I used to work for Qualtrics. I think Qualtrics and maybe LucidChart was a rare exception to the rest of the tech scene in Utah, which is pretty much "build a slightly different version of something at already exists and sell the shit out of a subpar product".
Qualtrics has come a LONG way in terms of underlying product quality, but they themselves got by for a long time selling the shit out of a product that could barely deliver. The company is 50% salespeople.
Less than a year ago their APIs were going down every day because of the crappy pile of legacy PHP monolith they were built on. They have brought in some very smart engineering leaders to transition to a more modular and scalable core product, but there's a ways to go.
Another thing that really sucked about the organization was that half the engineers are professional services engineers building custom, overpromised, one-off solutions for large customers. The vast majority are almost completely unmaintainable and they do a very poor job of leveraging previous work or having cookiecutters/shared libraries to accelerate custom development.
With all that said, I think their market opportunity is fucking gigantic and they are serious about curing the underlying inefficiencies of the organization. They are the leader of the field in a time when pretty much every C-suite is realizing they need customer & employee experience data to stay competitive.
More info to explain some of their marketing speak (Experience Management! Creating a category!):
They are by far the leader in being able to create surveys for serious research. However, since so much of this segment is owned by academics, they can only charge so much. They want to stay deep in the academic market because millions of undergrads and grad students every year do their first market research with their student Qualtrics account. Those students go on to be the decision makers in fledgling analytics departments/teams at many companies.
They expanded into Customer Experience and Employee Experience products with the big enterprise deals and fat margins that come with them but were much worse at those things than specialized competitors. They then came up with the concept of "Experience Management" to tie the data together. This is actually pretty cool stuff - Ford was able to find which crappy conditions at their dealerships were driving lower sales, etc etc. The strategy was basically if we can offer a total package where we're pretty good at everything, we'll beat competitors that are excellent at one thing.
Total agreement on the market opportunity. I'm not technical in any way like most of the people commenting here. I run a small financial planning business and I'm paying "a lot" of money to Typeform and to Wufoo to gather client data. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages but I'm ready to move on to something else if it fits my needs which aren't that complicated.
What are the disadvantages of Wufoo and Typeform? I've used both as a user before and I Wufoo as an admin. My needs were simple and they seemed to work for my use case. Just curious about your use case for which they don't work?
I've heard some good things about the tech scene there, apart from Domo.