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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

#111

Post by fjp »

JPKab wrote: post #109
LrnByTeach wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very happy to see this kind of success stories for multiple reasons. 1. It gives a great morale boost so many other not so sexy US places outside of silicon valley. YES big success possible outside of Silicon Valley. 2. Now with this big SAP investment, UTAH will get considerable 'tech employment' boost longer term instead of same old crowded Silicon valley & New York (sky rocking housing prices) 3. The way the…

Good for Utah. I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.

I used to work for Qualtrics. I think Qualtrics and maybe LucidChart was a rare exception to the rest of the tech scene in Utah, which is pretty much "build a slightly different version of something at already exists and sell the shit out of a subpar product".

Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could barely deliver. The company is 50% salespeople.

Less than a year ago their APIs were going down every day because of the crappy pile of legacy PHP monolith they were built on. They have brought in some very smart engineering leaders to transition to a more modular and scalable core product, but there's a ways to go. Another thing that really sucked about the organization was that half the engineers are professional services engineers building custom, overpromised, one-off solutions for large customers. The vast majority are almost completely unmaintainable and they do a very poor job of leveraging previous work or having cookiecutters/shared libraries to accelerate custom development.

With all that said, I think their market opportunity is fucking gigantic and they are serious about curing the underlying inefficiencies of the organization. They are the leader of the field in a time when pretty much every C-suite is realizing they need customer & employee experience data to stay competitive.

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

#112

Post by tokyodude »

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?

I give feedback all the time in the hope that in influences the direction of the company or project. Was just asked today for feedback on my Apple Watch. Gave it. Also sent in feedback to SketchFab today.

If you want a product to be better how else do you expect it to happen if you don't give feedback? It's certainly better than just waiting and hoping some random improvements appear.

I don't do all surveys or even most but more than 0.

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

#113

Post by fjp »

fjp wrote: post #111
JPKab wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for Utah. I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.

I used to work for Qualtrics. I think Qualtrics and maybe LucidChart was a rare exception to the rest of the tech scene in Utah, which is pretty much "build a slightly different version of something at already exists and sell the shit out of a subpar product". Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could b…

More info to explain some of their marketing speak (Experience Management! Creating a category!): They are by far the leader in being able to create surveys for serious research. However, since so much of this segment is owned by academics, they can only charge so much. They want to stay deep in the academic market because millions of undergrads and grad students every year do their first market research with their student Qualtrics account. Those students go on to be the decision makers in fledgling analytics departments/teams at many companies.

They expanded into Customer Experience and Employee Experience products with the big enterprise deals and fat margins that come with them but were much worse at those things than specialized competitors. They then came up with the concept of "Experience Management" to tie the data together. This is actually pretty cool stuff - Ford was able to find which crappy conditions at their dealerships were driving lower sales, etc etc. The strategy was basically if we can offer a total package where we're pretty good at everything, we'll beat competitors that are excellent at one thing.

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

#114

Post by fjp »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #105
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.

I am very happy to see this kind of success stories for multiple reasons. 1. It gives a great morale boost so many other not so sexy US places outside of silicon valley. YES big success possible outside of Silicon Valley. 2. Now with this big SAP investment, UTAH will get considerable 'tech employment' boost longer term instead of same old crowded Silicon valley & New York (sky rocking housing prices) 3. The way the…

Worth noting that their engineering org is in Seattle

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

#115

Post by todipa »

fjp wrote: post #111
JPKab wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for Utah. I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.

I used to work for Qualtrics. I think Qualtrics and maybe LucidChart was a rare exception to the rest of the tech scene in Utah, which is pretty much "build a slightly different version of something at already exists and sell the shit out of a subpar product". Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could b…

Total agreement on the market opportunity. I'm not technical in any way like most of the people commenting here. I run a small financial planning business and I'm paying "a lot" of money to Typeform and to Wufoo to gather client data. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages but I'm ready to move on to something else if it fits my needs which aren't that complicated.

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

#116

Post by cenal »

thwy12321 wrote: post #107
godzillabrennus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales cures all. No business has ever succeeded without sales. - Mark Cuban

That guy hit the lottery at the height of the tech boom and has done nothing since...

He manufactured much of his success: http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anat...

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

#117

Post by awad »

Mistletoe wrote: post #59
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 just recoiled in horror at the thought of my car company asking me to fill out a survey like this and mentally closed the window on it.

I've done this, multiple times, when the airline I frequently fly follows up after a flight. I've noticed that they're pretty good with their timing such that they'll expedite the survey trigger after a flight that had a delay or some other kind of issue. As someone who flies this particular airline a lot, it's nice being able to voice my exact issues in a nuanced manner while also singling out what worked well. I do this with hope and expectation that my voice will be heard and may influence future decisions.

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

#118

Post by vram22 »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #105
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.

I am very happy to see this kind of success stories for multiple reasons. 1. It gives a great morale boost so many other not so sexy US places outside of silicon valley. YES big success possible outside of Silicon Valley. 2. Now with this big SAP investment, UTAH will get considerable 'tech employment' boost longer term instead of same old crowded Silicon valley & New York (sky rocking housing prices) 3. The way the…

Sounds a bit like SAS. Not the family part but the part about starting from an academic background, plus high growth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute

SAS is an interesting company, both for their revenue growth and their work culture.

>During the 1980s, SAS was one of Inc. Magazine's fastest growing companies in America from 1979 and 1985.[18][23] It grew more than ten percent per year from $10 million in revenues in 1980[6] to $1.1 billion by 2000.[23] In 2007, SAS revenue was $2.15 billion, and in 2013 its revenue was $3.02 billion. By the late 1990s, SAS was the largest privately held software company.

>SAS is well known for its workplace culture.[36][41] The company was used as a model for workplace perks at Google[3] and is taught as a case study in management seminars at Stanford.

The page about the SAS CEO, James Goodnight, is also interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Goodnight

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

#119

Post by TomVDB »

usaphp wrote: post #99
TomVDB wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have a nice LCD panel but they decided to not make it touch-enabled. So to enter a street address you're supposed to draw the characters with your finger Palm-Pilot-style on a crappy touchpad. It's absurd. That's on a 2018 model. I think they're fixing that in some of the 2019 models.

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

#120

Post by jxramos »

atomical wrote: post #25

> After college, Ryan said he wanted adventure and went to South Korea to teach English. One of his early lessons in entrepreneurship came there. While most foreign tutors were scraping by on next to nothing, he decided to try private tutoring by putting flyers offering his teaching services in mail boxes. It's illegal. That's why not all English teachers in Korea are doing it.

Private tutoring is illegal?
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