Podcast Transcript

[00:00:29] Sean: G’day everyone and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast, where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fundamentally fulfill the potential of their business, maximise the impact they can create in the world, and make bigger decisions with greater confidence. I'm your host Sean Steele. And before we kick off today with my fantastic guests that we have today Nihal Advani from Qual Sights, I actually just wanted to acknowledge our community. I haven't read any reviews so far since we've recorded and we've published probably the first 20 episodes now, but we've had some amazing and really nice and generous reviews and writings coming through, which means a lot to us and to our team, and of course, it helps to get to into the hands of others. I wanted to shout out to Peter Jeremy who said recently, this is a great podcast for anyone wanting to scale their business. It's informative. It's so well presented. It's easy to stay engaged and to understand and to learn from.

[00:01:18] So, thanks very much, Peter. If you're listening to this, and if anyone out there in the audience would like us to read out there, then obviously jump on Apple podcasts. That's our favourite platform and drop one on there for us. But without further ado, I guess today is Nihal Advani - Founder and CEO of Qual Sights, out of Chicago. You're still in Chicago, right?

[00:01:35] Nihal: I am here.

[00:01:36] Sean: Good man. Good, man. My pleasure. Those who are listening might remember in episode 12, we interviewed Rishad Tobaccowala, who led growth and strategy for publicists, which if you haven't heard that episode, it's really a really valuable and worthwhile episode. You know, that's a company with 82,000 FTE globally. And I always believed that good people know good people and Rashad introduced us. I believe he's an investor and advisor to the business, is that right?  

[00:02:04] Nihal: Yeah. He's been amazing.

[00:02:06] Sean: He's a fascinating guy. And if you haven't jumped on actually Rashad's a weekly newsletter, it's the only one that I read religiously, so I really, really enjoy it. It's got some great insights in there, but I know people are really going to enjoy your episode today and how, because you've had to make some pretty serious and major strategic shifts. I'm going to try, avoid using the word pivot, but over the last nine years to enjoy the growth that you're experiencing now. And so, there's lots of Learning's in there. So, for those who aren't familiar with your brand, just a quick overview for people, the business is Qual Sights, but originally you found it as Georama and we're going to come back to the origins of that in a minute, but to get insights into customer behaviour, I guess, typically people used to and probably still do quantitative surveys is a bit of a sort of default option. They grabbed survey monkey and I try to design something. They go for that kind of survey start to get some insight into behaviour, but clearly world's moving on, and has moved on and you've developed a platform that allows customers to… and the customer might be the end client, the end company, or maybe an agency, in between I imagine. To use your platform, to observe and interact with customers when they're actually using, or making purchases or consuming the products in their natural environments. That could be whether it's using a smartphone or a smart glass or a 360 camera or something like that, sending the data you're gathering real time insights. So that could be somebody who's cleaning with a cleaning product or shopping or eating or cooking, or something in real time. And then you're taking, you're applying artificial intelligence capability to help generate the insights when you're getting this stuff at scale. Is that right, have I kind of explained that okay?  

[00:03:46] Nihal: That's exactly right. I mean, traditionally when you're doing research, you're trying to understand consumer behaviour, you pick between quantitative and qualitative, right? So, on the quant side, you've got survey tools like survey monkey of the world, and they're good for certain things, but they lack depth and context. And then on the qual side, you'll do things like interviews or focus groups, or if you had money in time, maybe go to somebody home in a non-COVID environment. But in both those cases there's issues, right? So, on one that lacks depth and context in other ones, you get that depth, but it does like context, but just having an interview and asking somebody about, let's say how they shopped in a store three days ago.

[00:04:22] A) They're not there right now, so, it's not contextual, but B) it's based on recall. So, it's saying like, Hey Sean, three days ago, what did you notice first? And your mind is not going to save that information. And so, what we do instead is a lot of people using our app on their phone to capture those moments as they happen, whether that's cooking or cleaning or shopping or eating, and they're forgetting true in the moment, consumer behaviour. And then as you mentioned, yes, we do have a whole bunch of AI that helps analyse that behaviour, make it easy for our clients, which is brands and sometimes agencies to analyse that data and then come up with the appropriate insights to whether it be launching a new product or improving a concept or whatever it may be, it is a wide gamut of things we help with.

[00:05:02] Sean: and there's also an issue with scale and cost, right? Like, qualitative is amazing when you get in front of a customer, you got a rich high context conversation. So, you've got a rich quality conversation, but doing it across a large number of customers, especially if you've got a consumer product or something, that's very expensive. If you're going to do it that way or you're taking a small …

[00:05:20] Nihal: Right. That's why there's all these companies that sometimes will steer away from call or just do a little bit of call and do a lot of quant because it's just cumbersome and what we realised that's the white space, right? There's a whole bunch of opportunity to help make qual faster, easier, more scalable through the use of smart capture mechanisms in terms of capturing data, but also in terms of AI, because half of the battle is capturing the data and capturing it scale, which you can do thanks to asynchronous video on a smartphone, you know, globally and so on. But then the other half of the battle is analysing that data because it's unlike a survey which is structured, this is unstructured data. So really being able to actually make more sense of it across aggregate consumers and therefore get to those insights faster, is the hard part as well. And so that's what we help them with too.

[00:06:03] Sean: So, can you give us an example just of that? Because I imagine, big food and beverage companies, maybe technology, hardware with consumer products, supplies, like smart phone providers and manufacturers and so on, what would be an example of, particularly of the I think those use cases would be pretty obvious to people given the technology using, but on the insight side, like what would be an example of when you're aggregating this data is to say, I've got 50,000 videos now coming through because we’ve done this at scale. What kind of intelligence are you able to give me from those 50,000 videos using the way that you built your platform from an AI perspective?  

