Q And how did you do that? I mean, the, the, Academic market is, is notorious for being, uh, or infamous for being hard to sell to, so that, that seems like such an unlikely, uh, sort of beachhead into a market.
A Yeah, do we have any academics in the room? Okay, you're probably the hardest group in the world because you, you have no money, which is not a good, which is not a good business prop. Um, we don't know what you're gonna throw at us because you're really creating something, so every customer that would come in would be running something, I mean, they're doing some sort of experiment. Um, we're in a basement. We're bootstrapped. We can't support them because think about who they want to talk to on the other end of the phone. That's not a scalable model. They want to talk to someone who's smarter than them, right? So how do you do that at scale? And make money. So we actually had to build the technology where our product was super flexible, and then no VC like yourself is going to come in and say, hey, I'm going to let this play out over the next eight years at five grand a pop. Right? So you're looking at it going, you guys are crazy, but something super interesting happened, um, in about 2007, 2008, 2009, when the economy went this way, our business quadrupled. Which is, and I'm probably getting a little ahead of myself, but students started using Qualtrics and taking it with them into the corporate world, and we had no marketing. And so this whole goal that we set out to entrench kind of academia, which was a, you know, seven or eight year play, ended up paying off to now wher…
AI assessment note: “students started using Qualtrics and taking it with them into the corporate world”