Company Overview
John Stair is Co-Founder & CEO at DealSurface, a GTM intelligence company for enterprise sellers who want to close deals faster. They use market-leading technology to surface opportunities within enterprises that need your product – then give your team the strategy and lead tools to win them. Learn more at dealsurface.com.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
Before DealSurface, I was a product leader at an insurtech, first working on claims solutions and later on commercial underwriting data products. I built solutions that helped carriers turn web data into insights about their books of business. Working in the insurance space gave me a firsthand view of how impactful technology can be for insurers, but also how painful it can be to sell and deploy.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
My cofounder, Ben Seitz-Sitek, and I experienced the problem while working at that insurtech, which served P&C carriers. Even with a strong product, figuring out which carriers needed it, who owned the problem, and how to approach them took months of research and conversations. The sales tools available to us treated insurance as one broad category, which missed how the market actually works.
We started by speaking with more than 100 insurtech revenue leaders and testing early versions with beta users. Those conversations helped us shape DealSurface around a specific mission: help vendors find qualified buyers, then get to “yes” faster. We launched the product in May 2026, and so far it’s really resonating with insurtechs.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
Generic sales and account-based marketing tools treat insurance as one market. DealSurface is built specifically for the insurance industry, which lets us curate buyer segments and data carefully to get the best results in this underserved market.
DealSurface starts with the product you’re selling and builds a ranked pipeline from the entire industry at once. That matters because two products from the same vendor can have very different buyers and reasons to buy. A carrier might be a strong fit for a book-review tool but a poor fit for that vendor’s submission-intake product.
We connect each opportunity to evidence from sources such as statutory filings, earnings calls, trade publications, conference talks, and news, then identify the relevant buying committee and help shape engagement. The customer can see why an account is a fit and check the source. That gives revenue teams a better starting point for a conversation and helps them decide which relationships deserve their time.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
Going deep in insurance and staying close to customers. We’re still early, and the best feedback comes from applying DealSurface to a customer’s actual products and target accounts. Showing someone evidence about a carrier they know well makes the value tangible and gives us a clear test of where the product needs to improve.
We’ve also kept our focus on the relationships behind the sale. Insurance is a relationship-driven market, so we’re building tools that help teams better leverage their networks to get in the right rooms with the right people. That focus guides both how we build the product and how we grow the business.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
We want DealSurface to become the leading source of go-to-market intelligence for companies selling into insurance. That means deepening our coverage across carriers, MGAs, agencies, brokers, and reinsurers, and making the intelligence useful across sales, marketing, and revenue operations.
The bigger goal is to help buyers and sellers connect over the products that are the best fit. If we can shorten sales and procurement cycles by months and give teams a stronger basis for deciding where to spend their time, we can help more useful technology make its way into the industry.
