How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
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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
#2I used the service in college. It was prettt powerful. I did some demand estimation and some work for local businesses with it. I didn’t find it 8 billion dollars amazing but who knows it could be much better than other tools out there — it was just free through my university.
Kudos to them for avoiding VC money for so long.
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#3Building a billion dollar startup OUTSIDE of Silicon Valley is possible? You guys just crashed my entire belief system...
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#4Interesting 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 to marketing research to high-profile class-action cases. I've always imagined this huge userbase as well as the centralized organization of all this research data is quite valuable, so this acquisition price doesn't strike me as out of place.
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#5I 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.
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#6I like the story.
But on the other hand it makes me feel like I'm looking at the equivalent of a popular Instagram model. It's hard to not compare myself and feel disappointed.
HN doesn't inspire me to do something with my life like it did 10 years ago. Perhaps it's my fault.
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#7Can 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 some processes and how?
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#8I like the story. But on the other hand it makes me feel like I'm looking at the equivalent of a popular Instagram model. It's hard to not compare myself and feel disappointed. HN doesn't inspire me to do something with my life like it did 10 years ago. Perhaps it's my fault.
Well HN is just that, hacker news. The focus isn't on DIY and bootstrapping yourself. This is more a niche that IndieHackers and the like fill in.
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#9As per Wikipedia:
>Qualtrics reported revenue of $190.6 million in 2016 and $289.9 million in 2017 representing year over year growth of 52%. In 2016, Qualtrics reported an overall net loss of $12 million with free cash flow of $3.4 million. In 2017, Qualtrics reported a $2.6 million net profit with free cash flow of $21.3 million
Is it normal for companies to be bought at 30x their revenue or am I missing something obvious (may be the wikipedia stats are off) ?
Edit: 2018 revenue according to this article is $400mil. That would mean a 20x.
Re: How one family built Qualtrics to an $8B exit
#10Can 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…
"analyzing every aspect of the customer experience to drive loyalty and referrals"
I guess as companies spend vast amounts to get visibility online (e.g. where Google and Facebook revenue comes from) they need to be able to measure what they are getting for all that money.