The Education Challenge: How Revelio Labs Creates New Market Categories in HR Tech

Creating a new market category isn’t just about building innovative technology – it’s about teaching potential customers to think differently about their problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Revelio Labs founder Ben Zweig shared how they’re tackling the challenge of creating demand for workforce intelligence solutions.

The company’s journey began with a powerful parallel between financial and labor markets. “Let’s compare this to labor markets, which are bigger than capital markets, but way less sophisticated,” Ben explains. This observation sparked their mission to bring Bloomberg-style analytics to HR.

But unlike financial firms who immediately grasp the value of data, HR departments needed more education. “They don’t necessarily know that they need something like our offering,” Ben reveals. “So I think a lot of our job is educating people on what’s possible ways to save money, ways this could help provide value and level up your understanding of your own company and be able to differentiate against competitors.”

Revelio Labs’ approach to this education challenge involves several key strategies:

Starting with Sophisticated Users

Rather than immediately targeting HR departments, they began with customers who already understood the value of alternative data. “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 shares. These early adopters helped validate their approach and refine their product.

Using Media as an Education Channel

The company leverages media relationships to demonstrate the power of workforce analytics. “We’re in the media almost every day now,” Ben notes. “We’ll work a lot with we have a bunch of reporters we have good relationships with at Bloomberg and Business Insider and Wall Street Journal and New York Times… because they’re in the business of looking for data to support their story.”

Building Credibility Through Analysis

Their weekly newsletter showcases their analytical capabilities while educating the market. A recent analysis of Meta’s hiring trends demonstrates this approach: “We had a newsletter that we did in collaboration with Bloomberg that basically showed that Meta basically stopped hiring people in VR AR and all the Metaverse skills.”

Meeting Customers Where They Are

Rather than pushing a particular vision of workforce analytics, they start with existing problems. “These end users, they are very often familiar with their sets of problems,” Ben explains. “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.”

Maintaining Technical Excellence

Their heavily technical team – “Right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code” – enables them to solve complex problems that demonstrate the value of sophisticated workforce analytics.

Looking ahead, Revelio Labs sees even bigger education challenges as they work to integrate internal HR data with their external analytics. As Ben explains: “We have a lot of data that companies themselves don’t have… 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.”

Their ultimate vision requires not just building technology, but changing how companies think about workforce data. “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.

Revelio Labs’ experience offers valuable lessons for any B2B founder creating a new market category: start with sophisticated users who already understand your value, use media to demonstrate your capabilities, solve existing problems while educating about new possibilities, and maintain technical excellence to build credibility.

Most importantly, their story shows that market education isn’t just about explaining your product – it’s about helping customers envision a different way of working. By consistently demonstrating the power of workforce analytics through real-world examples and insights, they’re gradually shifting how companies think about managing their workforce.