[00:06:39] Nihal: Yeah. Well, the industry perspective, yes, we do work with things like consumer goods, like cleaning products, household products, food and beverage tech, pharma as well. But in terms of the insights now, we are Nestle doing 50,000 videos, right? Like, so that's something where we are doing anywhere between as little as15 to as many as few hundred But it's still, again, very, very deep video. And therefore, you only need that kind of range again, depending on the project and the specifics, you don't need definite necessarily thousands. Now, of course, we're doing thousands when you combine everything, but on an individual project, the typical range is like 15 to 300, let's say. And in terms of how we help them analyse that data is we do a variety of things, right? So, on first end we transcribe everything and this is across 120 different languages. If it's a different language, other than English we'll translate it as well. But now once we have that transcription of the audio and the translation if need be we do things like NLP, being able to actually automatically detect appropriate keywords and themes, depending on what was said, make it very easily easy to find those things. So, for example, let's say for a beverage, if somebody said the word healthy, you can click on the word healthy and it will show you all the moments within that person's video. Or the entire group of consumers or the participants, we call them in that project to very quickly find the moments that people are talking about healthy, we'll do sentiment and emotions to help you understand how they think about healthy food, for example. We will have object and scene recognition. If you were doing something in the store, if you just want to go directly to the shelf, you click on the shelf. It goes directly to the shop. And so, it's all about making it faster and easier to find the moments that matter. What we don't do since we are a software company, is we don't actually analyse, we help as an assistant to help our end client analyse. Because at the end of the day, they are the expert on the brand. We give them all the information, make it really easy to find all those moments, and then help them make those conclusions, but also present them because we have a whole presentation builder in the platform that helps them tell powerful stories.

[00:08:35] Sean: Oh, That's cool. Yeah. It's such an interesting field. Like I love what you're doing and I came to see some examples. You've got about 65 people in the business, have I got that right?  

[00:08:50] Nihal: That's 65.

[00:08:50] Sean: 65 and growing. Okay. That's awesome. So, you're really getting some momentum now. Before we talk about now and what's coming in the future, can you take me back to the origins, like what led you to start the business of Georama and then why did that evolve into Qual Sights?  

[00:09:05] Nihal: Yeah, it's quite a crazy journey, honestly. I mean, I quit Microsoft in 2012 to start this travel company called Georama, hence the name as well, it was a play on the word Panorama in the world. And I was just very passionate about travels plan and the whole concept was how do you help people better plan their trips, and while there was a whole bunch of competition in that space, nobody was really helping you find where to go at the time. And so, the initial thing was the recommendation engine. TripAdvisor is great when you know where you want to go anywhere to find things to. We will one step before that, which really the competitor was Google, right? Like we were searching and coming back and searching and come back and asking friends and all this stuff. And so, it was a recommendation engine. And so, we started that way, B2C, we had a couple of hundred thousand users and everything, but we make finding it really hard to make money because unless you have huge scale and you have some advertising revenue, the real way you make money in travel typically is booking. And for bookings, we were new start-up and you know, it's a commodity right now. We've got all the, you know, you've got the kayaks of the world and all these big they're spending billions of dollars on advertising. And so, it's, you're not beating them on price. You're matching them on price. And if somebody has a new start-up versus an Expedia, like they're going to pick Expedia because of the support and the brand and all that stuff. And so we realised a couple of years like, Hey, this is going to be really hard to make money. Let's pivot. And our first pivot or shift was essentially into virtual travel. It was actually very novel idea. It's something that it was pre periscope, pre-Facebook live mirror, get all of the live stuff that, of course there's so much live stuff now, but this was all about live about you. It was live the other way, live about the world, basically allowing you to see the world through somebody else's eyes, a local who's in there, or a traveller who is passing by, aligned the world like you and me happened to be privileged people, to be able to see and travel out of the world. But there's a whole bunch of folks. They have vast majority in fact of the population that cannot do that, or cannot do that as often. And our goal was to help them see more of the world and understand more of the world. So, it was really interesting idea really first of its kind. That was an exciting foray. Did that, again, fought it hard to kind of make money. So, we decided, okay, let's do B2B. We started work with tourism organisations and decided there were so many other use cases because anytime somebody wants to be somewhere, but couldn't go there physically, whether it's because of financial, logistical or even sometimes physical reasons, we were there. And so, we worked with not just tourism organisations, worked with museums, for example, for virtual field trips with kids in a classroom, going to museums, we worked with NASA. They used us for virtual field trips. For example, we worked on college campus tours and we've kind of all over the place with the wide variety of use cases. Like even site inspections to help people inspect a facility remotely. And while all that was great and we started to make some money finally. It was one of those things where we were trying to be Jack of all trades. And we didn't really, essentially, we weren't kind of seeing great growth. It was just kind of up and down and up and down. And each industry had its own sales, nuance and things like that. And that's where we said, you know, we really got to kind of go deep into one vertical and that's where we made the decision to really kind of focus on one. We tested a whole bunch, and that's how we pivoted, where we found that our technology, we did research and insights to find that the insights world was where our technology was most valuable. And that, there were clients where there'd be money and there was a real pain point we're solving. So, that's how it all happened.

[00:12:28] Sean: Oh, you know, I'd love that story because I reckon probably so far, I'd say at least 40 or 50% of Founders have had the biggest… the last three to five years where they've had the biggest shift in growth has all come following a massive consolidation of focus and effort into a single industry or vertical or customer type where they've gone either this is a mass market where there's a lot of people who can spend a small amount of money, or it's actually a market where there's a small amount of customers, but they've got a lot of money to spend and we can really far more deeply solve that problem in a way that nobody else can. And each time that has occurred. And some of these businesses have already got to 40, 50, 80 million and then gone, we're still trying to be everything to everyone. And this isn't working, we're really distracted and we've got focuses everywhere and we can't be expert at everything. And I kind of shift right back down and I can make so many examples on the podcast so far where that's happened and I think it's a really insightful thing, but you know, when you're growing, when you're starting up and you're trying to find your product market fit. You have to test all this stuff, right? Like you're going, oh, there's an opportunity to go after that. There is a customer said, you know, I need this. Okay. Give them that. And you end up with all of this stuff.  

