Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Guerrilla Marketing Strategies To Grow | Nihal Advani - Founder & CEO of QualSights

Transcript

Lessons - Guerrilla Marketing Strategies To Grow | Nihal Advani - Founder & CEO of QualSights · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I
• 0:09
  Understand and what were some of those gorilla marketing things that you were doing that were obviously not spending millions of dollars and I had money
• 0:17
  Walking through some of those and which ones worked which ones didn't
• 0:20
  You know, it was interesting. We actually did a lot of social back then
• 0:23
  This was like earlier days of social compared now and you didn't have many of the platforms you have now
• 0:28
  Facebook was something we tried we actually won in travel. We won the best social media start-up in travel award
• 0:34
  I remember I think it was my skift
• 0:36
  We also won cranes the Chicago's best social media start-up award like so we had done some interesting things with Facebook
• 0:42
  Which was essentially we tried a bunch of different types of posts
• 0:45
  But what we found was a way to kind of get like a daily dose of inspiration
• 0:50
  Was you combine a great unique picture right we had curators that would find these cool pictures and kind of show people
• 0:55
  But you asked them a trivia question and when you cut like we tried so many different variations different things
• 1:00
  But the thing that was very clear like data was way better was if you asked them a question of like
• 1:05
  Can you guess where this is for example and then show them a really cool picture that inspires them at the same time the
• 1:12
  The likes and the comments and stuff the interactions were off the charts and so that allowed us to get some really nice usage from folks
• 1:19
  Like that who found us on Facebook and then kind of
• 1:22
  Got to our our platform and read it others shots of things as well
• 1:26
  But that was I think one of the interesting ones very interesting. Okay, so as this was growing
• 1:31
  But obviously and you won awards you were in you got some press and some PR but it didn't really work out
• 1:36
  So I can still see though that this is like the the roots of of
• 1:40
  Consumer insights like you're getting information. You're figuring out and this is you know the the
• 1:47
  Qualsites is not that far away from how it started really if you think about it like
• 1:52
  You think about it not when you just say it right up front it sounds like wait what yeah
• 1:56
  If you my original passion right it was all about helping
• 2:01
  Myself as well, right? I was I was one of the prospective users
• 2:05
  But also helping just people in general see and understand the world. Why do you travel you travel to explore the world
• 2:12
  Right to see other things three new things that expose new things and also understand country understand other humans and behavior and all those kinds of things
• 2:18
  And so I always had that passion and then we pivoted we actually pivoted two times
• 2:23
  To get here. So we had a travel start up then we actually pivoted to virtual travel
• 2:27
  Which is another thing right within travel before we went to insights, but all of these three things were
• 2:33
  You know what is connected by you know what is virtual travel?
• 2:37
  This is this is like pre-metaverse. So I don't I don't know what virtual travel is
• 2:41
  So funny right people talk about I mean metaphors is a bit different, but
• 2:45
  So this is pre-Miracat pre-Perschool pre-Facebook, right?
• 2:49
  We actually now finally got a pattern on this just last year seven years later
• 2:54
  Where we were the first to kind of do
• 2:57
  Allow somebody to travel somewhere virtually without physically being there
• 3:01
  So the way it worked is you had guides local guides where there was actually official tour guides
• 3:05
  Which we had many or whether it was you know
• 3:08
  Just locals in the city or even travelers in the city happening to be a travel
• 3:11
  We allowed them to share their experiences live
• 3:14
  So not recorded videos these were live videos
• 3:16
  That's why it was pretty all of like live such a big thing now in today's world
• 3:19
  But in 2014 when we were doing this it wasn't a thing
• 3:23
  And so we basically allowed people to virtually and remotely not just see what's going on somewhere else through somebody else
• 3:28
  But it was all mobile
• 3:29
  But somebody was walking around in that city and you could also kind of tailor your experience by saying hey
• 3:34
  Can you turn left and show me this so can you kind of do show me that or whatever it may be, right?
