research, not to provide research, but to manage the research that people are doing. And so it’s an incredibly expensive and difficult problem for them to solve. And every time they forget something, have to relearn it, or they forget something and ended up building something that that they should have known wouldn’t work.
You know,it’s it’s costly and expensive and frustrating as well. One of the biggest frustrations when I was just eat was that we would relearn the same things again and again, and people would make mistakes, because they didn’t know this research had already been done. Yeah. And, and you would do this research, knowing that it was really useful and really valuable, and probably no one would ever see it again. So that’s obviously something that’s changed for them now, of course, but they weren’t unusual. And it was really interesting. The first company I spoke to after just eat was Monzo and moo.com. So I think it was actually Monzo I spoke to because I really respected their UX team. I
And they said, Yeah, we’ve got this problem, or you need to speak to mu.com, the head of UX over there was complaining about this very issue the other day. So I spoke to them, how are you need to speak to? so and so. And yeah, and, and it was this kind of network effect, every time I spoke to somebody about this problem, they went, Yeah, this is a real big problem. And then you need to get to them next. And so we’ve done so far, we’ve done no marketing whatsoever, all of our growth has purely been organic, because either people have heard of us, they’ve seen me speak, or they’ve read my articles. But mostly, it’s because someone said, Yeah, we had that problem we started using Glean.ly or they’ve left a company and gotten some harassment, oh, we use so and so you know, this last company we use Glean.ly. And that’s where all our growth is coming from at the moment, that needs to change, of course. But as a small startup, it’s been been really beneficial to us, because we’ve really focused on a real problem, a problem that a lot of companies who actually facing in the early days, especially, we actually had to turn people down, we could only, we started with alpha customers, we called them. So these are real customers, paying an amount of money was a fairly small amount of money. But basically, we wanted them to commit to say, we’re solving this problem, you’re committed to kind of, really their investment was sharing their knowledge with us and give them quite intimate access to their company, which, especially for these quite big organizations, you know, I mentioned the name Adobe, you can imagine they’ve got a lot of very confidential, and very business critical, very valuable information going on. And they gave us really intimate access to that, which is a big, brave move for them. And also investing when you invest into as a company, you take on a repository, you are investing in that. So a lot of time and effort and man hours have been put in to building this knowledge repository. And hopefully, the tool makes it easy as possible, but you’re still kind of investing into that, that landscape into that product. So they had to take a big gamble on us that we had, because we had a very, very basic prototype, our first prototype that people were paying to us didn’t have search for repositories, you know, fundamental. And we said that we can put the information in, that’s good enough for now we’ll learn how to be build search through you. And so we started, we first we wanted to only have five customers. In the first six months, we had 10. And we said, right, we have to stop there.
Because we just you know, it’s going to take us too much time to manage that many customers. Very, as I say very intimate, very regular connections. So we had, we had to be tough on ourselves to say, no, Mr. Company, that is really impressive. And we’d love to have you on our roster, we just haven’t got the time to deal with you right now. And we won’t be able to get the most out of that relationship will call you back in six months time. And hopefully, you’ll still want us and hopefully you’ll still have that budget available and invest in somewhere else.
Matthew Todd
And you wern’t scared of losing them as a customer?
Daniel Pidcock
I was scared of them. Absolutely. Yeah. And of course, some of those people, we actually had a list of about 2000 names of people that hadn’t said they want to use our product. But we’re interested, if that makes sense. So sign up for the beta. And the longer we sat on that the older that list came and people were leaving companies and so those emails wouldn’t exist anymore. And it was yeah, it was very stressful. But we we definitely didn’t want to go too early and ended up people walking away. We tried that Glean.ly thing it was crap. It was just no use to us. It was useless. And so we did do the whole MVP thing we released at the at the minimum viable product. But we had to wait till it was viable. That was That was tough. That was really tough.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s interesting, because I see a lot of people misunderstand what an MVP is. And I think it’s become so abused that, you know, MVP is almost itself not viable as a concept in a way that many people implement it. And they think it’s the smallest thing they can ship to someone versus the smallest thing that actually adds real genuine value goes, you know, some way some decent way to solving that problem for them.
Daniel Pidcock
You’re absolutely right. I mean, if you consider really our first MVP was a whiteboard and sticky notes. That’s how we were testing the process. That’s how we were discovering if this word, and then our next MVP was airtable, you know, we were using airtable for a long time, as you know, off the shelf product to be able to build a repository using this process and seeing how it scaled and how it worked. And it just there was limits. I won’t go into them. But there was limits to what that could actually achieve. And it was very clear we needed to build something custom but we weren’t going out setting out to build a custom product. We’re protecting that to solve this problem.
And so then the first customers I worked with outside of just eat they were paying me to help them with knowledge management and to scale repository and socialite. But we didn’t have a product at that stage. So we was, I suppose in that regard, we were selling our product before we even had a product. And then once we had one that was good enough to start customers actually using and putting information in, that was the minimum thing. But they were coming on with the expectation, this isn’t a finished product, this is a product they’re going to help us build. Yeah, so in that regard, we were kind of releasing far too early.