[00:13:36] Nihal: Right. And you're getting pulled so many directions and you're so passionate about it. Like, oh yeah, let's try this. Let's try that. Let's do this. But in all that bargain, I mean, as long as you keep on learning, but at the time in the weeds of it, it's hard to kind of really come out and be like, wait, what's working, what's not working. What's actually seeing, but it was an interesting journey. It was a long journey, but I'm glad we stayed persistent. And now we're here today where we're finally seeing a great amount of growth.

[00:13:57] Sean: That's awesome, brilliant, man. Thank you very much for that summary. So got some questions for you. One of the things that really love to understand is actually that the couple of things, maybe if you were to think of, you know, maybe one or two moments where you either adopted and so maybe it was that shift that kind of focus on a really key customer type or segment or other things in the business that you notice really changed the trajectory on growth, because you know, you had a business that you're working through a whole bunch of stuff over the time, and now you've got 65 people in the business growing fast. What was some of the things that you would consider key moments or key decisions or key strategies that you put in place that really changed the trajectory of your growth?  

[00:14:37] Nihal: Yeah. You know, first was coming to the realisation that, you know, we were trying to be everything to everybody. And we realised like, hey, this is not working. There's so many nuances in each of these industries, we really ought to go deep in one. So it was that kind of realisation that we were trying to do too much. And we really had to focus and go deeper rather than broad and narrow. But the second was we decided to actually apply for an incubator or accelerator 500 start-ups out of the valley, we use that program and we got into the program, and we used that program very diligently while many of the start-ups were earlier than us. They are fairly newer and they're trying to figure a lot of things for us. We had kind of built great tech and we finally figured out the right industry. And so, using that program, we tested, I think it was seven different verticals and using the tools that they shared and the techniques that they showed us around. Even just sales techniques, we use those sales techniques almost as a market potential technique, using things like email automation to kind of go out and send messages to the seven different industries and basically AB test all of them to figure out where our where's our message resonating. And that was one clear signal we were saying, wow, insights is like, people are responding much more. We're getting many more bites, many more responses. And then of course had industry conversations with experts and things like that for the validated. And I think it was that process of a few months where we really kind of diligently tried to find a market versus previously where we were just kind of getting pulled in different directions and either having an idea and trying to pursue it, or having a client come to a website and kind of be a new industry and us getting excited and just going after it, this was a much more focused and organised process that then led to our pivot to insights and the rest is history.

[00:16:18] Sean: And so, to test those industries, were you having to essentially buy lists and do email marketing automation from that to then measure results. Is that how you sort of found that they got access to the data?  

[00:16:28] Nihal: Basically, there was actually another fellow foreign start-up company called Grow Bots. And it was one of the tools that was taught to us, basically as part of the whole email sequencing and the sales automation type of techniques and they give a steep discounts to fellow fire a start-ups. So, we were like, great, we're going to use grow bots. And I think the interesting thing about the tool at the time was that it not only had the email automation piece where you could schedule emails and have sequences and all of that, but it also had the databases in there. So, it was pretty easy to kind of search for and kind of get them in. And so, the database was part of that tool and we just kind of honed in on that tool and tested the heck out of it and fully utilised it.

[00:17:05] Sean: Awesome. Love that. What about funding? It's a conversation that every and every Founder who's never done any kind of funding before. It's like, oh my God, the number of funding options, there'll be podcast published sooner or may be already published by the time this one goes live with Roby from hipages where we actually unpacked pretty much every kind of debt structure and equity structure, you can think of that they've used pretty much all of them to rise different kinds of capital. How did you approach funding through this journey? What were the different kinds of funding that you considered or undertook that got you to where you are today?  

[00:17:41] Nihal: Yeah. So, we start off with friends and family, which tends to be quite common, initially was me. So, I self-funded for a couple of years, use all my savings and money from Microsoft that made to kind of put into the business. But once I was running out of that, the next was friends and family, and that's what allowed me to kind of really start and get a couple more people and just start again to really work towards it further. Beyond that, then we start to really, once we built the product. So, this was all pre product while we were still building, just with kind of an idea in some early, early, like basic product. As we put the product in the market, it was something where we had, even this was in the early, like the travel planning product. It was a very sound product. Our tech has always been great. And so that's why we use, in fact, we were lucky to be a part of this sort of an incubator space called 1871, a coworking space, but also an incubator. It's like, one of the start-up at least used to be the start-up hub in Chicago. Now, of course there's several. But we were one of the first 10 start-ups to be part of that hub. And they were interesting in that they help you connect with, they connected schools, start-ups and investors in the same thing and they are all kinds of workshops. And so not only would we learn, but we also made a whole bunch of connections. So, my first couple of angel investors that were like legit angel investors came from connections at 1871. And then of course, those have me introduced to others and so on. And so that was an angel funding. We still haven’t done venture, it's something actually, we will probably go for later this year. So, we're gearing up for that, but we've done angel financing, including some funds like fire under start-ups, or other small funds, as well as family offices and things like that. But we haven't gone full-blown institutional yet. We will purposely A) we weren’t ready for a few years, and now that we've been ready, we've been waiting for the right time. And I believe this year will be that right time.

[00:19:24] Sean: For those who in the community may not have done understand what angel investing sort of looks like, you know, typically, check size, what do they want for that, how do they get their money back out? How does that work?  

