Rethinking Consumer Insights: Holland Martini and Maria Vorovich on Creative Methodology

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Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. Today I've got a double dose of insight for you. My guests are Holland Martini and Maria Vorovic, co-founders of GoodQuests. What they call the anti-research research company. Holland and Maria met working side by side at Gray, one of the biggest creative agencies in New York, and turned a shared frustration with stale, jargon-heavy market research into a company that's worked with brands like P&G, PepsiCo, Adobe, TikTok, and Meta. Inc. magazine named GoodQuest one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S., and along the way, Holland and Maria picked up Effies, Cannes Lions, and Clio Awards for the brand work behind their insights. Today isn't just about their methodology, it's about how 2 co-founders took a genuinely different point of view and built a business around it. How do you position a company as anti the category it's in? How do you land enterprise clients when your pitch is, we do this differently? And how do 2 founders split the load and keep growing together? Holland and Maria, you are in different places. All 3 of us are spread out across multiple time zones. Thank you so much for joining me today on Your Brand Amplified.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah, as I was mentioning before we jumped on, I am teaching a research methodology course and I'm really excited to have finally met you after a few months of, uh, getting this scheduled and to talk about your company and to share this interview with my students and other work that you've done as case studies. So, before we get into, you know, your business, let's give listeners a little sense of who's who. Holland, you're Chief Insights Officer, Maria, you're Chief Strategy Officer. What does that split look like day to day?

Well, actually, interesting enough, we have a funny way to describe it. We call it waffle brain, spaghetti brain, and you'll hear us talk about this. So, Holland is our waffle brain. She's— and Holland, I am— I hope it's okay to speak for you, but she is our resident Statistician, fondly known as our math nerd. And the reason she's the waffle brain is she thinks in a very grid-like matter. Everything has to make sense. Everything has to fall in line. And I am the very opposite. I am spaghetti-brained. Things up there are slurping and swerving and just mixing. And that's a way to summarize our roles as well. So, Chief Insights Officer, Holland's job, more than anything— she has many, many jobs, But more than anything is to make sure that we are adhering to really rigorous practices, that our methodology is really sound and makes sense and can stand up to interrogation from the highest offices of C-suite with our clients. And my job is really to shake things up and to kind of see the forest through the trees and to be able to look for insights and be able to make disparate points connect. I would say we both bring creativity to the table because that's very much what our company is known for, but that's that's a way to kind of think about our, our role split. And Holland, feel free to, to add if, if there's anything else you feel I missed.

No, I think that's exactly it. And as Maria kind of alluded to, it's really what makes our company different. It's almost the foundation of, of how we even started, just seeing the benefit of having both brains.

And I, I'd love to hear a little bit about that conversation. You're both working at Grey in strategy and data respectively. What's the quick version of Hey, let's start a company together.

Well, the quick version is that Holland and I were very often paired on projects, but also new business pitches. And the first question we always get asked is, were you friends? And the answer is so-so. We actually, more than anything, were partners and we were butting heads often in the most positive way. We had the utmost respect for each other, but we really didn't always see eye to eye on how to approach things. And so, it created a really, really high level of respect for each other, where we really saw each other's skillset. And this happened to us, I mean, upwards of 20 times, where we're paired, and we have to solve a really sticky problem, and we're just in a room at 2:00 AM, just arguing. And I think that actually built the foundation for trust on all levels, right? To say that we can disagree, but it always comes from a good place. And we have the fortitude to potentially build something together. So that's kind of how it started from a relationship perspective.

Yeah, just to add to that too, I think that, that, that really is the foundation of it, but the more personal kind of like, how did it actually, like, okay, now what? Maria and I were at a New Year's Eve party, and this is where I think passion really plays a role in whether or not you can pursue a successful company. Everyone's talking, it's New Year's, everyone's drinking, everyone's hanging out, and Maria and I are talking about how we're still frustrated that insights aren't backed by data in an actionable way at a New Year's Eve party. And so, we kind of elaborated on those frustrations, had a beautiful night. I thanked her for having me the next day and said, hey, by the way, if you wanna do this, I'm in. And the rest is history.

And that's truly amazing. Number one, that you had the same frustration, even though you had butted heads and you looked at things Which gave you, again, like you said, the foundation to build that respect with each other and to know that you were just looking at things in a different way, but that you were bringing the best to your clients. The second part is many people don't make that leap from, we're frustrated with the way that insights are being looked at and having data backing into, let's start a company. So, what was that transition like going from working at large agencies, doing really great work together within a different context, right? To saying, all right, let's start planning, let's build our own company, and let's go all in.