But but managed in a managed way, in a way that was right. And there’s so much more I would like to do, I’ve got some really grand plans for the product. And it’s, it fundamentally works. It’s a fully fledged repository, it does everything repository needs to do. But it’s the frustration now is I’ve got all of these great ideas that I really want to implement. But we need to go through the process, it needs to be proven, it needs to be valuable. We’re completely guided by our customers. So we work with really talented UX and product people. And so all companies should be listening to their customers beyond anything else. But us, particularly because our customers are people who know product better than me, probably. So we’re constantly we’re completely guided by them almost we get we have a rough timeline and a rough kind of roadmap, kind of like a framework for where we want to be development wise. And then each each quarter we work on a different theme. And the customers tell us what they want us to do what be the most valuable problems for us to solve for them. Yeah, so sometimes we overall, absolutely, but that’s based on evidence.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, so very, very customer driven.
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, for example, we’ve got a, an evidence score. And I was really excited about the seven score to start off with I still am, it’s just a great, great thing. But we had plans, and we actually released a version where rather than a very simple score, it was very clever, it kind of took into account all the different types of evidence where the evidence would come from the age of the evidence, and things like that, to give a really precise scoring to how much evidence you had to something. And what we found is that was actually a negative customers were over focusing on that, and they were taking far too long it was becoming a stranglehold, they were so hyper focused on trying to get that score absolutely perfect. And worse, they were making decisions on that score. And that score should help people if they’re moving very quickly, but it should never be making decisions. It doesn’t know what the truth is, do I mean, it’s not truth score, not how important score. And so we actually had to take the difficult decision to chuck away a load of that work and say, No, we’re just going back to a basic score. Now, of course, new customers come in and go, Oh, I wish you could do this. I wish you could do that. Can we do this? Yeah, we can do that. We did it. You don’t want to promise you. So we kind of now no more than them in that regard. We tried it, it doesn’t work. It has a negative effect. But it’d be every customer pretty much asked for it.
Matthew Todd
That’s interesting. I think he’s, it’s really good and shows that you genuinely are connected to the problem that you’re you’re willing to pull something from the product, if you think it is steering people in the wrong direction. Not enough people do that.
Daniel Pidcock
And that can be I mean, I suppose in a way you could, you could argue that we should have validated before we built that, that it wouldn’t work or you’d have that negative effect. But sometimes there’s some things you can’t learn to release. So it meant that we ended up spending time building something we had to check at the end, which is never a good thing. But it was important for us to do that. And to be honest about ourselves.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, absolutely. And do you find with your customer base being obviously deeply in products, and UX, does that create any kind of challenges, you know, does it kind of raise the bar that you then have to meet for your own UX as well? Does that make things a little bit more challenging?
Daniel Pidcock
Absolutely, there’s, it’s two sides to it. On one side, most of our customers are our product designers and product researchers, project managers, and they mostly work in digital products. We’ve got plenty customers that are in the service or physical product industry as well. Yeah, but they there’s still parallels with those. So the good side is for most part, they understand.
They’re also running teams and have so much so many hours in the day and such like, I suppose on the other side, they’re mostly very big companies. And we have lots of small startups and even individual researchers as well. But it tends to be the larger companies we work closest with, because it’s them we’re focused on. So the feedback I get is mostly from larger company customers. And of course, they’re used to having big budgets and big teams and fairly quick turnarounds. Whereas, you know, I would say we’re quite with a fast for such a small team, but we are very, very small team. We can only work on one thing at a time. Two things that most, you know backend and front end? So, yeah, that that can be particularly frustrating, because obviously I get detailed and a great deal of feedback. We’ve got a Slack community. I had a week off last week, first week off for a long time. And I came back in the feature bugs, channels were almost full of suggestions. And I mean, the bugs ones, the team on top off, but the feature suggestions there go in our backlog, and we have to prioritize them. And the customers good news is the customers will help us and to be honest with us about really do they do they want this? Or do they need this? This is a blocker? Or is this something that just be really nice? And so yeah, there’s there’s pros and cons. And they really understand the processes is the biggest pro?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, this is good that you’re not having to educate them on that. And that they, they do have that level of understanding as well.
Daniel Pidcock
And they know when we promise something, it won’t be tomorrow.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Daniel Pidcock
Exactly. And for the most parts weird, we tend to be very good at estimating our time, we’ve only had one project in in since we’ve been working with paying customers where we’ve gone over our, our budgeted time. But we actually said at the beginning, we don’t know how long this is going to take, we’re going to say we think it’s going to take two months, they end up taking more than double that. And actually our investors, I went to, at one stage and said we’re actually running over time on this, they weren’t done, don’t worry, we’ve never known a tech company investment actually deliver on time and deliver what they’ve said they’re going to do. So I think in that regard, we’ve been with customers, we’ve been communicating with them what to expect and when to expect it and managing their expectations. So I think that’s really helpful as well, if we were promising everything within a week, and then we took months to deliver it. Perhaps they’d be more frustrated.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, you got to be open honest with them. And then you, you get that back as well from them, don’t you?