[00:19:37] Nihal: Yeah. So, it's been interesting. I mean, there's obviously many different ways and many different documents one can use. Right now, I mean, saves are pretty, pretty common when you're doing it early. Back when we were doing this, there was no safe yet. It was the pre-course at a safe that we used, which was safe, but not a convertible note in that it was not debt, but it was convertible. And that tends to be when you're early on, it tends to be the easiest way to raise money so that you're not pricing because it's hard. When you're really early. When you have an idea, maybe some product, not much stress. It's hard to put a value on the company. You may think it's one thing. Investors may think it's other. And so therefore the best way typically to do this is to actually have a convertible sort of instrument. You know, one of course is convertible debt. The other one is convertible equity, whether it's safe or whatever else, convertible debt is I stayed away from because then it’s debt on the books and there's other potential issues with that down the road, versus convertible equity or saves on the other hand are more, typically tend to be more entrepreneur friendly, yet very investor fair as well. And so, what those do typically is they allow you to set a valuation cap and that valuation cap is something that you can tend to agree on. It still, of course a negotiation. But when you agree on that cap, you also have with it a discount. And so, the way it works is that when we raise our real VC round, let's say, that's what we call qualified financing, then you will convert either the cap. So, let's say if that cap was 5 million, but your actual round was at a 20 million valuation. These angel investors get that value being capped at 5 million, even though you go to 20, but if let's say the VC comes in and that qualified financing, comes to add 50 million, the angel messages get a 20% or whatever the percentage that is discounting. So that's where they get the better off the valuation cap or the discount, that tends to be a much easier sell to investors because they are guaranteed a 20% discount on the next investor and or that max cap. And this way you don't have to really to go too deep into the valuation conversation, you can defer that for later.

[00:21:44] Sean: And are they usually expecting some kind of interest to be accrued over the course. I know that fundamentally that providing you cash now that you can use to fund the business, that cash can be converted to equity at the time, what was the sort of the typical note terms? Whether you'd like two years or three years?  

[00:21:59] Nihal: Yeah. So that's, if you go over the note and that's why we didn't go with the note. So, if you do go with the note, there tends to be interest in all of that. If you don't … equity instead, it's not something that accrues interest, but of course has the ability to convert at either the qualified financing date or at the maturity date at the investors option. And so, this way it gives them the option to convert in two years, or to wait for the venture rounds so that they converted to that preferred round with the venture investor. So, it gives them both t hose options.

[00:22:30] Sean: Got it. Very nice. Thank you, Mate. I really appreciate that. What about team? How have you gone about, given you've made some strategic shifts in the business, how did you think, particularly since it sounded like it was maybe sort of, was it 2018? That was probably the most…was that with the real double-down occurred in terms of the single vertical focus?  

[00:22:52] Nihal: Yeah, 2018 was when we made a hard switch into insights. Yes. 2020 was our breakout year of growth. But 2018, was that hard switch kind of starting from scratch in terms of brand new industry, zero revenue, but kind of having some product that we could bring and then of course building a whole lot more.

[00:23:09] Sean: So, and you've now passed that typically Founders that tends to be some comfort wobbles, depending on their background, their experiencing from a leadership perspective, usually around the 20, 30 people mock where all of a sudden they realise that, actually, I can't talk to everybody every day, I can't manage everybody else's priorities. They're going to have to stop building some management capability, bringing in some more senior people, et cetera. And that 20 to 30 is usually where it starts to get a bit painful if they haven't already started that process. In between sort of 2018 and now, how did you think about building your team in terms of the sort of sequencing of hires to get you something that was manageable so you can still focus on the stuff that you're good at and the stuff that you're stronger and the stuff that you enjoy, but other people are helping to kind of bring everyone else along?  

[00:23:52] Nihal: Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I was just joking with one of my colleagues that day like, we recently hired someone, it's been a month. I've never even spoken to them. It's kind of nuts. It just it's because it all happened so fast. So, to like, just to have that is so strange for me because I was interviewing every person, talking to every person. And obviously that's changed in the last couple of years. Now, back in 2018 we only had, what was it, probably, 15 people of which many would I be probably like three employees and 12 contractors, everything, it was like quite a little bit, and then 2018 as we kind of grew in 2019 was there, we kind of started final stride. That's when we started to add some folks initially, we've always been tech heavy, by the way. So, we will always like, from those 15, 12, or tech three, where some sort of myself included and then some customer support, maybe some basic sales and marketing. But as we started to grow, it was really in 2020, in fact. So, it was quite late, 2019 as well we rode it that way. 2020 was the year we started to grow. So, in the year and a half, we have tripled basically our headcount, but in 2020 it was when we realized, okay, hey, we really need some additional management help. And I was really fortunate to find, back then it was a head of operations, but now she's our COO - Courtney Williams. And similar with Jared Carr, who back then was head a customer strategy now as, as chief customer officer, in two key additional hires that really, really helped, A) take off work. B) kind of do their shit much better than I could do it because that was the expertise and then see, help grow that team under them and help manage that team and cultivate that team. And so I think the key, and I'd done that on texts on tech. I had my C2, it helped me build the tech side of this because we were always heavy on tech, but on the business side is where, because we were tech first always is where we were kind of lagging behind and having those key additional hires was essential to kind of help us grow and help us do it right.

[00:25:49] Sean: That's awesome. And so, if you think about some of your, the customer, maybe the customer success side or the sales marketing side. Did you build the people who were doing the work first or did you get this most senior people first and have them build their team from scratch?

[00:26:06] Nihal: So, it's interesting, we had one or two people initially they're doing the work. So, it was me. And one more guy, Kyle on our team was still of course here. And he's one of our key folks, but it was just two of us and we hit a million in revenue and it was two of us. And so, we were kind of doing a lot, but then of course that's when we added, I think initially it was a couple more project managers and then right after that was where we realised, okay, Hey, no, no, no, we really need someone who's much more senior to help manage this team and grow this team. And so, it was a little bit of both where we didn't go too much into, there was not many people hired before we had the senior team, it was a couple, and then we kind of added the senior team. And one of the things, the key things we've done team-wise and I'm talking about team is kind of really the way we hire has been focused, not just of course, and expertise and background and things like that, but really on team fit. And I think that's the one thing, knock on wood we've actually done really, really well. We have a team that is super collaborative and super like just good humans first and foremost, people that are really passionate about what we're doing, really bought into our vision and therefore, just the camaraderie, even in a COVID type time. We've, there's so many people that, I didn't meet until last summit, just a couple of months ago for like a whole year of them being in and they didn't meet anyone else cause we all virtual, but just the camaraderie we've been able to build by kind of picking the right people beyond just looking at skill. I think has been a key advantage to our team.

