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How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

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Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#91

Post by woodrowbarlow »

jbchoo wrote: post #27
mettamage wrote: post #5

I used this service as a psychology student, to my dismay if I may add. To the dismay of other students, I'd always code up my own surveys :D I wonder though, how is there space for: Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, Wufoo (back in the day) and a lot of others that I presumably don't know about. I feel most of these survey engines provide the same thing.

May I know what was your needs that required you to code your own survey?

in psych, "coding a survey" _can_ mean "tagging qualitative survey responses against a list of traits (called the codebook)" rather than "writing computer code to present a survey". GP may have meant that although Qualtrics provides tools for this process, it was easier to just do it by hand.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#92

Post by jartelt »

artemonster wrote: post #7

Can someone please genuinely explain the need of such software products to me? I work in VLSI engineering and such things sound like a total superflous bullshit-bingo to me (stats, dashboards, metrics, "value proposition", "targeting", "customer segmentation") I suppose I think so because I am a total layman in these fields. I'd greatly appreciate if someone could explain - is this a thing that acutally helps with so…

Where I went to graduate school, it seemed nearly every Psychology graduate student used Qualtrics to administer their surveys. When you are sending surveys to 100s-1000s of people, having a tool that manages the survey and helps with running the statistics and analysis is really helpful.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#93

Post by derek_frome »

usaphp wrote: post #63
mdorazio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branchin…

> each with 20+ branching questions I never understood , why would anyone waste their time answering 20+ questions for free?

You'd be amazed. I was an account manager at Medallia (Qualtrics competitor, also backed by Sequoia) and the response rates on 20-50 question surveys was typically in the double digits. When you have hundreds of thousands of customers in a month, you can generate super rich data through this process.

However, the industry as a whole has been coping with something they call "survey fatigue" which is reflected in a lot of the comments here. There has been a general backslide in survey response rates, though as of a few years ago, it had mostly stabilized around a new normal that was still plenty good for generating excellent data sets to understand the customer experience.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#94

Post by irrational »

usaphp wrote: post #63
mdorazio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branchin…

> each with 20+ branching questions I never understood , why would anyone waste their time answering 20+ questions for free?

Why do people tweet for free? One reason is, because people love sharing their opinions with other people. A survey is one way of sharing our opinions.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#96

Post by duck »

usaphp wrote: post #63
mdorazio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branchin…

> each with 20+ branching questions I never understood , why would anyone waste their time answering 20+ questions for free?

To be heard.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#97

Post by closeparen »

sjg007 wrote: post #57

Easy to setup programmable web forms and surveys for non-experts. Apparently it is big business. One thing I think is interesting is that I'd heard of SurveyMonkey before but never about qualtrics.. even here on hackernews. Maybe because qualtrics was outside of the valley? Yet clearly a unicorn and a very successful exit.

Every scientific survey I’ve seen was on Qualitrics. SurveyMonkey seems to be used in informally polls like K12 student projects and group activities.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#98

Post by closeparen »

usaphp wrote: post #63
mdorazio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branchin…

> each with 20+ branching questions I never understood , why would anyone waste their time answering 20+ questions for free?

Surveys often offer compensation, like an Amazon gift card, or at least participation in a drawing for one.

Why do we produce free content for YCombinator? People like to pontificate.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#99

Post by usaphp »

TomVDB wrote: post #84
nine_k wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that your car has a few things that bother you, and you'd like the car company to know about it. A link to a survey appears in email, and you think: "Aha! Now I'll let them know for sure, I'll tell them all I think about it!". Now you have 20 question to vent off your frustration, and likely a large text field for "anything more you might like to add".

It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.) The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.

imo Audi/VW has the best dashboard GUI in the auto business bar BMW iDrive. Try using honda or toyota and you will see that it can be much much worse than audi, laggy and badly designed.

Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

#100

Post by 1234567try »

jack6e wrote: post #69
sjg007 wrote: post #57

Easy to setup programmable web forms and surveys for non-experts. Apparently it is big business. One thing I think is interesting is that I'd heard of SurveyMonkey before but never about qualtrics.. even here on hackernews. Maybe because qualtrics was outside of the valley? Yet clearly a unicorn and a very successful exit.

Qualtrics is pretty popular among their initial target audience mentioned in the article: academics. Among academic survey shops this product is the definite go-to. I imagine, based on my own experience, the average tech worker thinks of surveys as small sets of questions used to easily and quickly collect a few data points. SurveyMonkey is fine for that. But for the types of real surveys that provide the data for se…

I agree
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