Daniel Pidcock
Absolutely.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. You mentioned in investment there How? How has the business been, you know, funded and built? I know when we talked before as well, you kind of mentioned the importance of creating something that is sustainable and genuinely has value. I’d be interested in hearing a little bit about you know more about that.
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, so we, I started Glean.ly with a colleague and friend of mine that I was working with. And, so the first version of Glean.ly, the basic thing that we took to customers and to investors was built in our own time, weekends and evenings, both of us having young family as well. So that was that was a lot of fun.
The, so we had, we had a basic product, we had some customers lined up that were willing to pay for it. And that enabled us to get the first round of pre seed investment. And we got our pre seed investment, unusually from a VC company. So normally at that stage, you’d be angels or individuals. And it’s been actually a really positive experience, is the first time I’ve taken investment myself, I’ve worked for startups before and been in companies that have have raised investment and how to manage investors and such like, I’ve never been directly in front of them necessarily.
So that was very much a learning experience. The thing we really struggled with and struggle with now is we’re a b2b company. And building a product that most investors probably don’t really understand, they may probably understand that there is a need for knowledge and knowledge, retention, sharing that knowledge. But for most investment investors, if they have worked in tech, they haven’t worked in tech for a long time. And they probably even then we’re working in a different part of it, maybe not quite, actually within tech team. So you know, they’re used to receiving reports, and they probably don’t see anything wrong with that. So it’s investors invest in what they understand and what they know rightly so.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Daniel Pidcock
And we kind of are aiming the kind of people that are would be investors. So that’s been a really real struggle, not just to explain what it is, but the scale of the opportunity and how many custom companies can use this and I get asked all the time. Well, how many companies have UX teams? Well, first of all, it’s not just for UX people, but all big companies, basically. All companies have UX and it’s, it’s been really interesting. Through COVID go slightly off subject here, please excuse me, but it’s been really interesting during COVID speaking to UX teams around different companies, and in lots of different industries. So we’ll have a company like semi world come to us and get say, every time Boris Johnson goes on the TV, our signups rocket, it doesn’t matter what he’s talking about whether he’s talking about obesity or not, it must be something about Boris Johnson. But every time that anything, anyone mentions anything to do with COVID, on TV, people sign up to send me one. And so we’re finding it hard to manage all of these new subscribers and dealing with this opportunity. And the company is turning to the UX team to help manage that. And then they speak to another company. I won’t mention any names, but it’d be obvious, it would affect almost all airlines, we’ve got a couple of airlines on our books. And they will say, Yeah, done. It’s really difficult right now, you know, we’ve lost 90% of our revenue. This is obviously before the restrictions lifted. And the company, you know, we’re losing, we’re losing hundreds, if not 1000s of our colleagues, and they’re turning to the UX team to solve that problem. And it seems like whatever happens within a company, whether it’s good or bad, UX will deal with it.
Which is great news, I suppose for for me and my industry and my product. But yeah, it is interesting that companies seem to have now not just realized that UX exists. But now see, it is kind of the magic, sticking plaster for whatever needs to be done.
Matthew Todd
So agile ways of working. UX is almost a next thing.
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, it was design thinking or, yeah, those kinds of things. It’s, it’s now we’ll get we’ll get some UX people on it. That’s how we deal with it. Problem solvers, I suppose. I mean, it makes sense. And it certainly is certainly a positive thing, especially for for my company. But I think the industry is as a whole UX people starting to be recognized as being able to solve problems, which is great. With that being slightly over.
You know, the expectations are slightly too high, perhaps? I don’t know, we’ll see. But the yes, so the question I get from investors is, you know, how big is how big is the problem? How big is the market? And it’s hard to quantify how big it is. Because even I’m surprised. And as I say, I meet all these companies that I didn’t even know existed, and they have these massive scale, UX and insights team.
So the problem for us now, so when we actually, let me go back, so when we raise the first seed investment, that was very exciting, but it came, I talked about COVID. And that came at a time when COVID in the UK was at its peak. It was where the stock market, if you remember when the stock market absolutely crashed to the floor. I was sitting behind a computer tried desperately to get this, you know, talk to that lawyer. And that’s This is the investors over here and trying to get everything signed, our solicitors were being particularly difficult and picking up on every tiny little thing to everyone’s frustration, and our investors like, Guys, we need to get this sorted because our investors are questioning, you know, what is money worth even any more, as you know, do we still have a stock market it was that kind of the world is imploding. So if you want this money, we need to get this done.