Yeah, refreshing. I think when you take the guardrails off, it allows for so much more creative thinking. And so, again, like I said, a lot of it was perseverance. We had full-time jobs, we were meeting 3 days a week at 6:00 AM before we would go to our respective jobs. At that point, Maria had graduated on from Gray, and we were constantly just pushing ourselves as of what does this look like? Why does it matter? What does it look like? Why does it matter? And the ability to start from scratch is really where I think we landed on the anti-research research company, if you will, because we noticed that research in itself is such a creative medium. But it is tackled in such a traditional, rigid way. And so to be able to just relinquish all of those standards and norms and look at it from scratch got us to a better place so much quicker. And it's not that there isn't a rhyme or reason to the order of big agency, but to operate without that rigidity when you're trying to start a business was having that lens, taking off everything that, you know, traditionally is really what I think kind of Was the spark.

And I think to add to that a little bit, a little personal anecdote, you've probably heard the story. I think it's a classic one. It probably even shows up in a movie, but my grandpa used to say this to me, that there were 2 mice and they fell in a bucket of cream. And one of the mice just gave up and drowned. And the other mouse just kept moving his little legs until the cream, until yeah, the cream turned into butter and he climbed out. And so I think that was always my philosophy. And I used to tell Holland, we have to just quit our jobs because once we're 2 mice in cream, we're just going to have to move our little legs to make something. And we won't feel like, oh, I'll do this next week because I have this cushy underpinning of my full-time role. And I don't know how, but I finally convinced her to put in her 2 weeks notice. I actually do know how. We signed a client and she's like, okay, I'll quit, she quit, and then the client backed out. And, and so we were literally the 2 mice in the bucket of cream just needing to make it work. Oh my gosh.

I can't even imagine because I just, even thinking about your original analogy of, you know, the spaghetti and the waffle would feel like a waffle personality. You want things laid out and structured a little bit. So it was a big leap for you to leave the position, as Maria said.

Yeah, no, you're not wrong. And, and I left with a plan and that plan got foiled. So I will argue that that was maybe the best thing that could have happened for us because we had to move our legs quite faster than we would've planned. Um, and, and really it, uh, it allowed us to reach out to people that maybe we wouldn't have reached out to before out of necessity versus out of desire. And some of the people that we talked to ended up leading us to ultimately some of our largest clients. So, while it was quite stressful and the opposite of my personality at the time, retroactively wouldn't change it for the world.

I'm just curious as to what your agencies said, right? Were they supportive? And I mean, knowing that you're still playing the same sandbox, what was that like making that shift and then having to go out and perhaps go after some of the same clients that you'd worked with previously?

Yeah, I actually find that that's a really important distinction because we weren't playing in the same sandbox. I think to a certain eye it might look that way, and that was actually something Maria and I toiled with quite a bit. So when we first thought about it, we were very much focused on data informing strategy, and what that did was it confused people, including ourselves, into, okay, strategy is the output. And what we realized and what we loved and what we wanted to put all of our effort in was the research and the data and the insights. And then, then you take that and it's not that we don't give strategic direction, but building an entire strategy and creative off of that is what the agencies of the world are doing. And so, you know, we were lucky to have the utmost support when we left. I had a mentor at the time who was the chief strategy officer of Gray, and he in his past life had also started his own business. So he kind of understood the trajectory and the desire and the need. And funny enough, you know, had been quite a big support in the past. In terms of the same clients, we actually didn't overlap for quite a bit. And that's simply because of, of how we were forming our, our business and how we were taking shape. And it was just coincidence. And is it stressful at the time? And do you want to be really careful and walk on eggshells and make sure that you're not ruffling any feathers?

Of course.

But at the same time, there's thousands of businesses out there all hailing after the same clients. And so you just have to be mindful of that as well, because ultimately you are trying to make money.

Yeah, absolutely. Coming up with your name, because brand is so important. And of course, you know, hopefully people are putting research into their brand as they're starting it. Good Quests. I mean, that's just, I can't even say enough about how much I love the name of your company. How did you come up with that? Because it seems to me that also helps lead into the kind of company you wanted to create, of course, being the anti-research research company.

You know, I wish we had a really fancy story, but I think the truth of it is, is that we were looking for a really easy URL. We tried so many different things and we kind of backed into this, but it really truly works to your point because our entire philosophy is you can ask better questions, and that our industry doesn't interrogate enough how we ask, and that it's been written the same way, the same robotic mannerism, you know, for the last 100 years. And so, in order to get the kind of insights that most companies are after, great insights, you have to start with effectively good questions, right? You can't get to a better insight if you start with the same question over and over again. So, And despite it not being the most glamorous start, it ended up being a really great name for us. And we always used to joke because people, people couldn't pronounce it. And if I— we could spend the next hour talking about all of the different mispronunciations, but we used to joke that when we're as big as Google, no one, no one will suffer. So, so hopefully we're— well, we're nowhere near that, but we're on our way to being able to— people being able to pronounce it right.

Yeah, and I will admit that I did Google it to make sure, because I was like, I think it's good quests, but I want to make sure it's not good cues or any other pronunciation. And good questions seems like a no-brainer, right, for people to pronounce, but I can also understand, especially if you're working with clients all over, that there would be a lot of mistakes with that. And I'd love to hear a little bit. So, that client backed out, takes us back to that beginning, right? There was a moment of panic. You had to really hustle. How much did you have to shift the work that you were doing and how fast were you able to onboard another client?