[00:27:25] Sean: Well, number one, I love that. And the whole concept of fit is a really interesting one because I think people can get lost in that principle. Sometimes people take it as; well, if they're not like us, then we won't take them on because that means they don't fit. And I kind of always think, well, if you want your culture to stay exactly the same as those people are, then that's one thing. But theoretically, it's… I'm always wondering what can this person do to bring to our culture, to help it evolve as opposed to have to fit it into the box that may already exist. Otherwise, the organisation doesn't evolve, but on the flip side, like I know flight centre have a very strong, a big travel agency, global travel agency, but very big in Australia who have a very sort of fit in, walk out the door style of culture, and it's very strong culturally, but people are like, well, you're either in this or you're not. And if you don't like everything that we do, see you later, it's very interesting scenarios. But I'm interested in how practically, because there's one thing is once the person's in the business, seeing how they gel with the team and how the relationships develop and all the rest, but fundamental, you've got to screen for that in your hiring process. So, what are a couple of the practical things that you found the most impactful in helping you assess, whether you think they're going to be a good fit for the organisation or not?  

[00:28:49] Nihal: No, honestly, it's been gut. It's been just having that conversation. Like, of course, when they come to for the interview with me as pretty much typically the final interview. They've already been vetted out in terms of they have the skill, they have the expertise and those kinds of things, but really my key thing, I'm not grilling somebody in my interviews. It's really having a conversation and kind of just getting a real feel for who they are, talking about those two different examples you said before, I think balance in that, you know, on one end, we want people to fit, but not fit as in. We have a very diverse team in a multinational in four countries at this point, a very diverse team, and it was demographics and geographics and all of that and ages as well, but the whole thing is really key values So, looking for key values without of course asking for them, or saying them out loud, but really curiosity, being one of the key ones for us and, uh, things like how passionate they are about they are, how just really honest and transparent they are, how willing to learn they are. Those are the kinds of things that if you can find people who have few of those and some others that we look for qualities, then that is the fit across the team. And if they have that, then of course they can be very, very diverse in many other ways and help grow the culture, but have that one constant, like that same ethos basically.

[00:30:10] Sean: I find that the art in that is really having thought about your questions, that help you get somebody talking about something in the right way. So, to your point, you don't kind of go, okay one of our values is passion. Are you passionate? Yes, I am. Okay, great. Next question. Like, that didn't tell me anything. So it's like, how do I get them talking about something that's going to help me assess that, it's a really interesting art form.  

[00:30:32] Nihal: And it's kind of funny, right? When I was doing this early on, like now we, of course we're going up and over the last year we have like brand book and brand values and all this good stuff that's been built. So, there's lot of stuff to reference on, but earlier it was just really literally heart, gut and just conversations. Just kind of trying to feel somebody out. It worked more like most times at work. Yeah. Have we got sometimes a couple of things wrong? Yeah. For the most time it worked just cause we, I mean, A) got lucky as well and B) just managed to kind of find that, but as we've grown, yes, having those values, understanding what kinds of questions to ask has kind of allowed, not just me, but other folks on our hiring and completely without me to be able to actually still screen and look for that and do that in a genuine way.

[00:31:14] Sean: Have you thought about your value proposition? I mean, if you think about, you obviously from a customer perspective and a matching your core value proposition, you're getting really clear on insights and who the customers are going to be for that. But once you're in that game and you're getting traction and it's moving fast. How do you stay on top of making sure that you are delivering enough value and you're thinking about your market and how you continue to sort of differentiate so that you've got a sort of sustainable competitive advantage. How much do you time do you think you spend focused on competitors versus just customer problems in terms of the way that it evolves? How do you stay on top of that when the business is growing quickly?  

[00:31:52] Nihal: So, this is one thing that I am really proud about like how we do it. We're really, really focused on innovation. We're always focused on what's next. We are always building the next thing while we're still supporting and improving the current thing. And that's what we've been tech heavy. It's allowed us to do that, to be able to have enough of a team and a very, very strong team of that who now have worked together, you know, nine years, many of them, we have been, very, very low on nutrition, which is great. That really has been. A lot of us to have this team, that's going laser fast building thing where we're pushing stuff multiple times a week, and so, we're really, really fast paced in terms of innovation. In the past, I used to do wondering, should I look at competitors? I've kind of found that when, even when I came into insights, I'm not an insight. I'm not a researcher, but I've been told many times like, oh, you must have been in research and it's not, it's just, I'm a good listener. I'll kind of go into those rooms. I'll kind of be a fly on the wall. I’ll listen, I’ll ask the questions and just learn about some of these process and problems and things like that. And we basically take that kind of data and we put that, I'm basically the head of products still and I keep a very close, I'm a very product heavy CEO. And so we are always looking at what's ahead and naturally where we've managed to when we came into insights, we came in with this live video technology to help you remotely do ethnography. It was great. People were like, wow, when they saw it. But what we realized was it was very niche. It was something that was so far ahead of what they were doing, it was A) too early in the market and B) it was a fraction, it was a niche. It was only a fraction of projects that could even use something like that. Where we really got into our stride was, we realised that once we analyse the market, we're saying; on quant, you've got the big players, like the survey monkeys and the quality. But in qual, there's no clear leader. There's a bunch of start-ups like us doing niche, different things. But what if we actually went in and tried, just be bold and try to go and kind of capture, be that Qualtrics or survey monkey off the quality of the market, because there is no clear leader and that's where we went broader and we kind of completely changed and expanded our platform both horizontally and vertically to kind of offer those services. So it's kind of staying in this conversation, and learning and being able to, and this is the hard part, especially, you know, tech folks as well. Like when you build something you're really proud about it, but we have thrown, I mean, think about our two different pivots before we got here, we've thrown away an amazing amount of tech. That was all great tech. It was hard, but I think the team just understanding that we're going to iterate, iterate, iterate until we kind of find that product market fit and then keep going and then keep cannibalising and reinventing ourselves. I think that mindset has really kind of helped us do that. And so, we do play close attention to not just our clients, but sometimes we're just doing forefront innovation based on what we have seen and what we know can be next. Other times, of course, there's of course, industry reports and trends and things like that. We look at as well, but it's a combination of those.