Sadly, at the same time, my wife’s mum was, was dying, and my wife was full time caring for her at home at her mum’s house, while she had a last few weeks, and we had a young daughter only a couple of months old. So it did feel like it was definitely the most stressful time in my life. And I think only part of that was to do with raising investment. Since then, our investors have been great. They’ve been lovely people to work with. They haven’t tried to get away the business, though advice had been invaluable. And you know, I don’t consider myself really a business person. I’m a product person. And we’ve been really lucky that one of our individual investors we’ve got is actually ex CFO of IKEA. So I’ve been able to, you know, kind of bend his ear for financial advice and that kind of strategical advice, which has been great. So our investment experience has been really positive. The struggle we’re having now where we’re now at a point where we want to raise kind of cool C funding. So we can kind of scale massively. We’re growing organically. But what we need to do is kind of really hypercharged that. So the problem we have now is one explaining to investors, who we are what we do and what the scale of business is. The other thing is because we’re not trying to raise millions were and we’re not trying to raise a precede round. We’re kind of in a bit of a no man’s land so that can be frustrating as well. And I’ve had a lot of pitch calls with companies where I’ve told them how much we’re trying to raise and at the end like, yeah, so our minimum check size is excellent. Yeah, well, that’s like, four times what we’re trying to raise at the moment.
And, you know, we’ve wasted each other’s time. It’s frustrating, because I’ve said at the beginning, this is what we’re trying to raise. This is what we’re trying to do. And, and those calls take a lot out of you. And a lot of work involved. Yeah. Have you done that kind of thing, Matt?
Matthew Todd
Yes, yeah. I’ve been involved in a lot of the the prep for that, as well as yeah, some of those calls. And, yeah, it’s a lot of effort on both parts. So it is the trouble one, you know, investors have researchers, and you know, they’ve got quotas to meet for a number of meetings booked. And the rest of it sometimes, you know, you mentioned that evidence metrics, sometimes I think they’re also incentivized for the wrong metrics. So therefore, you do end up in a situation where actually, it probably isn’t going to be a good fit.
Daniel Pidcock
Yea one of the most common questions I get asked is, you know, kind of what’s, what’s your signup rate? What’s your profit, all this kind of thing. And so we’re, you know, we’re making money basically, we’re technically profitable right now, only just and it changes on a monthly basis, if I’m being honest. But the, you know, it’s, it’s that’s grown organically, there’s so you know, we make more money than Uber.
It’s the truth of it, you know, we make more money than deliveroo. A lot more money, because we’re not in any debt, we’re making money. And that’s not what they want to hear. They want to hear like, yeah, we, they want, they want BS, basically. And that’s the thing that’s really frustrating. I’m a UX person. And I’m very data driven. As a person, I’d like to think I’m very honest, but I also, I find it hard to self aggrandizing. And kind of, you know, blow smoke, and that’s not a good thing for raising money. And actually, I’ve had investors and advice from from people in that industry saying, Yeah, you need to just basically add a zero to that figure, you know, make up some kind of some term to, and it’s like, well, no, I’m not doing that. If I don’t have the evidence to say, this is what we’re going to do. I’m not going to say we’re going to do it. And the figures we’ve got are good enough on their own.
Oh, yeah, you need to say you’re going to, you know, basically, I was going to use a phrase that my dad would use, and I don’t know, you’d have to I have to beat this. But, you know, do wonders and shit thunders. And the, the, and that’s fine. I believe in our company. I know that we can do wonderful things. But there’s a reason why I can’t remember his name, but the chap that wework managed to raise all of these billions of pounds on a company that, you know, actually just didn’t work fundamentally. And it’s because he was good at B essing. And it’s, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, yeah, there’s, there’s a few people I can think of, in the public eye, who are seeing these wonderful business people and actually just, you know, B essers.
There’s the recent, the the lady, threaten us, she’s actually been put in prison now for fraud. And it seems that the difference between what she was doing that’s considered illegal, and she’s now locked up for, and what a lot of, you know, very successful tech founders are doing, I can’t really necessarily see the difference there. And it’s not how I want to operate, I don’t want to be a business, that, that doesn’t make money, I don’t want to be a business that doesn’t provide value and actually do something. I don’t want anyone to put their hard earned money into our company, and may not be truthful about that situation. And that’s probably the probably going to be one doing to be honest.
Matthew Todd
No, I think it’s a good way to run a business and grow a business. And I think not every investor, but you know, there are a significant number of investors, you know, especially a very US centric model. And what we’re trying to bring with this podcast is, you know, more diverse opinions and perspectives on that, but there’s a lot of things that are kind of growth at any cost. And then we will choose when we turn that profit lever or sell it to someone with the intention that they will then pay an awful lot of money for and assume that they can then flip that switch to make it you know, massively profitable whenever they choose. And I I don’t think that is a sustainable way. I think there are a lot of casualties with or even true.
