Founded in 2018 by CEO Melanie Fellay and Zari Zahra, Spekit has built a platform that gives employees answers to their most common questions. With a need for virtual training solutions, the company saw 400% growth in year-over-year revenue in 2020 and announced the close of a $12.2 million Series A investment round, led by Foundry Group and Renegade Partners,
How has Spekit adapted its outlook as major companies, like Uber Freight, Southwest Airlines and JLL, join the platform in tandem with the mid-market firms the solution was originally built for? Learning, driving change and enabling employees to be effective and impactful in their roles are universal problems that companies struggle with at every stage and size. Spekit found early success with high-growth, mid-market companies given the pace at which they were scaling, evolving and onboarding employees.
However, even today’s largest organizations are now embracing learning as a revenue driver instead of a cost center. This shift to treating learning as a continuous journey instead of a one-time event and the retention, productivity and efficiency benefits that follow have allowed us to evolve from helping individual teams to entire organizations with their learning efforts.
What’s been your biggest 2021 accomplishment? The growth we’ve experienced on all fronts in 2021 has been our greatest accomplishment by far. Our revenue has grown more than 6 times in the first half of this year compared to the last. And along with that, we’ve welcomed some of the fastest-growing organizations in the world including Snowflake, UberFreight, Outreach, Databricks, Invesco and more. To support this growth, we’ve brought on some of the most talented individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, more than tripling our team size.
Are you in the stage of the life cycle you expected to be at this time? There is no one-size-fits-all formula to growth. You can read a million books on what defines product-market fit, how to hire, when to expect hockey stick growth and the list goes on. But, the truth is that every company should develop at the speed and pace that is right for them. For us, it took almost two years before we felt confident that we’d truly achieved product-market fit. In other words, we’d designed a product that our customers couldn’t live without. And, while I didn’t anticipate it would take that long, I’m so thankful it did. Because throughout those two years, we were able to gather feedback, research, test and iterate to design something truly industry-defining. Now that we’ve hit that milestone, we’ll continue those best practices of absorbing feedback and thinking outside the box to propel us into the next wave.
How would you define your company’s “new normal"? We’ve fully embraced this hybrid lifestyle of work. It’s not only allowed us to hire the best of the best, regardless of location, but it’s also given our employees a deeper sense of work-life balance. We’ll maintain our HQ office in Denver with satellite offices around the world, but give employees the option to come into the office when they deem necessary (or just miss their co-workers!). Balancing this with quarterly or semi-annual in-person meetings where all employees can collaborate face to face has worked tremendously well for us.
What’s your next big move? We’ll be continuing to scale the business and further our reach in the months and years to come. This includes finding more incredible talent to join our team and taking on additional capital to support our growth.
What’s your No. 1 piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? To solve the problem better than anyone else, you need to understand the problem better than anyone else. Don't be too attached to the solution, what other people are doing or what’s been done before. Instead of locking into the competition, focus on the science and the research behind the problem you’re looking to solve. Interview people with those same challenges (relentlessly). When you’re able to truly get to the core of the problem, only then can you design a truly unique and disruptive solution.
Spekit
Category: Early Stage
Location: Denver
Top exec: Melanie Fellay, co-founder and CEO