[00:34:39] Sean: I love that. And some of the themes that I'm hearing you talk about when you think there's a lot of people spend…can really fall into the trap of doing things like just looking at what their competitors are doing and trying to almost sort of match and maybe differentiate on one thing that's small, but fundamentally, if you're sort of out there looking for best practice, i.e. things that people are already doing then you're always going to be a lag out. You're always going to be behind the game and you're actually just playing catch up. And if you don't have sufficient differentiation, that's going to be problematic. But what I like is that you, it sounds like you spend a lot more time listening to and interacting with your customers to really figure out what their problems are and not just taking that as your own lead, because you can also end up in some pretty interesting places if you do that. And you're not actually bringing, you know, because sometimes customers don't know what they need until you put it in front of them. Right. Because they haven't seen it before. They didn't even know it's possible to do X, Y, Z. So, you've got this interesting mix of going. Here is the strategic sort of canvas. Here is a category you're at, we've got a category role we want to play. And so, there is clearly some good, you know, kind of market thinking there about where's a space we can own with some white space, but then we've really got to listen to our customers to make sure that we're adding enough value in a way that we're going to be, they are never going to let us go once they've got us inside, there we're adding so much value. They're like, okay, this is incredible. And then we've got to mix that with. We've got to bring stuff that's next practice because if we're only looking at what's currently best practice that went already behind that's, whatever else is already doing. That sound like the right kind of mix for you guys?  

[00:36:08] Nihal: Absolutely 100% right. And for us, I mean, one thing we've, I've always looked at as an advantage is actually not being from whether it was the travel industry, virtual travel was just a whole new and nobody was ever part of it. And then we created it basically. And then this industry, both these industries travel and insights, we weren't at least, I wasn't in them. And I think that was an advantage because when I came in, I didn't know, if I was a researcher or I was a travel executive, I would have kind of had all of those biases on what one thinks subconsciously or consciously can't be done. Right. Versus here you just go and see, okay, these seem to be the problems you kind of analyse it. I never looked at any competitors and said based on this, here's what I think we should do. We build that out, start built out, get feedback and then look and see, okay. Are there the competitors around there? And typically we were finding like, no, we had actually gone way past where people were doing because otherwise people were just getting stuck in some of those boxes while we didn't really know what was not possible. So, we went out and build things that were much ahead of the game and it's happened multiple times for us. And so, we hope to kind of keep doing that over the years.

[00:37:12] Sean: Love that. What about, can we shift, I guess out of the sort of practicalities of business and come to you, what makes you come alive in business and how does that tend to show up in your company?

[00:37:24] Nihal: Comes alive more just in terms of passion or…?  

[00:37:28] Sean: Yeah. When you think about the stuff that really lots of fire in you, business-wise, that continues to make you get out of bed every day and bring energy to the business. Fundamentally, even in a company of 65 people. Yes, you've now got some management structure in place but the energy comes from the Founder. And fundamentally CEO probably gets two bad days a year, right? Like you can, everyone's entitled to a few bad days, but when you're the leader and if somebody is trying to inspire you, you actually have to bring your energy. And in the absence of something that lots of fire, that energy tends to sort of wane or wither, or it's hard to give to other people, what lights you up?  

[00:38:04] Nihal: For me, it's always been the innovation side of it. Right. It's the product side of it. As I mentioned, like, that's my passion. That's my forte, that's what I still do every single day in some way, shape or form as a big part of my day, and I think just being able to make an impact, it sounds cheesy, but it's true, that's what's driven me all the time. It's just being able to actually make an impact, build something that truly is something and does something in the world. And like, that's like the core underlying thing I've always had. And then in this case, we actually truly like by, having a platform that helps several companies and agencies and others truly better understand humankind or human behaviour to then help them build better products and services actually does have a large impact indirectly. But does have a large impact on the world, and therefore, you know, that's really a big driving force for us. It's like, what can we do to, you know, help everybody else like product... It's kind of interesting. If you think about it as a product innovation that we do to help others do product innovation and therefore help just everyone be more innovative, right. If we do things right, and, you know, provide them the right tools and all of that. And so that's really what exciting, cause I'm all about innovation and new technology.

[00:39:15] Sean: One of the things I'd really like to draw out of what you've just said for a audience is, I've just built a new diagnostic to help companies. If, you know, typically anywhere probably from five to maybe a hundred people who are still scaling and trying to figure actually how they're scaling practices and how the things I built compare to the businesses that actually scaled the best and the practices that they have. So I built this diagnostic tool that allows people in a seven minutes survey to actually get a report back that says here's where your gaps are, here's where you're really strong. The first section of these nine business pillars that are in there is actually founder awareness and founder health. And two of the elements that I talk about in there were two of the elements, two of the key practices are actually two things you've just drawn on. First of all, the Founder understands what gives them energy. And they actively and proactively talent pool and identify talent to fill those things that actually to ensure that they don't end up spending time on things that take energy away from them. And you know that about yourself, that what lights you up is product. And so, you built this leadership team in a way that allows you to spend the time, not only adding this space that you can add the most value. But also, the place that gives you energy because in the absence of that, if the Founder loses energy, say goodbye to the business, pretty shortly after, you know what I mean? It's going to become a big problem. So, in the second part is actually Founders who have enough “why” in their personal purpose, their personal why and motivation that, that is going to sustain them in the hard times, because in the absence of that desire to actually really create impact when it's just about money. When hard times come Founders make very different decisions if they're not actually motivated by something deeper than financial, because they look at the business go, oh, the businesses starting to wither. Maybe I should just sell it off. Like, let's get the money out and just put this thing to bed as opposed to going. Now it's time to double down. Actually, maybe it's time to double our investment in this business because I know that there's a next horizon, but they do that because they've got a much bigger why, beyond just the money.  