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a good example is, you know, I talked about Just Eat earlier. So this that’s an industry I know fairly well. And I remember I was working at Just Eat when their their shares were downgraded by the Bank of England because the guy at the Bank of England was looking at his window and he was seen delivery bikes going left, right and, you know, but he wasn’t seen Just Eat bikes going left right. And what he didn’t realize is we’ll just eat doesn’t have bikes or didn’t know that stage and if you see any there actually been bought and paid for by the by the restaurant with a hefty discount for having the logo on the side. And you know, their model of actually doing the logistics, which is the difficult and expensive bit actually isn’t all that sustainable isn’t all that growing, growth orientated.
Just Eat was very clever in that when they started, they didn’t focus on London. They were started in Norway, if I’m not mistaken, and David Buttress who was CEO for a long time and oversaw their massive growth put them to the UK. But he focused on the smaller cities. And the smaller towns towns big enough to sustain the company just didn’t have plenty of restaurants and plenty people wanting food, but didn’t have the competitive nature of London, etc, which I think is really clever. And I know that the method of choosing whether to go into a company or a country, sorry, or leaving a country was can we be the biggest, and their biggest metric, what their business metric for the biggest is number one, at least four times bigger than number two, because they had learned that’s the only way they could turn a profit, it seems insane. All they’re doing is saying this guy over here wants a pizza, and taking 20% for the privilege. But they had worked out they could only turn a profit if they’re number one and at least four times bigger than number two. And if they’re not four times bigger than number two, they’ll either by number two or leave that market.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Daniel Pidcock
And that is why that they they grew to the extent they did, and they’re struggling a bit more now, I think. But the and then delivery, obviously has been doing very well. But they’re not making any money, quite the opposite. And when COVID hits, probably a lot of people know this already. But it really caused them a lot of problems. Because every time they sold a meal, it would cost them money. And suddenly, with COVID like they were selling a lot more meals than they were expecting to so losing a lot more money than they’re expecting to.
That isn’t a business, that’s a charity. I’m paying my money for you to eat it that isn’t that isn’t isn’t a business I? And obviously, you know, there’s people a lot smarter than me that will say, well, okay, well the thing is, is then we get market share, etc. But if your business can be scuppered by people using it, that doesn’t, that doesn’t make sense to me. It just doesn’t. And I think that it’s probably a naivety, but yeah, I, you know, we don’t have a freemium version of our product, maybe we should do, we have a free trial of our products.
Daniel Pidcock
The people with the most valuable knowledge, you know, especially developers, for instance, in a tech company, very rarely they’re included in the conversation around knowledge management.
We charge per user, which I’m not happy with. One of the struggles we have is when we, when we were in alpha mode, the companies paid a small fee to have access to it. And then they just had open access. And it meant that everybody in the organization could have access to the repository and could contribute and collaborate. Every other product on the market has a per seat pricing. So you have researchers that pay and non researchers that don’t. Now, this is this is a problem for us. Because I know that companies are more successful if everybody in the organization can be involved with that. I fundamentally personally just don’t like this kind of gatekeeping of I’m a researcher, I can create knowledge, you’re not you don’t your knowledge isn’t valuable enough to record, I think doesn’t make sense to me. And quite often the people with the most valuable knowledge, you know, especially developers, for instance, in a tech company, very rarely they’re included in the conversation around knowledge management. And I suppose they have their own things like GitHub and such like but, and JIRA, and tools like that, but it’s slightly different kind of knowledge, right?
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Daniel Pidcock
So, yeah. So we had to make a decision, how can we do this? Do we just have a set fee? And how do we create that set fee that it’s not only fair for all different sized companies, because obviously, if we say, we charge 10 grand, okay, that’s gonna be great value for a big company like Adobe, it’s gonna be really crappy for that individual who’s working on a small project.
And you know, that if we say, Okay, well, you will limit it in some way, then the big companies are going to say, well, we’ll buy the cheapest one, because we only have three researchers who need three licenses, and then missing all of those 50 people that would have had the value. We don’t know we’re not solving anything there. So that’s been a real struggle. We haven’t solved that yet. If anyone listening has got any ideas, please get in touch. So.
Matthew Todd
Have you ever thought about, not not to kind of jump in and turn it into a consultation? But have you looked at other metrics that that do align incentives, like the amount of information stored versus the number of people contributing to that? Have you kind of explored those kind of areas?
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, I wouldn’t say we’ve tested those, but we definitely thought about things like that. And I suppose the problem is fundamentally, when you charge for something, it’s like a tax, you tax the things you don’t want, right? So we’re taxing the amount of users. So it means that there. And the reason we decided just to stick with that at the moment, it’s because it’s the easiest for customers to understand. It’s easy just to be compared by it’s the easiest, and that isn’t a good answer for solution. But it’s the truthful one.
Matthew Todd
Well yeah it’s a low kind of barrier, I suppose if if customers are used to those kinds of pricing models its something they understand already.