Yeah, it was really interesting timing. So we fully left everything behind in 2019, and so our client backed out in January of 2020, and if you do the math, COVID struck. And this is where I don't want to say right place, right time, because we put so much effort to it and we succeeded for a reason, but right place, right time. When COVID happened, there was this big swing into the research world of, oh no, we don't know what people are doing anymore because our whole world flipped upside down. And we were at the same time coming with a new positioning of we're not asking people the right questions and we were flipping research upside down. And so there was a symbiotic relationship between how we were approaching research and how people were feeling in the world. And so we got positioned quite well, and it was doing what they— it was during what we called the research boom, where there was so much budget going into research. And again, we were just positioned in such a beautiful way. And we also had the luxury of mentors who had our back because we didn't just start GoodQuest as like young 20-something years old with like a finger in the air and a dream. We had so much industry background and so many connections and so much trust on our side already. And one of our mentors introduced us to this woman who was excited by our take, was in between jobs, ended up becoming the head of consumer research at TikTok and introduced us to her team. And they were smitten with our approach and TikTok became one of our first clients. And so, you know, those are the stories that you hear, and those are the stories that matter. You know, for us, having TikTok under our belt earned us trust and reputation that allowed some of the other people who were maybe nervous about our accolades or how new we are to then come upon with us. And then, like I said, the research boom and, and it really tailed off from there.

And you've now been through 2 profound shifts, right? The shift of COVID And then, of course, in the past several years, generative AI. And obviously, we know there are underpinnings of AI under recommendation engines, algorithms, all kinds of things way before we, we really started talking about it to the extent we do now. I mean, and using these tools on a daily basis. And that also, I feel like, has changed the way that people look at research. Sometimes there's a school of thought, particularly with small businesses, that they can do all the research and they're gonna believe everything that an LLM tells them.

Right.

It's one thing I find we were talking about, 'cause I know Holland, you're also faculty, I believe.

Yeah, I, I'm not full-time faculty. I help teach a class at Columbia and Maria actually does as well.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's something that I'm seeing with my students. I have to help them distinguish between if you're using LLMs for, if you're using them for prompts, you need to put that in your references and show me all of your prompts, but don't cite them as the original resource. Right, because I've seen a lot of that happening. And so, there's still this, this learning we have to do with our students, but even I'm sure with clients, particularly, I mean, I know you work with larger clients, but have you had that experience where people have said, you know, oh, I can just do this all in AI? And how much AI do you put into your process? Where do you use it for your own business?

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I'll start by saying, you know, we literally are the anti-research research company, and I think with that reputation comes a love for new and unexplored territory. And I still think AI is that. And I don't mean exploration like, you know, you've asked it a few questions. I mean really, really profound knowledge of building skills and artifacts and programming language and figuring out what the right prompt looks like. Prompt engi— I mean, all of the context engineering, right? It's on and on. And so, we've basically decided that we are going to be absolute hyper experts. And we decided that 2 years ago, right before it was even on the tip of anyone's tongue. And so, we've really put our money where our mouth is. We've invested really heavily into becoming AI experts and really figuring out best practices, and to the point where we've actually been invited by some of our larger clients, by Adobe, by Procter Gamble, by Unilever, to lead AI workshops on figuring out how, what is the right approach to applying AI to the practice of research. And so, we have a lot of opinions on it, and at a very high level, you know, we love it, and we think there's still so much left unexplored. And we're in, you know, we've just landed on the shore of the Americas, if you will, when it comes to AI. In terms of our clients and, you know, battling for whether AI can do our jobs, we actually have a slightly different perspective on it. We see what happens in our industry right now, and the use case and application of AI is largely on what we call the factory. So, meaning if you imagine, you know, a Model T Ford being made, everyone in our industry right now is focused on how do we make the assembly line faster? How do we make it so that there's, the parts are a little bit shinier, whatever it is? What if the machinery is a little bit cheaper, a little less clunky? We are completely in a different camp where we are focused on innovating what the factory actually makes. So, what we're saying is we're not making the Model T, we're making a Tesla, right? Or we're making whatever, whatever your analogy is of the new frontier. And so, for that, AI truly isn't good yet, right? AI can make your process faster. It can make you a little bit more streamlined. It can improve your QC, but it reverts to the medium, right? And we are not looking at the medium. We don't want the average. We want the new, the best. And so, our clients still very much see the value in our company because that's what we're pushing for. And we're embracing AI to say, we too can be faster, more efficient. But we're still going to focus on the output being just absolutely bang on revolutionary. And that's what we're selling.

There's, I'd love to ask follow-up questions about this, but I don't even know which direction I wanna go in.

I'm sorry. I feel like I went a little, I'm, I'm very passionate about this. I love that.

