From Data Science Consultancy to AI-Powered Platform: Zenlytic’s Pivot to Product
The most valuable startups often emerge from founders who’ve lived their customers’ problems firsthand. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Zenlytic founder Ryan Janssen revealed how his company’s consulting origins shaped their path to building a revolutionary business intelligence platform.
The Consulting Days: A Front-Row Seat to Customer Problems
Before Zenlytic became a product company, Ryan and his co-founder ran a data science consultancy that gave them unique insights into how companies struggled with data. “We were actually working with dozens of companies from startups to Fortune 500s basically. And we had a front row seat to how they used or failed to use their data,” Ryan explains.
The Parallel Revolutions
Their journey began at the intersection of two significant developments. While studying machine learning and data science, they witnessed the birth of transformer models that would revolutionize AI. “The famous paper, Attention is All You Need, which kind of underpins the development of the transformer… came out while we were studying together,” Ryan recalls.
Simultaneously, through their consulting work, they observed a massive shift in how companies stored and processed data. “There had been tremendous advancements in data pipelines over the past couple of years. Every company has more data than ever before, but nobody’s really using it to its full capacity,” Ryan notes.
The Technical-Business Gap
Their consulting experience revealed a stark contrast between technical capabilities and business reality. “When you’re a big nerd like me, and you’re good at Python or SQL or whatever, it was remarkable how fast we could actually go from cold to the most well-informed person in the room by just doing a couple of hours of data exploration as consultants,” Ryan shares.
This efficiency highlighted a critical problem: while technical experts could quickly derive insights from data, business users lacked the tools to achieve similar results. This revelation would become the foundation for Zenlytic’s product vision.
The Pivot to Product
When ChatGPT launched in December 2022, it catalyzed Zenlytic’s transformation. “Within an hour of that coming out, we just seen the capabilities of that tech, and we said, okay, it’s time to accelerate and double down on this,” Ryan explains.
But rather than simply building another AI tool, they leveraged their consulting insights to create something more valuable. They focused on making data analysis as accessible to business users as it was to technical experts.
Building for the Real World
Their consulting experience also informed their market approach. They chose to focus on mid-market companies, identifying a sweet spot where their solution could provide the most value. “We like the mid market sales cycles versus long enterprise sales cycles… the sweet spot for us is something like our customers mostly have revenues between sort of 15 and $500 million a year,” Ryan notes.
The Road Ahead
Looking to the future, Zenlytic sees itself as the next evolution in business intelligence. Ryan traces the industry’s development through previous innovations: “Ten years ago or whatever, there’s Tableau. And Tableau was the first person to really crush building great dashboards… After that came Looker. Looker was the first tool to really popularize the semantic layer in modern history.”
Now, with the emergence of powerful language models, Zenlytic aims to pioneer the next wave of business intelligence tools, making data analysis as natural as having a conversation.
The transformation from consultancy to product company wasn’t just a business pivot – it was a natural evolution informed by deep market understanding and technical expertise. For founders, Zenlytic’s journey demonstrates the value of starting with customer problems and building solutions based on real-world experience rather than just technological possibilities.