Daniel Pidcock
If we have a limit on the amount of knowledge stored, for instance, the, well first of all, the amount of knowledge isn’t a reflection of of value, which has been really interesting, we have some customers that, you know, let’s say we have two customers the same size. And one is, there’s 50 people in there all the time constantly doing something like whenever I look at look at their account, is just, you know, firing away and doing all sorts. And there’s another one that, you know, just blips once or twice a week, there’s something happening or maybe once a month, or adding something to it. And when I speak to those customers, it actually you don’t know which ones getting the value, they might vote on the values by neither. So the amount of use certainly isn’t a reflection of value, which is interesting. But the dangerous if we if we charge based on the amount of knowledge that that say they started deleting when they start hitting a level. And that’s the worst possible thing. You know, we already had to explain, no, you don’t get rid of anything, because someone would come along in the future and learn from that knowledge.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Daniel Pidcock
So yeah, it’s a difficult one. And obviously, then also, if we charged by amount of knowledge, it’s hard to compare, compare us, which could be good or bad, really, I suppose. Depending how we play it.
I suppose we’re not at the scale that we need to worry too much about that at the moment. But it’s something I’d like to change and solve and maybe just ended up I think, once we have more data to the average amount of different organizations spend, we could probably start looking at say, right, we’re just gonna have a flat fee where you have unlimited use.
Matthew Todd
I see.
Daniel Pidcock
This kind of scale, and then like a smaller one for individuals or something.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. And I guess, you know, coming from the products, UX background that you have been designing, you said, you’re very much a product person, how have you found you know, the challenges of all selling?
Daniel Pidcock
I don’t find selling difficult at all. I’m not sales person, but I am passionate about the product. I know the industry really well. I’m lucky that I’m working in an industry that is very receptive to new ideas, first of all, yeah. And they appreciates honesty and forthrightness. So if I did go in, you know, doing what, you know, investors expect to UX customers. And this does tend to be UX teams that bring us into an organization.
So it tends to be researchers and UX designers and those kind of people within a team that I’m speaking to and making the decisions about whether to bring a product. And that’s the other good thing as well. They tend to be decision makers, they tend to have a budget and allowed to choose which tools they want to use. So that’s quite great. Very rarely do we need to go up the chain.
The but yeah, the, if I went in there and be like, Yeah, this is the best thing on earth. It’s awesome. Guys, come on and get involved. Yeah, you’ll love it, you’ll love it. They’ll be like, alright, this person’s an idiot.
And I’ve actually, I’ve had a few people say, oh, yeah, your competitor, X, Y, and Zed, or they’re using, they’re using salespeople, salespeople, and they’re like, Oh, my God, it just, we can’t, can’t bear it. And what they want is honesty. So I’ll show them the product or talk them through how it works. I showed them where we’re where we’re lacking, and where we’re strong. And they’ll be really honest about you know, we know this isn’t great. And we’re dealing with that that will be done in this timeframe. And we know this is a problem. And we don’t know how to deal with that. So if you any ideas.
And this is where we’re really strong, and that works in this industry. It works really well. I can just show the product and get excited about it in a real way, you know, in an authentic way and but mostly go in there looking to solve their problems. The first questions I’m asking is I think any salesperson would actually is what do you need? What are you suffering with? And how can we solve it, but also been open to say, No, we can’t solve that. And it has happened a few times where there’s a particular need that a lot of customers have, and I have to say we don’t do that. I don’t think we ever will because it kind of falls out of scope for our product. And if you want that, either you need another tool to do that and our product or you know, just not, you know, not our product at all.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s interesting. I think it shows that problem, you know, kind of centered approach. And you talk about, they were salespeople, but I’d argue those are bad salespeople, because I think all good salespeople should be as passionate as you clearly are about solving the problem, because that brings the best quality customers on board.
Daniel Pidcock
I think it’s difficult for anybody that isn’t a UX person to sell a product like this. So it doesn’t know the industry very well, because I gotta be honest with you. There’s nothing complicated about UX, we make a big deal about all we’ve all these fancy names for things, there’s a lot of gatekeeping in our industry.
And there is a lot of nuance it’s but fundamentally, UX is, is easy to do. And there’s a lot to learn to do it really well. But it’s easy to do this, this is not brain surgery, by any any stretch of the imagination. And but when talking to mostly the people who are making these decisions about the product, they are very much that far and have really experienced researchers and UX designers, etc, or product people. And so they have very high expectations, they’ve got very clear defined objectives and an idea of both the problems they’ve got and how how they want to solve it, or what they expect from the product. And someone to come in without knowing that industry quite intently, is going to really struggle to be able to talk to them, talk to them on their the same level. You know, I don’t mean that in you know, in a disrespectful way. It’s just different knowledge areas, right.