Yes. No, I'm, I'm very passionate about AI as well, and I've probably over-indexed putting it into my courses because I'm trying to make sure that my students also understand that they have to understand it as more than just a helpful little partner, but how can they actually create an endeavor to make it more, which is what y'all are doing, right? You're saying everybody else, kind of like with being anti-research research, people are asking the wrong questions. They're using the old way of thinking. They're not looking at how can we completely change our brains and rewire around this. Wonderful. So can we talk a little bit about Your pitch process, right? What does it look like to pitch a client and land a client as an anti-research research company?

I think for us, so much of it is just showing them versus telling them, you know, what we stand for is, is newness and creativity. And we're always saying we're out-of-the-box thinkers when it comes to research, we're asking questions in a different way, but I think it's very hard to wrap your head around that. And I think there's a lot of misattribution, you know, when I say creativity, Some people go to, oh, you're testing creative, meaning like you're taking ads and testing them. And we're like, no, no, no, no, we're applying creativity to research methodology and output. So, it's a little heady, so you have to show them. And so, a lot of our pitch process is just saying, imagine if, right? Imagine if instead of just sitting in an interview, in what we call in the industry IDIs, in-depth interviews, imagine instead giving the respondent tools to make their own cartoons, right? And how much it then becomes not just about what they're saying, but with the cartoon, you're able to see through their eyes. It's what they're literally seeing, right? So, that flips everything on its head. Or imagine copywriting a study through— for someone else, right? How you would copywrite a quantitative study for a new mom being completely different than the kind of study you might write for a Gen Zer, right? And how that language can shapeshift. And most people don't think about that in our industry still to this day, right? They just write a quantitative study to be as neutral as possible, as robotic as possible. But there's all this data and research that says what you give is what you get back. So, if you write a robotic question, people will give you a robotic answer. And so, again, just showing them how using language can manipulate, and, or manipulate's the wrong word, it has a negative connotation, but can lead you down a path towards a better insight, that's really powerful. And we do the same for outputs. We say, imagine that it's not just a deck that we give your team. Imagine it's almost like a BuzzFeed-style quiz that leadership has to take to test their knowledge of the audience and be shell-shocked a little bit before we read you the report. And, you know, our clients oftentimes are like, oh, that's That's great because it's so hard to capture leadership's attention. Like, that will really shock them, 4 or 5 minutes of their data to be forced to take a quiz before, before they look at any kind of document. So, that's the kind of stuff we're playing with, and it's always imagine if, and hey, let me show you something. That's kind of our approach.

Yeah, I think to add to that, one question we always get from our clients and just from the people around us is, it sounds like you're doing really creative things. Things are so different, but you have clients like P&G, and Adobe and Unilever who are very regimented. And, you know, one thing that we always try to teach is that creativity doesn't need to mean throwing baby out with the bathwater. Creativity can be little things, small tweaks in words that make a huge difference, even small ways in which you ask a question. So, for example, you can say, how often do you recycle? Oh, I recycle all the time. Well, how often do your friends recycle? When they can. It's because you don't want to, you don't want to admit the worst version of yourself, but you're comfortable admitting the worst version of the person around you. And guess what? Birds of a feather flock together. And believe it or not, those little tweaks in shifting perspective to allow people to answer the question where they don't feel like they're giving something up, but they're actually giving away their true behaviors, makes all of the research more predictive and more accurate. So. Again, it's, it's not always these big romantic and creative endeavors. Sometimes it's really small tweaks that are creative in nature to think that way, but change the entire way someone would answer.

I really appreciate that framing from both of you. And, and I do wanna ask, has there been a time when, you know, from the inside side, an example of your approach uncovering something that a traditional research method might've missed and that really changing the narrative and moving the needle for the client?

Absolutely. Gosh, we have, we have so many, so many examples. The one that we always give, because it's the funniest one, is one you might have heard, but we had a client in the healthcare space that was about to launch the first ever at-home STD test, and they were nervous that If we were to just survey people and ask them about their promiscuity and how often they have unprotected sex, that most people would exhibit some kind of social desirability bias, want to answer in a way that frames them in a more positive way, even if it's just in their head, even if the study is anonymous. And so the reason they were so fearful of that is because this study basically would help them to negotiate shelf space in stores at like a CVS or Walgreens, because it would tell them the market size. So, the difference of a market size, you know, of 10% versus 40% is drastic. And so, they really, really needed people to tell the truth. And so, that's where we started from. That was our problem. And so, when we were looking for a solution, we thought, what is the scenario when people are most open to telling others, especially in a public space, really strange information. And we started to think about memes and how funny memes are, right? When you send memes to each other, they can be so uncouth. And you know, you send it to a friend and you're like, oh my God, that's me. And you would never say it, but through a meme, that somehow becomes more palpable. So we found this meme that literally said, Condom sex is garbage, just give me the STD. And it had thousands of likes. And we said, what if we put this directly into our quantitative study and just ask respondents, how much is this like you? And it was the difference of people saying, oh yeah, this is 100% me. And so we saw the same thing in the study and we did, we did a bit of an A/B test to say, you know, what happens if we ask it plainly? What happens if we ask it with the meme? And obviously with the meme, People were much more comfortable admitting, admitting the truth. And so that was really, really interesting and an example where something even quite comical and funny can really work to reveal the truth when you go to a human level and think, what does the respondent need to feel in order to be comfortable to tell us their truth? And that's really the place where we start from. It's not about making them laugh. It's not about anything then. Let's figure out the comfort level and how to create that space, that safe space.

