Lessons - Guerrilla Marketing Strategies To Grow | Nihal Advani - Founder & CEO of QualSights

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