How Qualtrics Became A Multi-Billion Dollar Company

24 Sept 2026 · 2 min

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1:53

In this interview segment, the speaker explains how Qualtrics deliberately moved away from being perceived as a "SurveyMonkey on steroids" and rebranded itself as an experience‑management company. By asking the executive team what problem a survey actually solves, they discovered that most surveys aim to assess an experience—whether it be customer, employee, product, or brand. This insight drove a category‑design effort to exit the crowded survey market and focus on the broader experience‑management space. Co‑founder Jared Smith then led a product shift, building dedicated applications for customer experience, employee experience, and product/brand experience on top of the existing survey platform. The repackaging of technology enabled dramatically larger contracts, moving from $50,000 survey deals to $2‑3 million experience‑management deals—a roughly 100‑fold increase in average selling price, illustrating the power of changing the value stack and market positioning.

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this company called Qualtrics. When we first met with them, they were sort of considered to be SurveyMonkey on steroids. Used to piss Ryan Smith off. He hated that term. And he wanted to get out of the survey category. Now, a lot of the features in the survey category amongst SurveyMonkey, Medallia, and Qualtrics at the time were pretty much similar. Yeah. And so the product organizations are trying to make better features and faster and quicker and cheaper and all that sort of stuff. That's not really the game. What we realized was with a survey, what is it? This is the question we asked the exec team when we did the category design. It's like, when you're building a survey, what question are you actually answering? Like, what is it you're trying to find out? And 9 times out of 10, it's like an experience. Did you have a good experience or a bad experience? Mm-hmm. And it's like, okay, so, and then the second question you asked was, who has that problem? It's like, well, people who are customer-facing or employee experiences or something to do with a product or a brand or whatever it might be, right? And so Qualtrics went from being a survey product to being an experience management company. That was the shift. And then when that happened, I'm talking to the product side now, one of the co-founders, Jared Smith, who's a genius, walked in and said, okay, people, product team, we now need the platform stuff, which is a lot of the survey stuff, but now we need an application for— Experience. Customer experience. We did an application for employee experience, one for product and brand. So fundamentally, the packaging of all of the technology took a big shift. And with it, surveys went for $50,000. Customer experience went for $2 or $3 million. So it was 100 times ASP by just changing the emphasis of where you are in the value stack and what you deliver.