Yeah. I mean, I'm over here laughing at this, but also thinking about how I would've responded if I were given that. And this is truly an example of flipping research on its head. And, you know, what was the impact of that? People responded and they told the truth.

I mean, so Holland presented the work and she quite literally got a standing ovation from, from the client. I think there were 100 plus. Holland, you could tell the story better than I can. No, it was funny.

There were 70 scientists in the room.

Oh.

And so to say in front of a bunch of scientists, so we found this meme, condom sex is garbage, just like the look on their face. But the impact was enormous because the anticipated market size almost doubled. Which means think about everything. Think about how much production you have. Think about when they're selling at Duane Reade, CVS, Target of the world, their shelf space doubles. I mean, it literally gave them a proof point for increased investment, for increased visuals, for increased shelf space. It probably is one of our most impactful examples, not only because it's so viscerally impactful to see the difference, and obviously the meme in itself is something unforgettable, but because the business impact was so large.

Have you ever had a time when you've had to fire a client because they didn't, they thought they were on board with your methodologies and then they realized, ooh, we're not quite ready?

No.

Oh, that's great.

I think everyone has a taste for creativity. It's just what their boundaries are and the boundaries that they have to hold internally. And so, you know, there's examples of one of our clients, they have a tracker, a brand tracker, right? And you measure how much people love your brand and you say, how much do you love X brand? I like it. I love it. I like it a lot. Indifferent, blah, blah, blah. And so you always get these scores. They're like 70% of people like your brand. And all we did was we said, what would you do if the brand disappeared tomorrow? Would you be upset about it? Would you just buy another one that looked just like it and that didn't matter to you? Would you try to find a lookalike? And that question is so much more revealing because if you just go find somebody else and you're just as happy, you don't like the brand. The brand's just, you're complacent with the brand. And that's not a big lift. That's not too much creativity, right? We tried to throw so much more into that study and it really, it made the client anxious. Because brand tracking, there's history to it. You want to see and track the same numbers over time, and there's a benefit to that. But there's also, you know, the negative side of it, which is comparing bad data for 5 years in a row isn't as good as comparing new data with no comparison point, good data. But that small tweak to them, you know, was, was massive in terms of how they understood their brand's relevance. And so I think it's just on us to understand. the comfort level of creativity and understand what creativity means to them and then shaping it to those needs. But no, we've never had somebody who's completely just said, this is too far.

But what you're talking about is real intent, right? It's the difference between saying, oh yeah, I like that brand too. I'm actually going to make a purchase from this brand.

Yeah. And you put it exactly how we say to the clients, what we do is never creativity for creativity's sake. It's always creativity with purpose.

And I could, I can think of, you know, a handful of brands right now that get this wrong. And I'm sure you have many examples of people who you're like, they really should work with us.

Yeah, I think everyone should, to be honest. I mean, we definitely drink our own Kool-Aid, but it's because it comes from passion and it's because we always do research on the research. So there's not, there's not a single method that we've ever done that has been a finger in the air. Let's see how it works. We always are testing it first to make sure that there's proof in the pudding, that there's a benefit in looking at it in a different way.

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Let's talk about being co-founders, right? How does that work? How does it look like now? And for people listening, what are the things they should get really clear on before they start if they are looking at starting a company with somebody else?

Oh gosh, that one we talk about all the time. I think Holland and I are tremendously lucky, and again, I think it's because we had that opportunity to work together and really, really know each other before we started this business. And then since then, we've, we've been in this business together for 7 years, co-founders, partners, through the good years and bad years. You know, and, and I, I now give new founders advice to always start a company with a co-founder because I think for me, Holland is the yin to my yang. She balances me, you know, when, when I'm feeling really anxious about something, she usually has the clear head to calm me down and vice versa. We truly complement each other in skillset. I think we have completely different skill sets, and it works so beautifully to our favor. And we ironed it out really early on, who's really good at what, and we kind of continued on that journey. And it really helps because I think that there's no egos. We know our strengths. We also know our weaknesses, and that creates a really smooth path. And that's not to say that we never disagree, but it's kind of the place where I started from, where Disagreement is really good and positive as long as it's always done with respect. And I think that's the line we'll never cross, that, you know, feeling like the other person is disrespected or lied to or things like that. That's, you know, that's a line that's very hard to come back from. But outside of that, we disagree all the time and, you know, and then we'll laugh about it. And if we're in the same city, we'll have a glass of wine and completely forget about it and talk about, you know, the movie that we're watching at the moment. So, That's kind of my 2 cents on it.