[00:41:10] Nihal: Exactly. It's been that driving force that we've had. I mean, being around for nine years, most of which way we were struggling, there's the honest truth, being still, being able to come back and still kind of go out of it and still kind of just have that energy has been a key advantage or at least I think like, if somebody asks me, what are the things that you guys did that got you here? I say it's three things. It's passion, persistence and the ability to pivot, right. And to be kind of reinventing yourself, has been those things. And because we've had times where we've been down to, I mean, three times we've been down to the last $5,000 or less in our bank account. And those are times and other times, even when launching and first couple of years, my parents being like, hey, what are you doing? You had a cushy job. Like, this is a mistake, didn't want… sometimes initially they didn't want me to launch, you know, it was like, Hey, you know, we love you and we'll support you, but really we think you're making the wrong decision. And it's times like that, where if you really have that commitment and you really have that belief. Now, you obviously shouldn't have it completely wrongly, we knew that we were onto something. We just didn't have the right industry. We knew we had great tech and we always had so much validation from some phenomenal people. Yes, we weren't seeing revenue attraction, but that was the thing that took us wild. Can I get that product market fit to get to revenue attraction? But it was having those whys and having that driving force, is what allows us to kind of wither all those storms and be where we are today.

[00:42:38] Sean: Beautiful. So good. Biggest mistake you've made in business to date. And what did you learn from it?  

[00:42:49] Nihal: I don't know, we made many mistakes, so I don't know if there was one, like biggest one I can like single out, but I can perhaps talk about a couple. Right. One is, when we were first launching, right. The first time again, because I'm so into product. When we were first launching, I think we took like a year, year and a half just to launch our product in the market because I was like a perfection it's like, no, no, no, this has got to be A++, but in doing that, we had, ironically that year, it was, I guess, the year of travel planning, 2012, I don't know what happened. It was a plethora of start-ups that kind of came to the market. No one doing exactly what we did, but there were of course overlapping start-ups, and so, we just waited too long to get out of the gates. We would have perhaps kind of got out sooner, maybe be able to raise money sooner, do other things and sort of capture more markets. So that was one, you know, starting off the blocks kind of mistake that then we decided never to repeat again rather than to try like perfect the technology and launch it. Let's launch and iterate, launch and iterate, just keep iterating, iterating. And so that's where we, we fixed that. And other times sometimes, you know, you just have, like, we waited too long to make, now again, if I had to do things override, there's a lot of things I wouldn't do, because if we didn't do those things, we wouldn't kind of be here today, but at the same time, I wish I could condense those nine years into some shorter years. And I think part of that was to be more diligent around the industry, right? When we kind of had this great virtual travel technology, where for example, after that first pivot, it was really exciting technology, one of its kind, but it was something that we were trying to go to education and to governments and all this stuff. And we, weren't thinking too hard about the business side of the sales process and the fact that some of them don't have money, right. But some of them have money, but it's such long sales cycles. And so, we didn't pay enough and we paid attention to the value on paper of the use case, but didn't really pay enough attention to the feasibility of the sales cycle and the nuance of all of the different kind of facets of kind of getting in the door and being able to scale that quickly and so on. And that's where we faltered, where of course, eventually we kind of learned, and we did the right tests while a part of finer start-ups there to kind of find the right market. I wish we had done that sooner because we would have kind of condensed the time to get here. So, I'd say those are a couple of ones that come to mind.

[00:45:06] Sean: Yeah, really interesting. Everything is easy in hindsight, right. You know, it's great to have a 2020 vision, but fundamentally you get the learnings from somewhere. Hopefully you can contract those by using good advisers, having good peer network and listening to podcasts and whatever else gets a source of learnings is, but some things can be truncated and some things we just got to go through because, you know, it's just the way it works. So, two questions more for you. We've talked a lot about how we've got to here today, but if you go out three years from now, what's the business going to look like in your mind?  

[00:45:40] Nihal: Very, very different, very different. Like, as I mentioned, you know, we always reinventing something where currently installed above. It is something that we later this year plan to kind of really kind of go big with, and it's something that we think is really going to revelation. Revolutionise the industry. Of course, everybody says that, but it's something that we've really been working on behind the scenes for a while, it's something that is kind of creating a new category that didn't exist, it's something that we've learned from, of course, doing all the work we'd done and it's one of those forward-thinking things, but it will kind of change in fact really shake up what we're doing, but in the right way. And we've kind of really seen the data to kind of know this is that then we've got the right advisors, people who've been there, done that in the industry that are really kind of behind this. And these are folks that, I remember one of them who actually is like, I call him the godfather of the industry and he's been with us, you know, for a couple of years and he's shut down a lot of my ideas. And this one, he was like wow, and like getting that from him was more exciting than our first million.  

