Product-Led Growth’s Failure

TL;DR

• This article was informed by exclusive interviews with over a dozen current and former early employees of Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey.
• They all told the same story—Qualtrics should’ve lost but somehow emerged victorious.
• By wielding a 3 pronged strategy of utilizing cheap Utah labor, gutsy product marketing, and aggressive GTM tactics, the company resoundingly beat SurveyMonkey.
• Their story acts as a warning to operators, the things that are popular among Twitter thought leaders are just the flavor of the moment, build the business you want and ignore everyone else. 
• There is a reason almost all software companies are built on the back of outbound sales motions. It works. 

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What if I were to pitch you on a company that had the following attributes:

1. Has multiple viral growth loops built into the core product workflow
2. Has a 3-year head start over its competition
3. Has some of the best technical talent available in California
4. Has an active, global user base of millions
5. Has deep integrations with Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Slack, Tableau, Oracle, and basically every other major tech player
6. Was entirely subscription-based for many years and has a small services arm started 6 months ago

This looks like a good company! It checks all the boxes that in vogue software investors look for. By having viral growth loops baked into the product, they dramatically decrease their cost to acquire a customer. An active user base fuels a bottoms-up growth method, similar to other software darlings like Slack or Atlassian.