Yeah, not to be cliché, but it's like 101 of like partners in life, respect and communication being the foundation. But I think for us, I mean, obviously it depends, but for us, having 2 different ways of thinking has actually been such a blessing and having really clearly defined roles. And also, and I think this is really important, understanding what you're good at and understanding what you're not and having no ego. And I think really early on, Maria and I both had a coming of Jesus where I don't need to learn how to, what you need, what you do. I need to know what good looks like, but I don't need to know how to do it and vice versa. And when you put all of your energy into the thing that you're good at, while the person next to you is putting all of the energy into the thing that you're not good at, but they're good at, it becomes foolproof. And I think there are so many stories of bad co-founder stories, and that's why Maria is Saying we're lucky in the sense that it happened to work out after we already had the idea. But if you have an idea and you're going to look for a co-founder, if you will, I do think that the communications and the respect and the counterbalance to what you do is more important than someone who can do exactly what you do with your exact vision and you feel like it's gonna be fuel. I actually feel like that's where it can become a little bit dicey. And also the fun anecdote of Maria and I also became moms 3 days apart from one another. Oh, wow.

So, you've really seen each other through a lot of transitions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And if you don't have open communication and respect, the 2 co-founders of a company are literally down for the count. There's not, it's not easy to come back from that.

Yeah. And I'm sorry, just to give another story of, of how much kindness also plays a role in, in respect. I recently, we were invited for a big old workshop with, with P&G, with their entire insight division, which is like almost 100 people. And I was so excited, and I literally called Holland, and I said, Holland, this is like the pinnacle of my career in my life. Like, to say that P&G has something to learn from me, and it was about AI, I'm like, oh my God, like, just put this on my tombstone. So, I'm like, pack your bags, we're going to Cincinnati, we're gonna present, we're gonna be on stage, like, wear your heels, like, bring out your best suit. We get there, we practice nonstop, we wake up early morning, we're about to get into the taxi to the offices. And Holland's like, Maria, what's the address? And I'm like, it should be in the invite. She's like, the invite's just a Zoom link. Oh, yes, it was a Zoom meeting. I took Holland away from her family. And, you know, during a time where really she didn't want be traveling and brought her to Cincinnati. And, you know, another co-founder could have been really angry, could have been really bitter, could have said, you're so irresponsible. And I don't think Colin and I laughed that hard in like a year. We were just in absolute stitches. We went up to our rooms, we logged on, we took a call, and then, you know, we went to the airport. And again, it, it was just a sign of Respect, trust, and, you know, even just liking each other, frankly, and being able to say, hey, you know, that's okay.

We basically spent 5 grand to go to an Italian restaurant in Cincinnati, but we don't get to see each other that often. So it was kind of nice.

That's one thing I was actually going to touch on is, Marie, you said when you're in the same town, right? Because you used to live in the same city. As I mentioned at the very top, we're, I mean, I'm on the East Coast or on, I'm on the West Coast. Holland's on the East Coast. Maria, you're overseas. So, what does that look like day to day? How were you able to come to an agreement that, hey, we don't have to physically be in the same place to have this great company together? That's part one. And then, I also wanna know in terms of staffing up, right? How do you choose Who you work with, does it matter where they work?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. We didn't really have a choice of whether or not remote was gonna work for us. It was COVID. And so we had an office on Broadway, which I can't say we really loved anyways. And they were, they asked us, do you wanna renew your lease? And Maria was like, no, there's a pandemic happening. Like, obviously not. And this was, I think, like March 8th, and I looked at her So baffled thinking you're really taking this out of control. Like, this is like a little flu, relax. Cut to the biggest global pandemic in history of the world. And so she moved to Denver and I'll let you tell that story, but she had never even been to Denver. She was driving to LA and kind of didn't make it all the way. She can talk about that. And we just had to make it work. And I think what it did is it actually unlocked something beautiful, which is, yeah, you absolutely don't have to be in the same room. But you do have to be incredibly intentional about driving the same level of respect, communication, understanding, and being able to feel personal with one another. And so, our third hire was in India. Uh, she used to work with me at Grey in, in New York. She went home during the COVID And then, our fourth hire was in London, and then, our fifth hire was in Chicago. And what we realized is, As long as you are very intentional, it really doesn't matter. You know, there are things that we think about all the time in terms of a new staff member, how much you learn just by eavesdropping on your peers next to you or your leadership. I can't tell you how much I learned because I was just sat across my CSO. And so, what we do is we do company offsites where we all fly somewhere and we work together for a week and we do other fun things, of course, but We have that mentality of like, you have to know people on a personal relationship in order to work with them in a way that's comfortable for everybody. And once you know who they are, there's more empathy and you're just more likely to be kind and respectful to each other. And then also just having like an open door policy of, I am always here to talk. I pretty much never wanna talk about something via email. Just call me. We'll get it done faster. And I, it's so small, but from a culture perspective, I see every one of my staff members' face every single day, and I think that is really important. And it also just gives you, sorry, like I feel like I'm on a, a rant, but we're passionate about it.

