Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 148 posts

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

#121

Post by rconti »

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.

Having owned a dozen cars, shopped for far more, desired features and options that the manufacturers don't give, and finally buying ONE car brand-new, I relished the opportunity to actually have my voice heard for once.

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

#122

Post by rconti »

jxramos wrote: post #120
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?

Probably putting flyers in mailboxes without paying for postal service to do so.

Now that I stop and think about it, it's likely illegal in the US, too. Interfering with mail services might well be a federal crime. (or maybe not, I really don't know).

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

#123

Post by CalRobert »

rhizome wrote: post #79
CalRobert wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few things involved, and they're not all BS! You want to build a couple new features. You have 60 person-hours at your disposal. Which one do your users want? Build two quick prototypes and see which one people actually use more. You need to convince people to give you money (aka "get customers"). You're not sure what the best way to convince them is. Try 3 different approaches (Landing page with tech detai…

>0.1% of them will buy a $100 package once. 0.01% of them will buy a $9.99 package three thousand times. The first group is worth $1MM, the second $3MM. I think it's likely you'd be able to afford to create both packages, regardless of what time any of your players take the bus.

The point is to figure out how to offer the right package to the right people (I was responding to a question asking about targeting and segmentation) to maximize profits. It's not a question of affording to create them.

Mind you I'm not endorsing this approach. But it does make a lot of money.

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by covemarkets »

njarboe wrote: post #102
derek_frome wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The customer that fills out a survey must be a very select group of customer. If the response rate is in the single digits of percent, what about the rest of the people? Setting company policy on just this small fraction of customers could be the path to failure.

correct, and that's why surveys need to be as scientific as possible in order to avoid various biases that skew the results. hence qualtrics and not surveymonkey for serious survey research.

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

#126

Post by justaguyhere »

todipa wrote: post #115
fjp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the disadvantages of Wufoo and Typeform? I've used both as a user before and I Wufoo as an admin. My needs were simple and they seemed to work for my use case. Just curious about your use case for which they don't work?

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

#127

Post by austenallred »

fjp wrote: post #114
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…

Worth noting that their engineering org is in Seattle

Not 100% true. They have some engineering in Seattle but a ton in Utah too.

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

#128

Post by garysahota93 »

Phemist wrote: post #4

Interesting news! When I was in uni, I made some money on the side writing custom JS plug-ins for their survey engine. Through a lot of trial-and-error I managed to reverse engineer some useful knowledge about the inner workings of it (this lasted up till a major revamp of the survey engine around 5 years ago). The community was quite vibrant, and their product was being used from questionnaires in academic studies t…

Haha, I did the same thing when I was in grad school! It's so interesting to see how while we've gone on to do other things, they are still keeping their eyes on their (well-deserved) prize.

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

#129

Post by devmunchies »

austenallred wrote: post #127
fjp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that their engineering org is in Seattle

Not 100% true. They have some engineering in Seattle but a ton in Utah too.

they have most in seattle and some in utah.

I engineered in both offices. VP of engineering and product are both in Seattle and there are MORE engineers in seattle if talking absolutes.

Post reply on HN