How AI company You.com pivoted from consumer to enterprise

If you’re having trouble keeping up with the myriad of consumer LLMs on the market (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Grok are just the tip of the iceberg), you aren’t alone. AI search engine You.com reacted to signs of attrition in the consumer market and in 2022 pivoted to AI search for enterprise (or anyone dealing with specialized workflows). The company now provides AI search infrastructure, accessible via various APIs—designated as search, content, or research APIs (the latter is for multistep agentic reasoning)—that communicate with LLMs to give real-time answers, insights, or summaries to complex questions.

In an era of AI hallucinations, the search for accuracy is an important one. You.com’s ability to deliver citations, nuanced responses, and customization (through integrated AI agents) makes it a kind of AI-powered Swiss Army knife. For the layperson, You.com functions as a sort of Google Search and ChatGPT hybrid, merging search engine capabilities with the generative functionality of LLMs (the platform is LLM-agnostic, and quickly integrates new models).

Timing is everything

You.com only had experience employing product-led growth motions when its leadership made the decision to pivot to enterprise. It needed someone with experience, and that’s where CRO Peter Grant came in.

Grant was recommended for the job by Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff (also an investor in the company) and immediately targeted an ideal customer profile with a view to crafting an enterprise motion. Grant soon decided that traditional SaaS motions were too slow for the AI space.

“If you look at the sales process in generative AI, and especially around the APIs as well, it is condensed…There’s no education of the end user, so it’s all about qualification,” Grant said. “The average SaaS enterprise revenue used to be $50k and [took] about nine months. Some of our deals we’re doing over $300,000 in six weeks.”

Grant created a sales team comfortable with moving fast and one that understood the product on a technical level. Together, they crafted a hiring assessment that looked specifically at a candidate’s creativity, social awareness, ego, selling record, and that included a simulated sale. In many cases, the process separated candidates naturally.

“A number of people go, ‘I’m not going to do this. I don’t need to do this.’ If you don’t need to do this, then you’re not going to put the hard work in.” Grant said.”

Telling a new story

Once You.com committed to a new market, it also committed to telling a new story as a company. When VP of marketing Justin Fink was crafting that narrative, two things were important: overlapping customers and identifying pain points.

“When you’re making that pivot from consumer to enterprise, people always seem to forget that consumers buy enterprise software. They just happen to do that in a work setting,” Fink said.

In addressing any pain points, Fink established a robust relationship between marketing and sales teams that allowed You.com’s existing product to be aligned with enterprise needs. A key part of this process was sharing data and insights.

“[Sales is] very quantitative. It’s like, ‘Did we secure a meeting? How did it go?’ And typically, it’s all via market. Is this campaign working, or the leads that you’re ultimately getting from a specific content campaign that we have, are they good leads?” Fink said.

Expert insight: tech pivots

Mark Weinstein, tech entrepreneur and author of the award-winning 2024 book Restoring Our Sanity Online, said enterprise is the only space where AI has been shown to make sustainable money.

“They’re pivoting to where the money is and where the demand is. Because for the enterprise, AI isn’t a curiosity; AI is a necessity,” Weinstein said. “AI is a necessity for almost every enterprise today, whether you’re a service industry and manufacturer, whether you’re in high tech, low tech, whatever it is. AI is fundamentally important for lowering costs and actually being really innovative.”

Weinstein applauded You.com’s focused approach to enterprise.

“You’re much better off not being a jack-of-all-trades. I think you want to identify where you can be a key player amongst the two or three key players in a particular zone, and then you’re going to want to play hard for it,” he told Revenue Brew.