Oh, great.

It gives such diversity of who you get to work with, which I think is so important. You know, working in New York my entire life, when people are giving you strategic ideas or even writing research, you're doing it through a New York lens. You're like, when do you go to dinner? 8, 9, or 10 PM? Which is obviously not representative of the United States as a whole. And so it's been nothing but a benefit for us. I'll stop there.

Yeah, Marie, I want, I'm interested, I'm intrigued about the story of ending up in Denver because then obviously now you're in a totally different country.

Yeah, I'm actually, well, you're referencing that I'm in Portugal, but I'm actually here just, just for a few weeks for, with my family. But I typically do live in Denver and, and Holland's actually absolutely right. So I will give myself credit and say I was really early on the pandemic and I was really scared. And before it was even, you know, reported that there were cases in New York, I started riding my bicycle from Brooklyn to our office on Broadway in New York City. And I was doing this in like January and February before this was announced. So I would arrive and I was—

New York, she had to bike ride over the Williamsburg Bridge. Which is no sleep every day, twice a day.

And before e-bikes were available, I will say now everyone, whoever's listening, it's probably like, oh, an e-bike, like easy. No, no, no. E-bikes were not available yet. This is 2019, 2020. And I was also wearing heels every day because we were seeing clients. So I was in my heels on the Williamsburg Bridge, absolutely frigid weather, just dying. But I was like, the pandemic will not get me. And so when it was actually officially announced, you know, things are closing, border is closing. My lease in my apartment was also up with my husband. And we said, let's just take a car from, not even our car. We didn't have a car in New York. His parents' car who live in Pennsylvania. We took their car and decided we're just going to drive west. We'll end up in LA. It'll be great. We'll live there. We stopped to see some friends in Colorado and we quite literally never left. We then got a dog, had a few kids, and here I am. So yeah, it really is as random and as funny as that. But I'm lucky enough that I'm, I'm back to New York, which is home all the time. My sister's still there. My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law are still there. So, we, we still have very, very deep ties. So, I'm, I'm very lucky to get to see Holland quite often.

Going back to brands, I'm curious if there is, there are one or two characteristics that you see brands do well, like really strong brands, perhaps even brands that you've worked with that other companies miss. When they're looking at their insights or they're trying to figure out how to do the research to make sure they're messaging to the right people at the right time?

I would say for me, it's not looking for perfection in everything and in every word, in even in some cases best practices, but just looking for empathy and humanity. And I'll give an example of that as well. In open-ended questions in quantitative studies, we like to bundle more than one question. So, we usually write 2 or 3 questions in one. So, for example, what did you eat today for dinner? Was it what you always eat? Who were you with? What were you thinking? Making it up. That is one question for us in an open end. And traditional best practices say that you should not do that because people don't know what to answer, but that's exactly what we're after. So, what we're trying to do is kind of spur this kind of tangential thought of someone going on a journey because If you just ask, what did you eat for dinner? Oftentimes you get something like potatoes. If you ask, you know, what did you eat for dinner? Who were you with? What was on your mind? It was like, well, actually I ate dinner with my girlfriend Michelle because I was feeling really down. And I actually had a steak, which I never eat. I'm usually vegetarian, but I just felt like I need, you know, and then the journey begins.

Yeah.

And so, I find that insights teams that want perfection and feel that they're afraid to break or bend any rule, or really, you know, it needs to be perfect, perfect, and it goes through 10 rounds of reviews, they often get lost and they forget the humanity, the empathy, and it becomes truly a functional product. And so, for me, that's probably the number one piece of advice to any researcher, and especially in a very large organization.

Yeah, I, I couldn't agree more. It's when we get lost in the sauce of the, but it should be done this way and not the, well, why is it done that way?

And even my visceral reaction to what you just took us through, right? Like, okay, I answer a question about my dinner. I can give a very short answer, but when you ask the cluster of questions, it becomes a story. It becomes, it, you know, I think about what I'm remembering and how it made me feel. And it's a completely different experience as somebody who would be being asked that question.

That's exactly right. I, I couldn't agree more. And we actually use that word experience a lot internally because we literally say, what is the experience of the respondent? And again, it's flipping the lens because typically for a researcher, it's what is my end goal? What do I need to get out of the research? What do I need? What is the information I need to extract? Versus what is the experience I need to give? And we always start from a place of what experience do we need to give respondents?

It's funny too. I think it's an example that's so easy to digest. Maria and I started presenting that example 8 years ago, and we go to all of these conferences and we literally see people copy it word for word.

Really?

Yeah, like down to the question. And honestly, what do they say? It's the greatest compliment, right? Being is the greatest compliment, whatever that— yeah, you know what I'm talking about— is. But the theories of what we've been preaching has been starting to become the norms, which is really exciting.

