The Glean playbook: Create demand, build to scale from day one

“Every single person in the world has this problem. And yet there are no products to buy. And that got me excited… I felt I could actually go and build a good product in this domain.”

If you work for a large enterprise long enough, you probably know the frustration of not being able to find basic information like a benefits policy or specification document a former colleague created.?

For this week’s Building One, I talk to Arvind Jain , CEO and founder of Glean , an AI-based service and assistant for enterprises that allows employees to easily search and find answers across the company’s entire knowledge base. I’ve long believed that this new wave of AI will have its greatest impact in enterprise products, and Glean is a great example of that.

It was a familiar pain point at Arvind’s previous companies. Unable to find anything on the market to address it, he set out to create the solution himself.

"Despite a lot of indication and a lot of guidance from the market that we need to do something different…fundamentally It came back to my own personal pain point — and the pain point everybody who I know has — which is that people do find it hard to find information at work”

Arvind, whose experience includes Google’s Distinguished Engineer title, is a great proponent of leading with belief — going with your gut when there's no empirical evidence to support your hypothesis. But Arvind threaded that needle to create a business that others either did see the need for or didn't think they could.

Creating demand for your product

"For search, you come and ask a question. After that, if you actually spend some good amount of time on a document, and you don't do another search very quickly and refine your searches — that's a good indication that the user actually found something useful."

Just like any company, Glean gets product metrics like successful searches that result in dwell time or unsuccessful searches that result in short bounce rates. But that was not enough. There was no demand for their product, and they had to create it. For that, they not only show qualitative data from employees that indicated how valuable the product was for them, but also, they measure time-saved so they can prove to a CFO and CIO the productivity gains. Arvind also shared a case study of a narrow field like customer service can show material productivity gains.?

Why Glean built with scale right from the beginning

"We knew that this is a pain point that large enterprises are going to have even more than midsize companies. So we built with that assumption that our customer is going to be the world's largest companies.”

Conventional wisdom holds that it’s more appropriate to start with a narrow use case that is not meant to scale, and only after proving the main value proposition, attempt to scale. That's the opposite of what Arvind did. He knew his customers would be not just any enterprise, but the world's largest companies, so his team built the product with scale in mind from the beginning. Glean's engineers were hired or exactly that mindset.

Figure out how to balance scalability with customization, which most enterprise startups struggle with

"Every customer is gonna take you in a different direction. And it's very hard to actually say no to them because you need that revenue … you have to share with them honestly what your roadmap is and what capabilities you actually can provide to them."?

It's important to listen intently to your customers, but you also need to know how to hold the line on your own product road map, especially when the ability to scale is so key to your product success. Otherwise you’ll get pulled in many directions with customizations. If you don't do what your customer asks you to, you might lose the customer. But if you do everything that they want, you'll fail for sure. This is a tricky balance to achieve and you need to build strong conviction in your roadmap.?

?? Check out the full episode for many more great insights. Listen, follow and rate the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.