How Magical won enterprise deals with WorkOS SSO

“Scale” is traditionally good news in the tech world. A startup might scale to meet the needs of its growing user base. An enterprise might scale to onboard new customers in a major market. “Scale” is less commonly used to describe the sheer magnitude of repetitive work that people in sales, customer support, recruiting, or health care have to tackle each day. That’s where Magical comes in. 

Magical’s platform is built to help teams streamline or automate repetitive tasks. For recruiters, that might mean using AI to draft an email to a prospect. For sales, Magical can create single-click automations to make CRM tagging faster and more efficient.

The platform continued to grow through word-of-mouth as it effectively eliminated redundant tasks for go-to-market teams and enabled users to focus on more important aspects of their work. As usage continued to increase, Magical eventually captured the attention of the enterprise. They quickly found themselves in conversation with large enterprises like Tesla, Intuit, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix. All were interested in adopting Magical in their work, but they all needed SSO. 

SSO unlocks enterprise deals  

“Enterprise clients told us very early on that they needed us to have SSO to continue conversations and sign a deal,” said Jeanne Thai, Product Manager at Magical. 

As a product-led, price-conscious startup, Magical wanted to make sure they picked the right SSO solution to unlock the enterprise deals they had in play. After asking other AI companies in the space and polling their founders’ network, WorkOS appeared at the top of their list.

One major consideration for Magical in implementing SSO was speed. The engineering team needed to move fast to address the volume of new customers and enterprises looking to adopt Magical as part of their suite of workplace tools.

The platform’s significant product-led growth also meant that many people were using Magical on a personal basis to help with their day-to-day work. However, to formally implement Magical as a tool accessible for everyone within an organization, Magical needed approval from additional stakeholders from IT, security, and procurement. SSO was seen as a table stakes feature by these decision makers, and WorkOS ensured that Magical could move fast with implementation without sacrificing precious engineering hours. 

Picking a partner with stellar support 

Magical’s engineers were able to implement WorkOS’ SSO and SCIM in just a couple of sprints. “WorkOS had stellar customer support and was easy to build with. Many of the open source solutions we considered didn’t have documentation that was up to par, and we doubted the experience would have been as high quality as WorkOS,” said Thai. 

As Magical’s team was building their SSO solution, they had responsive access to the WorkOS support team via Slack, and detailed documentation that allowed them to work independently. 

“For me, it’s customer support that sets WorkOS apart. If I’m talking to a customer’s IT department and I want extra eyes on something where we’re working in a new and novel environment for that client, it’s helpful to know that there are people at WorkOS who have been in situations like ours many times and can walk us through any details,” said Thai. 

Another reason for choosing WorkOS, aside from support, was the range of identity providers (IdPs) it supports. While Okta, Azure, and others are the most commonly used IdPs, Magical’s customers in the healthcare space use more specialized IdPs specific to the industry. With support for a variety of providers, Magical can confidently support customers in any industry, wherever word of mouth about their stellar product spreads.