Yeah.

What's next for you?

I think we have our eye on the prize of growth. Holland and I have really been focused on growth. We're continuing to expand the team. We're continuing to expand our capabilities. We're continuing to expand what kind of outputs we're delivering. We just delivered a podcast to one of our clients. So, with the deck, you get like a 10-minute podcast where you get to listen to the insight. And again, the thinking is that a lot of these executives, you know, they don't have a lot of time, but they probably need to drive home to their family. They could listen to the insights on audio. So, you know, it's growth in every sense of the word, growth of the company, growth in expansion in our methodology, our thinking, and so on and so forth. So we're really excited about it, and I think we've been kind of sharpening our tools for the last 7 years, and now we're like, okay, let's, let's do this.

Wonderful. If you could give any entrepreneur or small business who's listening right now one piece of advice, what would that be?

Always the hardest question, Helen. I can, I can start, but For me, it's actually pick a really worthy co-founder. I don't think I could have done this myself. It's the advice I always like to give to new founders. For me, it's really helpful, especially at the beginning, right before you have the funds to hire, before you have, you know, a team around you, it's really helpful to not just be in your own head, but have someone that you can talk through ideas, talk through strategies, talk through tactics, And someone who can, you know, be your ally in all of that and also come with their ideas and tactics and strategies. I have felt from the start that 2 has been better than one.

I couldn't agree more. If I could add to it, and I say this all the time, it's just getting comfortable being uncomfortable. And I mean that in every sense of the means. Like Maria and I have been preaching this entire time, be comfortable saying to your co-founder, I don't really Agree with that, even if that feels uncomfortable, because you're going to get to a better place. Be uncomfortable bike riding from Midtown to Wall Street in 100-degree weather in heels because you miscalculated the time it was going to get you to your client. Be uncomfortable eating dinner in Cincinnati for no reason, emailing people who you thought didn't remember you and who actually do. I mean, all of those little things add up. To the magnitude of what your business becomes. And, you know, it's funny, Marie and I speak a lot on podcasts and our personalities are quite different outside than they are in our own homes. We're the first people to leave a party. We have this famous, let's do something new and different, and it just means going from our desk to the couch. And I can't tell you how uncomfortable it is being a salesperson and like an evangelist for your own company, but it's the best thing you could do.

I'm with you on all of those fronts. So I hear you, I see you, and I really appreciate you being here and sharing today. I always do ask a final question, which is, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto, words that inspire you? If you don't have words, do you have a book that you're reading right now that's really influencing who you are today?

There's so many, and we've given a few different ones on podcasts. I'll actually go for a new one just in case someone is listening to this and has heard us speak before. But there was a book I read years and years ago. I think his name was Jonathan Safran Foer, the author. And he wrote this book and he had a quote in there that I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like, I feel my bones being crushed by all the lives I'm not living. And what he meant by it was that he had this angst to want to live, through the perspective of everyone on the planet and see life through their eyes. And I think for me, when I read that 15 years, 20 years ago now, I felt it so deeply. And I think that's why I love so much what we do, because for me, it's the privilege of being able to see through someone's eyes just lights me up and makes me feel alive. So that's the quote that I'll leave with.

Yeah, mine is, mine is more business. Oh, it's funny. It's not business focused at all, but it's For the purpose of this business focus, my grandmother used to always say, if this change isn't scary, it's not big enough. And I find that really important because business changes like that every day. Every day you have to pivot. Every day you have to adjust. Like, you're having a business during COVID and then COVID goes away and then you're in the, in the office and you're out of the office and now there's AI and AI is the biggest change since the dawn of the internet. And so I think It's, you can really get scared away if you view change as something that is scary. But if, if it's not big enough, it's not a good enough change. And I think at least for me, that's always been comfortable because as someone who is a plan organized person and operates in a life where you have control of nothing, that is the mantra that's gotten me by a lot. Yeah.

Hmm.

These are both, they're both beautiful. So, thank you for sharing them. Holland and Maria, this has been really, truly a great conversation. I love that you're able to share how you approach the business, how it's, how it helps your clients, right? Having those perspectives, how that helped you build a strong foundation of trust and authenticity and just being genuine co-founders. Hearing about how you landed your first clients, how you're looking at AI, and how you approach asking questions differently is fascinating. And I, it, there's so much for people to learn just from listening to this and, you know, following your work. So, of course, we're gonna have goodquest.com. We'll have your LinkedIn profiles in the show notes and all of that so that anybody who is listening can reach out, learn more about what you're doing now, what you're doing in the future, and how they can work with you. So, thank you again for being here, and thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it. Your challenge for today, of course, is to think about how you're doing your own research. What can you do differently? How can you ask questions differently to get true insights? And with that, I'll be back again with another amazing guest or guests to share their story very soon. Thanks for listening or watching. Thanks for listening to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.

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