[00:46:47] Sean: Yeah,  

[00:46:48] Nihal: Because like he is the godfather. And so, we are really bullish about what, I'm unfortunately not able to talk about it yet, but it's something that, yeah, it will change and it's something that I believe is going to allow us to have even faster rate of growth because of just the way the fundamentals of the business are, becomes more, even more sticky SAS and things like that. So, it's really exciting across, but unfortunately…

[00:47:14] Sean: And I love that that is a category creation rather than kind of a category leadership, you know, like well, creating a new one. Yeah. Beautiful. And of any companies that are capable of do it, given what you've been through in the last a couple of major shifts, I'm sure you guys. are really well set up to do that. So, that's very exciting. Last question I have for you, which I ask every Founder is, I want you to imagine. It is a little segment I call 'Above all else’. And so, I want you to imagine that you're in your yearning years. So, you've still got a long way to go before you get to your yearning years. You've obviously got lots of energy and you've got a lot of stuff you want to achieve, but let's imagine you're in the later years of life, you've got lots of… you've got your full mind, you've got all this, you built as many businesses as you wanted. You've solved all the problems that you felt like you had the appetite to solve and the CEO of the world's largest global community of first time Founders typically, those are the maybe 1 to 20 million Founders, but they haven't done it before and they're super hungry and they want the wisdom and she gives you just like this one time opportunity where she goes, okay, Nihal, you have to crystallise for me, above all else, what are the three things that have found on needs to get right if they want to truly scale, what would be those three things for you?  

[00:48:24] Nihal: I mean, I'm biased because this is something that we've kind of used and I strongly believe in, but it's something where… and it's not necessary scale per se, but it's to succeed, I believe. Right? So, one is just be truly, truly passionate. It goes back to what you were saying earlier, having those why, having that driving force. So, if you're really passionate about what you're doing or the problem you're solving, that is a very key thing you need, especially as an early stage Founder, that's going to go through all these ups and downs. We have to wither those and to kind of really stay hungry. Right? So that's one. Persistence, it's the other thing. You are going to hit so many walls, so many twists and turns and really staying persistent through all of that is key. Again, not being foolishly persistent, but being persistent and being able to, and that's why the third one, these all kind of go so hand-in-hand is again the ability to pivot because being able to actually kind of, I mean, it's rare. There's many businesses today that I'm sure. There are so many case studies out there where people started at one thing and just ended up either completely different. We are one example of that, but sometimes, you know, significant even within the realm of what they were doing, they started for like one niche thing and then kind of became completely like, you know, there's so many examples of that around the world. And so, you know, that what you start with is very likely not going to be what you end with, but if you have that open mind, right. The mind that says; Hey, I'm willing to learn. I'm willing to reinvent, and I'm willing to shift and. That I think is another key advantage to be able to kind of really stay out there and keep it.

[00:49:56] Sean: I love that that is beautiful. And I'd really love to acknowledge you today Nihal, because those three things you can hear if you sort of listen back to this full episode, folks, you'll hear actually all those three things have played such a major role in how you got here to today. And one of the things I love about the way you've approach this business is that humility because you can't actually do pivots. Well, you might be persistent and dogged because you want to go after a goal, but that's very easy to sort of, to end up actually close minded and tunnel vision and not listening and not taking feedback. And so, it's a hard thing or it's like, well, how much feedback do I take? Do I kind of just be sort of blown around by the wind? So, I've got to find this balance between being persistent and being open. And then, when I've made a shift, now I have to be persistent in that direction and then I have to be open and do another shift. Then I have to be consistent that direction. It's actually, really hard to do it. It's a dichotomy. But it's how great businesses evolve and the fact that it's taken a good amount of time for you to go through that learning process because you stayed open. Now you're getting the fruits of that labour. And I don't necessarily mean the financial fruits. You now having the impact that you want, you’re to starting to grow, which means you can accelerate your impact. And so having a team of 65 must be super exciting when you look around and you look at your management team and you go, there's all these people here that are smarter than me at the things that they're great at, which allows me to spend more time doing the stuff that I love. Now, I know I'm set up for success because I can actually have great ideas and I've got great people who can help me implement them as well, and so that's a very gratifying.  

[00:51:20] Nihal: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's such a great feeling. We were just creating an exact summary the other day. And I was putting on my like leadership slide. I was like, wow. Like literally just two days ago I looked back and I was telling my colleague was working with. Look at this team. I mean, like, because again, everything's happened so quickly, but to have people at with that calibre by my side, you know, real experts in all the things they do, it's kind of really allowed us to be where we are today. It's going to allow us to kind of grow further. And as you mentioned, allows me to focus where my strengths are. So, you are absolutely right.

[00:51:50] Sean: Beautiful. And Nihal, how can people get in touch with you or follow along with what you or the company are doing?  

[00:51:59] Nihal: Absolutely. My email is [email protected], you know, of course, they can follow us on our website and social channels and things like that, but it's all just Qual Sights. And I, myself, I'm not too big on social, but our company is obviously present in the standard channels but I’m of course reachable by email.

[00:52:18] Sean: Beautiful. Mate, thank you so much. Folks, I really hope you've enjoyed the show today. A huge thanks to Nihal, a really wonderful story and so many learnings for aspiring Founders. And first and second time, Founders and professionals say you guys are regarding the companies and want to be able to really maximise their impact. Before you go, if you'd like what you've heard today, of course, please leave us a review on any of the platforms. We love Apple Podcasts because it's where 70% of our listeners are on Apple. So, it helps us find more people. Seemingly who love apple over Spotify. I don't know 30% use Spotify 70%, I don’t know how that's just the market. Obviously we've got a website Scaleupspodcast.com. So, if you want, you can get full transcripts of this episode on there. You can also go to YouTube if you'd rather watch the video version of the full episode, and if you want to follow us on social, you'll find us on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. And like now I don't spend a huge amount of time on most of them other than maybe LinkedIn, where you'll see me most. And for our community, just a thought to leave with you or to leave you with today. The only thing that can guarantee that you will not scale is actually giving up is the lack of persistence that you just heard Nihal talk about. And you have to stay on shakeable in your faith that you will get there and you have to remain open and flexible to new behaviours, new ways of doing things and staying flexible in your approach, but you can't give up in the absence of giving up, stick out. Hopefully you'll get there. You've been listening to ScaleUps Podcast. I'm Sean Steele. And I look forward to speaking to you again next week. Thanks so much, Nihal.

[00:53:46] Nihal: Thank you so much, Sean.