How QuestionPro CEO Vivek Bhaskaran grew QuestionPro to $56.4M revenue and 4.8K customers in 2025.

questionpro.com finish 2022 at a 30 million run rate up from 20 million back in 2019 he's bought five companies and done this all organically in bootstrap since launching in 2005. uh it's a tool that helps you learn from your employees learn from your customers all through smart surveys and engagement tools check it out at questionpro.com hey folks my guest today is Vivek baskaran he is the CEO and founder of a company called question Pro bootstrapped he's done a lot of m a last time we spoke he broke 19 million bucks in Revenue serving over 4 800 customers he's now in warm in Sunny San Francisco while I freeze down here in Austin Vivek are you ready to take us to the top yes sir let's go for it second time I love it back in time your first your your recording when you presented on stage at one of our last events where you talked about how you used WhatsApp to text basically another founder and ended up closing a deal with your one-page sort of Loi was a massive hit are you still today even in a recession looking at M A opportunities or no uh I'm doubling down I mean in fact I have three Deals in the pipeline right now uh I think uh yeah I've been uh from an m a perspective the kind of deals we do like you know there are still deals to be made um and uh we're we're active so guys question Pro helps you run surveys to do research understand your customers experience and also get feedback from your employees to manage Employee Engagement Vivek with that context how are you thinking about M A do you go buy an adjacent product categories do you double down on the current niches you're in how are you thinking about it so we doubled down on the current Nations we're in so like you said like you correctly accurately pointed out that three different buyers are looking from the Enterprise perspective the three buyers number one is consumer insights and market research somebody in a company doing research um they typically fall under marketing uh second buyer is customer experience so people are trying to figure out NPS like you know somebody's in charge of figuring out what's going on with the existing customers how can we prevent churn how can we upsell them and the third component is HR obviously employee surveys really so any uh any product or services that sells to each of these buyers we are interested in we are trying to kind of build it out so so my model has been look look at a buyer put the buyer in the center of our kind of you know sphere and say everything that he spends on or he or she spends on we want to have those tools and services around that so that's the kind of General pattern um that followed it's an example in fact uh Valerie from sweet CX she was on your show a couple of years ago or maybe a year and a half ago really so she she build a journey mapping platform for the CX buyer if you think about it so we do the surveys for the CX buyer she built the journey mapping platform for the CX buyer so we kind of combine forces and we acquired them actually last year so where is my one percent fee come on man what percent is the hourly you know the time that I oh actually you know what the poker money since you killed me on poker every time I've spent a grant with you on poker so the program money is your one percent I love I love that well congrats on getting ideas on how's it going you know a lot of people say you buy a company and it's so hard to actually merge two companies how many companies have you bought since you founded the company in 2005 and how is the CX integration going with Valerie yeah so uh when people say it's hard it is hard I mean it's not it's not an easy thing um there's cultural issues the tech issues of you know the cultural issues Tech issues and then obviously business the business issues are the easiest one right you know what look you're gonna cross sell blah blah so pretty straightforward cultural is the hardest One tech is kind of in the middle realistically right so um and from uh you know with Valerie and obviously Valerie and I hit it off but there are a lot it's not just Valerie she's got a bunch of people they don't you know usually you have at least 20 attrition I would argue anytime you do a deal 20 of the people um in in the in the selling company will just leave no matter what no matter what you do yeah because they're like it's a good kind of like you know break point if you will the way I look at it it's a break point right so look you know if you're working for a company that got sold you'll be like let's take a break okay let's see what's going on and then once you start looking you know you're gonna find something quite frankly You're Gonna Leave um so um so I think we are kind of so in my kind of experience the first time it was kind of a shock like look you know we lost a bunch of people uh but the next time with the third time they're like look I'm expecting 20 to 30 attrition oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your frownerpath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and how many have you done so how many Acquisitions have you done since uh six or five or so yeah between five and seven uh honestly the first ones are pretty small uh they were only asset deals and later on as we got better at it um now we kind of like we still do acid deals but we kind of like are looking for more asset plus um you know asset as in Tax Plus customers plus you know the standard operation I mean we want customers we want uh we want people from a you know from an HR perspective and obviously some pack uh from a software perspective um and the other thing that I want to kind of like my lesson learned I would argue is um from a tech uh Tech integration perspective uh the first time I did it I did not rewrite the platform we read the code base um and I that's in fact um in long term a huge mistake right so because now you have multiple code bases and my team doesn't want to work on better and there's all this all this cultural issues start coming into play uh so what I've started to do now is like you know we model the acquisition such that we are going to rewrite the code base and the story right so up front we say look we're going to buy this awesome piece of tech but we're going to rewrite it because we have a way and you know we have a team and we want to manage it um and that is well that seems a little expensive but that's what you want to do in the long run um because otherwise you'll have a hodgepodge of you know you know these guys use Ruby those guys use Java these guys use Python and now you have like you know you know it's a show at that point um so if you're not ready to rewrite the...