And so it’s like trying to sell a car to a car designer, you know, it’s a, it’s a product, it’s a design is a product to people who design products, you know, or a car engineer, perhaps the, you know, it’s different to selling to the average person. So I think that they’ve already got a problem that and it’s, I can understand why they bought salespeople in, because there aren’t enough UX people at the moment. And UX people tend not to be the kind of people who want or are particularly good at sales job that they’re not interested in that side of things. So you can’t really be can’t hire an OD UX people, it’d be too expensive, first of all, and they’re just not interested in that they want to be designing products. What are you going to do? How are you going to scale a sales team? So yeah, something that we need to face as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think it’s interesting, any kind of technical b2b product like this? Has a you need to say, yeah, you need to, as you said, to kind of have that real understanding and the connection. But then once you do have that, and you have that experience, you, you really will resonate with the people that you’re trying to reach because you deeply understand the problems that they’re facing. And you’re talking in their terms. So yeah, it’s not the project, the product, fundamentally the product has has to work it has to work has to provide value. Yeah, you have to be able to show the people who are buying it, but it will do so.
Daniel Pidcock
And if you can automate that, then hopefully you won’t need salespeople. Yeah, you can’t you can’t BS people in this industry. Absolutely not. And I suppose that’s, that’s the reason that we’ve got a successful product, and why I’m finding it hard to raise money.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, interesting that there’s yeah, pros and cons to that. But I, I would argue that the quality of that approach, and therefore the quality of that product can only can only be a good thing, like, as you said earlier about that kind of BS investment. You’re, you’re kind of sidestepping that, which Yeah, it might make it harder to raise investment. But I suppose when you do get that investment, you’ll have the right investors on board that’s that truly support that kind of mission and vision.
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose what we really need is, you know, they must exist, like kind of UX investors, I wonder if that must be a thing. And I suppose the there’s another thing that is fundamentally opposed in investment and that world to, to how I see things, which is building a sustainable business that that provides value, and, you know, delivers a product and you know, because for the most part, investors don’t want you to make money. They don’t care about that. And as we said, you know, they they want growth at all costs. So the next investors come in and provide the value. So investors aren’t investing in products or what the product provides. They don’t care about the customers other than as a KPI. They don’t care about value at all. What they care about is, is that it meets its next fundraising objectives.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, and I guess it’s different timeframes of thinking, isn’t it? Are they in it for a shorter timeframe than you are trying to optimize for and that can create some challenges and almost like a false customer, where you’re no longer serving your real customers, but you’re serving your investors instead?
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, absolutely. That definitely can happen and does happen. And I think it’s extremely common. We’ve been lucky so far, that’s our natural growth and kind of natural cadence has met the objectives of our investors.
But I could see if that was misaligned, that would cause a lot of problems and cause company owners to be pushing for things like, you know, we say, losing money on each sale, grabbing, you know, growing, and bringing on maybe even lying to customers over selling your products and under delivering just to build those KPIs at one end, and not worrying too much about the other end, because it means we’re going to get the next investment, we’re gonna get that 10 grand investment, we’re gonna get that 60 grand at six to 10 grand, what sort of 10 million and 60 million? Yeah, you know, 150 million billion pound investment right now a massive company, now we can focus on actually making some money. Something like COVID hits, and it’s too late.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. That’s why I think you’ve got to find the right business model and the right investment model that that goes along with that. But I think, you know, as far as I’m concerned, I think you’re approaching it from a very genuine problem oriented perspective, that means you are going to get that brand loyalty and you mentioned, you know, customers renewing for year three, etc. That’s what happens if you do that, right.
Daniel Pidcock
Yeah, hopefully. So are thing now is making sure there’s that pipeline has been filled from the other end. Yeah, actually, one of our growth, things have been people. People in tech tend to move around quite a lot. And it sounds strange, but one of our I wouldn’t say it’s our biggest but one of our notable growth areas, are people leaving one company go into another and say, Well, yeah, we should use legally we use it.
Matthew Todd
Growth strategy is to be aware of people that have exposure moving.
Daniel Pidcock
I don’t I don’t know how you could call it a strategy, because it’s definitely completely passive. Start encouraging people to leave their jobs.
Matthew Todd
No, no.
Daniel Pidcock
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And in fact, they say we don’t they, they tend to come to us. And it’s, it’s quite gratifying. Having demo calls and sales meetings and seeing faces, I recognize it means it’s working, it means that whatever happens, we’re providing a valuable product. But I do recognize there’s many products out there that were good and better than the competitors and didn’t make it. So I’m not naive to know that that’s the be all and end all. It’s yeah. But I suppose as a product person, that’s what I’ve been focused on is building good product.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, absolutely. Building good products and helping others to do the same.
Daniel Pidcock
That dichotomy of product and business.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And I, but I think, you know, there’s a lot of people talking about things like product lead growth, that really do, you know, highlight the importance of, you know, putting your product in front of your prospective customers, and ensuring that they do see and recognize and get that value from it. You know, thankfully, we are we are seeing kind of that, that kind of area and methodology, if you like, you know, becoming more popular.