• 3:38
  So it was a very interactive experience
• 3:41
  And it was really unique in that our goal was you know when we realized okay
• 3:45
  Why were it was hard we realized the whole financial model would work and
• 3:48
  Even though we had users and stuff
• 3:50
  But then we were like you know who are companies in the travel industry that have actually broken out
• 3:55
  Kayak was one you know for years before we started was while they started out at Kayak and Airbnb
• 4:00
  You know like a new way of you know searching for
• 4:02
  For stuff and then would there be a new inventory source and we're like what can we do if we try to stay within travel
• 4:08
  But be truly unique and that's what we came up with we're like well, you know
• 4:13
  Folks like you and me were privileged in that we have got to see you know quite a bit of the world and etc
• 4:18
  But there's so many other folks out there in this world that actually would want to go places
• 4:22
  But don't get a chance to go don't get a chance to go as much
• 4:25
  Whether it's because of financial reasons or sometimes it's logistical or even physical reasons
• 4:29
  And so that was kind of that that
• 4:31
  There was super exciting because we were doing something truly incredibly unique
• 4:36
  And we did it beyond B2C be very quickly realized B2C was going to be hard because we had the same challenges
• 4:42
  Amata we had some interesting ideas of monetization in fact Amazon by the way recently just started a
• 4:47
  Thing that is almost like an exact thing of what we were doing in 2014. It's kind of funny Amazon travel
• 4:52
  I think they're piloting it. You know how they pilot different things. We'll see how it does
• 4:55
  but point is um
• 4:57
  We had different ways to kind of tip guides and have private tours and stuff like that
• 5:01
  But we realized you know this is going to be a very strong thing for B2B
• 5:03
  And that's where we started to B2B
• 5:05
  We work with tourism organizations like state of Illinois, state of Michigan
• 5:08
  We'll clients of ours for example
• 5:09
  We work with
• 5:10
  A very very different hotels for things like site inspections
• 5:13
  So going to see a hotel for like an event per se or even like things like we have work with a wind farm in Australia for inspections and the wind farm
• 5:21
  So all kinds of reasons we even work with NASA for virtual filters for kids who couldn't go there
• 5:26
  And they wanted like a you know record for a trip to NASA or even museums. You have many museum clients
• 5:30
  So it was really unique and we started to make some money there
• 5:33
  But there too because we had all of these different industries right we had tourism we had government we had education we had
• 5:39
  Others um that we were like this is great. There's definitely something here. We've got strong tech
• 5:44
  But we haven't really found product market photo found that one industry that we can really own
• 5:48
  We're trying to be jack of all trades and that's where we made that final pivot
• 5:51
  To call sites. Okay, that makes okay, so but but you you pivoted to call sites
• 5:55
  But you could have just why did you not just double down on one industry?
• 5:59
  Why did you choose to pivot even like the brand like the company name? That's that's major
• 6:05
  Yeah, so when we were looking at these and we were doing a few different things right so we were doing these few different verticals
• 6:10
  I just mentioned
• 6:11
  This one time one of our advisors connected us to this other potential investor
• 6:15
  And within a day he gave us you know a 25k check because he was like you know what
• 6:19
  I'm a researcher and I think your your your technology could be interesting for research for ethnography
• 6:24
  For helping people understand consumer behavior without physically visiting a home
• 6:28
  I'm like oh, that's pretty interesting. So that's how kind of the idea popped into mind
• 6:32
  In 2017 when we realized like listen
• 6:35
  We were kind of doing this and just like not going the way we wanted to but I mean it was not going bad
• 6:39
  But it was not going great
• 6:40
  We're like we need to figure it out and we need to kind of hone in on one vertical
• 6:44
  We've got into 500 startups out of the valley and
• 6:47
  And that journey what we did was like unlike other stuff
• 6:50
  We were kind of a little bit later stage going into 500 startups
• 6:52
  Considering we had a great product and all the stuff we had some revenue
• 6:55
  But we didn't have the right market and so we used that program single-handedly focused
• 6:59
  We took seven different verticals including insights being one of them at the time
• 7:03
  To then kind of do some real tests and real some real market testing in conversations and a whole bunch of things that they taught us there
• 7:09
  To determine what market it would be that we would focus on and insights was thrown into the hat because that one investor once dropped a check
• 7:17
  Really quickly, but I don't see something here
• 7:22
  And when we did those tests like we did up for example email kind of not email marketing
• 7:26
  But like almost like sales email sequencing. That's quite common nowadays
• 7:28
  But like automated sales emails to kind of see what message is working and it was a night and day with with compared to other industries like
• 7:35
  The insights folks really it was resonating our message was resonating
• 7:39
  We spoke to a whole bunch of industry experts got some more investors
• 7:42
  It's part of that like we just talking to people and they were getting excited about what we're doing
• 7:45
  There's something here and they've got real money these CPG companies for example and farmer companies have real money
• 7:50
  They're a real pain point that we can solve about being able to do research more efficiently at being doing deep research
• 7:57
  And that's how the whole
• 7:59
  Final change came to kind of hone in into insights. Okay, so then okay perfect
• 8:03
  So then that brings us up to to qualsites. So what so like elevator pitch what does qualsites actually do for a company?