Revo – Deep context infra, slow adoption, good old email is saving us

Hey HN,

I'm Mehdi, co-founder of Revo (https://revo.ai). We spent years building something that, as far as we know, does not exist anywhere else: a real-time structured memory layer of your entire business. Wanted to share what we learned and why we struggled with go-to-market despite having a product that works.

You connect your tools (Slack, Jira, Google Meet, CRM, docs) and Revo organizes everything into what we call Intelligence Modules. These are structured, self-updating representations of how your business actually works. Not RAG. Not semantic search. Not a chatbot with tool access. A structured, opinionated context graph.

Enterprise customers validated it. They love it. The technology works.

But we kept hitting the same wall: adoption speed and momentum.

People would connect their tools, bring teams, see the potential, get excited, and then not know where to start. The value was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. "This is amazing, I can see a hundred use cases" is the most dangerous sentence a customer can say. It means they see zero.

No single obvious pain point. No habit to replace. No moment where someone thinks "I need this right now." Just a powerful system waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it.

We tried different entry points. Product teams. Strategy teams. Leadership. Every time, same pattern: excitement, pilot, slow fade. The energy could not survive the gap between "this is cool" and "this is how I use it every day."

So we stepped back and asked: where does someone feel the pain of missing context multiple times a day, every day, with zero ambiguity?

Email.

You get an email from a client. To reply, you need to check Slack for the latest update, find the Jira ticket, remember what was said in yesterday's meeting, pull the right number from the CRM. You do this ten times a day. Everyone does.

That is the exact problem our infrastructure was built to solve. We just never had the right surface for it.

Now the UX is: connect Gmail or Outlook. That is it. The Intelligence Modules build themselves from your email history first, then expand as you connect more tools. No blank slate. No "where do I start." You open your inbox and drafts are there, grounded in real context.

The cold start problem that killed us before is gone. Email is the onboarding.

We have large enterprise customers paying real money for the full platform. The context infrastructure works at scale. But we have not figured out how to scale that sales motion yet. Every deal is high touch, founder led, long cycle.

Our bet is what we call the iceberg strategy. The surface is simple: connect your inbox, get better drafts. But underneath, Revo is building a full context layer of your business. Once that exists, the expansion and team intelligence happens naturally. Same infrastructure our enterprise customers pay for, but the entry point is self-serve and instant.

We are now trying to build bottom up what we have been selling top down.

Curious if others here have dealt with similar adoption challenges. A powerful horizontal tool that needed a vertical wedge to get traction.

What worked for you?

https://revo.ai