Matthew Todd  0:00  
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  1:04  
Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. 

Matthew Todd  1:07  
No worries. So yeah, over to you tell our listeners about you and your your business.

Daniel Pidcock  1:13  
So my name is Daniel Pidcock. I'm a UX researcher and designer, and I have a product called Glean.ly. 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. 

Matthew Todd  2:20  
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 Glean.ly in the first place? 

Daniel Pidcock  2:38  
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, Tomer 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. 

Matthew Todd  8:17  
Yeah, yeah. 

Daniel Pidcock  8:18  
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  9:48  
Yeah, 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  9:57  
Is it mostly UK demographic? Most yeah, 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  11:49  
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  12:01  
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  12:41  
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  13:09  
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. 

And they said, Yeah, we've got this problem, or you need to speak to moo.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  17:51  
Anyone scared of losing them as a customer? 

Daniel Pidcock  17:54  
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 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. 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 air table, you know, we were using air table 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.

Yeah, so in that regard, we were kind of releasing far too. 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  1:05:02  
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  1:05:22  
If you're interested in having a look at Glean.ly, please go to Glean.ly. So G L E A N dot L Y, 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  1:05:53  
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 talk 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  1:06:16  
Thank you so much, Matt, and thank you so much for having me on here as well.

Matthew Todd  1:06:23  
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today's guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.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