Revelio Labs’ Playbook: How Starting with the Wrong Customer Led to Product-Market Fit

The conventional wisdom in B2B tech is to focus relentlessly on your target market. But what if your fastest path to product-market fit comes from an unexpected direction? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Revelio Labs founder Ben Zweig shared how starting with the “wrong” customers ultimately accelerated their mission to transform HR analytics.

Revelio Labs began with a clear vision: to do for labor markets what Bloomberg did for financial markets. As Ben explains: “The idea for Valley Lives was really to kind of do for labor markets what visionaries like Myron Scholes or Harry Markowitz or whatever did for finance and also what companies like Bloomberg and others have done for finance and create this ubiquitous source of shared information.”

But their journey took an unexpected turn when they discovered that hedge funds and private equity firms were eager customers for their workforce analytics platform. “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 “detour” proved invaluable for three key reasons:

First, investment firms already understood the value of alternative data sources, eliminating the need for market education. While HR departments needed to be convinced of the value of external workforce data, hedge funds immediately grasped its potential for understanding companies.

Second, the investment community had established processes for evaluating and purchasing data. As Ben notes: “When I think about investment management, there are industry conferences where there are data buyers and data sellers, and these commerce organizers facilitate introductions and meetings, and it’s very clear who you’re selling to.”

Third, serving sophisticated financial clients pushed Revelio Labs to build a more robust product. Their intense product focus – “Right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code” – was shaped by the demanding needs of these early customers.

This foundation enabled their expansion into adjacent markets. “I’d say we started investment management, then our next big splash was in consulting,” Ben explains. “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.”

Their credibility with financial and consulting firms helped ease their entry into corporate markets, though this transition revealed new challenges. “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 clear buying centers in investment firms, corporate sales required understanding that “the user is not always the buyer, and maybe the decision maker is two levels above.”

The company’s approach to this challenge reveals another benefit of their roundabout path: they learned to focus on solving existing problems rather than creating new ones. 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.”

Revelio Labs’ experience offers a valuable lesson for B2B founders: sometimes the fastest path to your vision isn’t the most direct one. By starting with sophisticated customers who already understood their value proposition, they built the foundation needed to eventually transform how every company understands and manages their workforce.

Their ultimate vision remains unchanged. As Ben shares: “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.” The journey to that vision just took an unexpected – and ultimately beneficial – detour through Wall Street first.