Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle built a $73 million-funded company replacing paper binders with digital tools for industrial workers. With 53 million baby boomers and 42 million Gen X workers in North America, the company found product-market fit in energy and consumer goods, then shifted to product-led growth to scale across 130 countries.
Chapters
We're already $73 million in. And the reason for that is that this market is so big, but it's very, very conservative. So one of the things that, again, I would advise you, and the reason why we've been successful, is to also segment your market. Markets are not one. So segment your market into, you know, elements where you can actually start to dominate. So horizontal markets without doubt are the best because they're the biggest, but you need to segment them down as well.
Anyway, I think we can move now. Now, keeping an eye on the clock as well to make sure we have lots of time for questions. Maybe we could talk a little bit about your work at Parseable today. So maybe you could tell the group of us about Parseable and kind of your history there and your transition too.
Yeah, so I was looking for something as close to a garage startup as possible. Most of my early-stage companies, they've been $1 or $2 million worth of revenue. And then, you know, my commercial and financial skills have come in and then grown those companies. I wanted something that had a total blank sheet of paper with a very, very big market. And I was introduced by one of the investors, Lightspeed, which is one of the most successful investors in the Valley, to 3 founders that had come up with an idea, which was to basically liberate industrial workers, meaning give them technology that actually hadn't been delivered in the past. It's a very, very big market. But if you look at the way most industrial companies are executing work, it's on a— with 6-inch binders, Maybe some printouts from some other systems, and then tacit knowledge. And there's another big dynamic in that market, which I knew from my experiences around the world, which is that there's a massive demographic shift going on in the workforce, not just here in Silicon Valley, but most blue-collar workers, as they're often called, are later career. They're 20 to 30-year veterans. In North America, there's 53 million baby boomers. still working, of which the oldest is 73, the youngest I think is 55. So it's 53. My generation, which is the next generation down, Generation X, is about 42 million. So you don't need to be a math expert, there's a 10 million dollar gap. And if you think about the generation after that, Generation ZY, if you say to them, here's the 6-inch binder, do you want to go and work for an oil company? You're not going to be that successful because it's all about mobility. What we saw was a massive opportunity to build a company. And I saw a company that had no commercialization in a market that I knew very, very well, which was the industrial space. It's where I started my career. But up until the last 4 years when Passable started to— I joined Passable, all of my previous career was around data and analytics and more in the traditional Silicon Valley companies. So I was very fascinated by it, saw a great opportunity. But knew it would be a long haul. So we've raised a ton of money, we're already $73 million in. And the reason for that is that this market is so big, but it's very, very conservative. So one of the things that, again, I would advise you, and the reason why we've been successful, is to also segment your market. Markets are not one. So segment your market into, you know, elements where you can actually start to dominate. So horizontal markets without doubt are the best because they're the biggest. But you need to segment them down. And so what we started to see is that there were some early adopters around the energy industry and around consumer packaged goods for economic reasons. And that's how we built the business. And, you know, 4 years later, since we had our first product-market fit, you know, we have customers in over 130 countries. You know, we passed $10 million in ARR last year, and we believe we can build a multibillion-dollar company.
And how did you scale from that, you know, those early days of founder-led sales or early team-led sales into actually building that sales engine that can be repeatable and really get you to that multimillion-dollar ARR?
Yeah, so believe it or not, I've spent my whole career in enterprise selling. I fundamentally believe in enterprise because selling large enterprises makes up, it's far, far easier long-term, but the markets take a lot more to get going. But what I realized is the enterprise selling model is not a good model because it's very unpredictable. So we figured out a way to growth hack this in a relative sense, which is that we found a way to find early adopters that could then share our products. And we started with some different prices. We experimented with a lot of pricing models to drive adoption and have other companies sell our product for us because hiring people to sell to large enterprises in the industrial space is very, very difficult. There's very few people that can do it. So we figured out a way predominantly around product-led growth to make our product very, very easy to consume. You can download my product from the App Store or the Google Play Store and be up and running, like, once I give you a login immediately. So we started to think about changing this enterprise sales model, even though the value proposition is enterprise sales. And the other point about this segmentation is that if you can find one or two early adopters in a market and you can get them to work for you, it becomes viral in nature because most of these, most people in life, even in consumer products, buy in swarms once there's some sort of virality on it. If you can get virality in the enterprise space, first of all, it saves you costs, but also you grow a lot quicker.
