Leon

Brian Smith wasn't always a SaaS founder. As a director of sports science for USA Track and Field, he used data to predict performance and injury in professional athletes. He noticed something universal: athletes, salespeople, tech workers—everyone burns out. The same warning signals appeared across different domains. When the COVID-19 pandemic killed his previous gym membership platform business in late 2019, Brian decided to apply his sports science expertise to a new problem: helping companies detect and prevent employee burnout using data.

Brian spent about two and a half years pre-launch building Leon's core insight: combine CRM activity data (calls, emails, revenue, meetings from Salesforce or HubSpot) with diagnostic employee surveys (sleep, well-being, psychological safety, work relationships) to create an algorithm that identifies burnout risk. The product doesn't just flag problems—it prescribes solutions. When burnout is detected, Leon pushes playbooks to managers and recommendations to employees, integrated with a marketplace of wellness providers like Headspace, Calm, and Equinox.

When Leon fully launched roughly a year and a half ago, the team had already built significant momentum. On Product Hunt, they signed up around 6,000 early access users. Brian credits this to aggressive community outreach: "Your sales reps hate their jobs, your employees hate their jobs"—a tagline that got people's attention. They pushed into Dave Gerhardt's communities and sales communities, "literally pushing buttons" to drive engagement.

Product Hunt was a major catalyst, but it wasn't the entire story. Brian and his co-founder went deep into sales and marketing communities, using provocative messaging to spark conversation. The 6,000 signups from Product Hunt and community engagement converted into paying customers. Today, Leon has 264 paying clients and 750 active users (defined as people answering surveys and taking action—engaging with content, starting playbooks, or purchasing marketplace products).

The sales motion was always focused upmarket: targeting entire sales functions (VP of sales down to individual sales managers). Current customers typically pay for 2-3 manager seats per account, though their larger deals involve 7-12 managers across the full sales organization.

The marketplace revenue model emerged as a pleasant surprise. Leon makes 20% on every dollar spent—10% from employers purchasing wellness benefits and 10% from wellness providers like Headspace and Equinox. While SaaS revenue (at $350 per manager monthly) initially dominated at 70% of revenue, the marketplace is growing faster. This shift came after pushing a free plan and refining the product-led growth motion to drive marketplace engagement.

Brian was candid about mistakes: "We made a shitload of mistakes." The team over-invested in certain areas and kept staff too long. Despite raising $4.5M in a friends-and-family seed round eight months prior (January 2024) at a $17-18M post-money valuation, they burned through capital faster than expected. Still, with 26 people on the team (13 engineers) and still scaling, they're doubling down on fixing manual backend processes and refining their PLG motion before hiring senior sales and marketing leadership.

Leon is doing approximately $220,000 MRR—up 116% from $100,000 a year ago. The all-in revenue model (70% subscription + 30% marketplace) is working, with marketplace revenue growth outpacing SaaS. They're actively hiring and grappling with scaling challenges, but the core value proposition—turning employee burnout signals into actionable insights and solutions—resonates with sales leaders managing remote and hybrid teams. At 40 years old with three kids and a five-month-old, Brian is living the very burnout problem his product solves.