Daniel Pidcock
Do you think consumers are becoming more aware of, of quality?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think given you know, the number of products they are exposed to the number of platforms they’re exposed to online, I think they have more people have more options than they ever had before. Therefore, they have to make more decisions than they ever have done before. So I think the the quality really does shine through and I think, truly resonating with your customers, you know, being able to speak their language and truly understand their problems, I think is becoming ever more important. I think, you know, the mistakes we see a lot of people making and certainly from a marketing perspective, are, you know, trying to do b2b marketing a bit like as an E commerce brands, you know, a few years ago where you should get away with more transactional kind of marketing techniques and tactics, but everyone’s seen that, everyone’s tired of that no one needs another PDF that, you know, we all except it’s just an expensive way for you to buy someone else’s email just doesn’t really add that much value when people see through that now and that what they really respect is a proper connection with the brand, the products, the problem that is trying to solve and I think authenticity of that, then you’re not just trying to pull a fast one and, and get them using something for the wrong reasons that doesn’t solve their problems.
Daniel Pidcock
And I suppose it’s, you know, with the breadth of the internet also becomes it the other side, which is that you’re much closer to that brands, customers as well, you can hear that actual real, authentic experiences very easily. So if a company isn’t looking after those customers aren’t delivering on what they’re promised, they’re quickly going to get a reputation, right? you’d hope?
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Especially in niche areas like this, you know, I imagine if you, you know, we’re doing a really bad job of acquiring customers. And as you were saying earlier on, you know, if you had accepted the however many companies were on that waitlist, you know, and a time where they probably would have been disappointed, you know, news or spread within that, that area of the industry?
Daniel Pidcock
Yes, it’s quite a tight industry in that regard. The UX industry, certainly. And that has its has its benefits, as you know, the process has spread and the name of our company has spread. And but yeah, absolutely. I suppose you as you always people say you’re only as good as your last customer, and it’d be very easy to to lose that trust.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think that trust is, is key. And we’re quite aware of time, and I don’t want to keep you too long. But before we kind of wrap things up, was there anything else kind of for our audience that you, you know, you would like to get across or you think is valuable to them?
Daniel Pidcock
There’s nothing I can think of I know, we had a list of things we’re going to talk about?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think we’ve covered that really, really well. And I think people should take a lot away from this conversation about the importance of being true to solving that problem, and not trying to rush things for vanity metrics, either, you know, fooling yourself or for the purposes of other parties, I think there’s a lot to be said in what we’ve talked about that, you know, really understanding that problem and genuinely trying to solve it in the right way. So I hope people do pay attention to that. And as we’ve talked about, quality of not just products, but entire experience, you know, I hope people do take that on board and try and implement, at least to some of this approach.
Daniel Pidcock
I mean, that’s, that’s obviously experiences is the thing that my profession is completely focused on. There’s a reason why, you know, the biggest companies in the world are investing so heavily in that not focused on that. And, you know, not just in the case of putting the sticking plaster on it, but also because, you know, the, the experience is the thing, right? And I suppose that’s one of the reasons why UX teams are being put into all sorts of different situations and up against all sorts of challenges, that there might not have been in the past, just because, you know, something is ill defined as experience or so why does experience can mean that it’s, it has a wide scope, but yeah, the, it if I do believe if a if a, if a product can solve that, it first of all, solve a problem and solve it in a way that customers have a good experience, whether that is just being satisfied, or to the point of singing, singing, singing the praises of the company. And, and we spoke briefly about designing for extremes. And I think that’s one of the reasons I believe in that is quite often, people think about designing for the 80%. And you know, sort of, you know, the 20% should be less of a focus, because then you’ve got 80% of the market surely, but actually when you design for that 20% then you have 20% of the market that will never go anywhere else that really love you. And probably what I tend to find is if you design when I say for the 20% even for the 1% the people at the far end of that spectrum that really are struggling. That’s when you actually end up bringing a long the rest of the 99%.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that. And I think that’s a really good place to leave it if anyone is interested in what we’re talking about, not just from the business building perspective, but also from the UX and research perspective, where’s the best place for them to head to find out more about but your approach about your platform as well.
Daniel Pidcock
If you’re interested in having a look at Glean.ly, please go to Glean.ly. So G L E A N dot L EY, we’ve got a 30 day free trial. And it’s not just for UX people. So anybody have any company that deals with knowledge, will hopefully be interested in that. And I’d love any feedback. Any thoughts you have on it? If you’d like to talk to me get in contact. I’m on Twitter at Dan.Piddy. That’s p i d d y.
Matthew Todd
Cool, perfect. And I’ll make sure we include those links for people in the description as well. But yeah, once again, thank you for taking the time to sort this morning. I think it has been a really, really interesting conversation from my perspective, but I think our audience will will get a lot of value out of this as well. And I wish you all the best of luck in in taking Glean.ly for the next steps of starting to scale that growth.
Daniel Pidcock
Thank you so much, Matt, and thank you so much for having me on here as well.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the scaler. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website inside the scale app.com can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from.
Thank you for listening