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Building the Bloomberg Terminal for Labor Markets: How Revelio Labs Found Product-Market Fit by Starting Outside HR

The evolution of financial markets from relationship-driven phone calls to sophisticated data analytics isn’t just ancient history – it’s a blueprint for transformation. That’s the inspiring story that sparked Ben Zweig’s vision for Revelio Labs after reading “Capital Ideas” by Peter Bernstein.

“Someday someone’s going to tell the history of how labor markets became sophisticated. And I really want to be part of that history,” Ben explains, describing how the book catalyzed his mission to bring the same level of sophistication to workforce analytics that revolutionized finance decades ago.

What makes Revelio Labs’ story particularly interesting is how they found their initial product-market fit in an unexpected place. While the company’s ultimate vision was to transform HR analytics, their earliest traction came from a different direction entirely.

“We kind of got sidetracked a little bit because we found this huge opportunity in selling to hedge funds and private equity firms and sell side research groups and VCs,” Ben reveals. “And really they are in the business of understanding companies without having an affiliation to those companies.”

This opportunistic pivot proved crucial to their early growth. Rather than forcing their way into HR departments, they found eager customers in the investment world who already understood the value of alternative data sources for company analysis.

The company’s core innovation is what Ben calls a “universal HR database” – essentially reconstructing detailed workforce insights about companies using purely public data. “Every company’s got their own HR data and that’s a locked box. They don’t share that with anyone,” Ben explains. “And we are trying to collect the universe of public employment records and try to reconstruct or approximate the HR database for every company.”

Their expansion beyond investment firms followed a natural progression: “I’d say we started investment management, then our next big splash was in consulting. So we work with all the major consulting firms because they’re also in the business of understanding companies more deeply and without necessarily needing to get into their systems.”

What’s particularly noteworthy about Revelio Labs’ execution is their intensely product-focused approach. As Ben notes, “Right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code. Everyone’s really hands on.”

The company’s biggest GTM challenge emerged as they expanded into corporate markets. “Breaking into the corporate market… it’s been hard just because it is a fragmented market and you don’t really know who the buyers are necessarily,” Ben shares. Unlike the investment world where there are clear paths to data buyers, corporate sales cycles proved more complex: “In a company, the user is not always the buyer, and maybe the decision maker is two levels above.”

Their success in navigating this challenge came from recognizing that corporate customers often already know their problems – they just need solutions. As Ben explains: “These end users, they are very often familiar with their sets of problems. Sometimes they’ll just come to us and they’ll say, oh, here are five challenges I have in my role. And we’ll say, okay, we can basically solve one, two, three, and four.”

Looking ahead, Revelio Labs aims to become as ubiquitous in HR as Bloomberg is in finance. “In ten years, I really would like to see a Revellia Labs terminal on the computer of every person who works in HR, just like a Bloomberg terminal is used by everyone in finance,” Ben shares.

Their next major frontier involves combining their external data insights with companies’ internal HR data: “We have a lot of data that companies themselves don’t have. We have a better sense of the skills that people have and where they go, when they leave and where they come from… so I think we’d like to come into a company and say, we can incorporate your own data and the external data and give you the best of both worlds.”

Revelio Labs’ journey offers a masterclass in finding product-market fit: sometimes the fastest path to your ultimate vision isn’t the most direct one. By starting with investment firms who already understood the value of their data, they built a strong foundation before tackling the more complex challenge of transforming HR analytics.