How UserZoom CEO David Murphy grew UserZoom to $75M revenue and 1K customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is alfonso de la noes he's building a tool you've probably heard of it called userzoom.com the experience insight management company that helps businesses gather and manage the insights they need to design and deliver an exceptional digital experience they've raised over 150 million bucks and backed by silicon valley investors sunstone capital and al rock alfonso are you ready to take us to the top i am thank you for having me again so hey real quick for people that missed our last interview from april where you shared i believe that you had just passed about an 80 million dollar run rate and a thousand customers correct correct yeah so help me understand you know this is a very frothy space like user feedback in general how are you positioning yourself i mean there's a clue on your bio where you used a very specific word right experience insights management platform is that what you're trying to brand and own correct yes we are um to be honest with you experience insights management is a little bit of a visionary uh way of positioning ourselves in a market where right now there's a bunch of companies specializing in ux and a bunch of companies specializing in cx and then there is other companies that are talking about experience management such as the case of qualtrics um you know there's momentive which is the new surveymonkey also providing feedback there's a lot of survey tools out there and then there is others like user zoom which focuses on the product experience and user research and user experience research usually takes place in the pre-production stages nathan which is where you're kind of in the discovery stage when you're designing and your prototyping and you know solutioning as we like to call it and then you do some validation and some testing and across all these stages of the life cycle of the product development product design development life cycle you want to be in touch with those users before they become customers now once you become customers there are multiple ways to measure and track experience and so we come in with specific methodologies and metrics that provide more much more than just a survey you know much more than just a feedback mechanism but you know you can also do qualitative research you do one-on-one interviews you can do unmoderated sessions where you ask them to complete certain tasks not just questions but tasks and we record everything they do so we combine kind of attitudinal and opinions with behavior data and video is this a marketplace though like can i as a sas tool pay you to go find people to test my software and you record them testing it doing an action i asked you to do it or are you enabling me to get this data from my customers directly you can we our customers use the product as a self-service so you don't actually need to ask us for anything we just give you the login and password and you as a company you know you have probably a you know multiple products or properties digital properties you can test your properties or you can test any url uh you know competitors or any other website that is accessible through a web browser so so who do you like if you take off and and you you like crush it like who do you kill i mean does pendo go out of business if you do well no in fact pendo funny enough this very morning you know we were discussing this vendor is a great ally or or partner because they're very much specialized in product analytics right they do provide feedback but it's a very simple you know feedback you know you do you like it or not but their their core business is analytics product analytics that's more specialized in the what's going on like what are we use pendulum by the way our product team uses pendo and uses user zoom and a bunch of other tools but that's more analytics and what's happening the visits the monthly active users like activities that we call cold data it is very important but that's different than user research which is when you actually engage in a conversation and you um ask people to complete certain tasks and you record everything they're doing so we're not just saying what we actually focus a lot more on the why and how they do what they do yeah so very very compliment very much you know it is it is it just it feels so like you feel so close to pendo and you both feel so close to like hot jar and smart look i just i wonder why there hasn't been a mass sort of like merger between all it's happening nathan is happening look tell me square just well let me tell you so uh first of all the the whole thing i consider the whole thing this product experience um digital experience market right i mean i see that as a as a digital product cloud and you know research insights cloud you know that that's the category i can see okay that's why we call it experience in science management you know for digital um there are more of what we call passive insights which is analytics those that you know will collect information and and data uh code data on on um you know once you're live once the product is live and then there's others like including user zoom that are more active uh research platforms this is when these are these are products that allow you to connect to your users and ask questions and probe them and have conversations right so what is more analytics dealers is uh is uh user research and as i said earlier um customer experience is all about feedback management and asking people once you go live the other one uh user experience research is more about design and and understanding you know how to build a digital experience right a digital product all of these guys right now all of these vendors all these solutions are you know kind of separated and and there's a little there's little categories for each but what's happening in the market and i can see it you know happening is that there's going to be convergence so for instance um content square just acquired hotjar i think the news hit this morning right um then you see um uh you know you see qualitative and you see customers i talk to customers all the time that think that qualitative and quantitative they need to be paired up and they don't look at what customer experience user experiences two different completely different uh categories they actually like to see it as an experience category right you see uh qualtrics which is one of the leaders if not the leading company is doing you know uh uh brand research and market research and and they're also doing product and design research as well we offer a whole lot of ux tools ux solutions for for user testing and user experience research but we also offer surveys for more marketers and e-commerce and uh you know quantitative analysis so i think what we're seeing is that over time we're going to see convergence we're going to see um you know that you're not going to have separate teams working on separate things but everything is going to be about the experience that the end users have yeah how much revenue do you think hotjar uh hotjar had you know uh the press release this morning actually didn't say um you know they didn't specify the the terms of the deal which kind of leads me to believe that it was a fairly fairly small deal i don't know maybe wrong but so don't quote me on that but you know clearly under under 100 million like like right based on what i knew and the fact that hotjar was much more focused on smb you know i think they probably were somewhere in the 10 to 20 million it's my guess were you were you looking at the deal at all no no because hodger again is analytics hotjar would be the the the basic tool that you need to to understand what's happening with your with your website right so um you know you have google analytics you have pando you have uh hotjar doing some things and some behavior with heat maps as well so they wanted to kind of kind of take it to the so-called advanced analytics just you know a little bit more but they're not really in the user research space the way we are positioned again you're not having direct conversations with users and you're not using hotjar before it goes live before the product goes live so that's why we were not looking at people people will use you as they're doing product research before they launch the product to do to do testing in fact most of the times most of the times they'll test with prototypes with wireframes that's a great that's a great sort of way to delineate like pre-product versus post product that's exactly how i explained that's sorry if i didn't explain that more uh correctly to you or more in detail i'm just slow i'm just slow no that's okay but you know you're not alone trust me i'm telling this story to a lot of people but actually the one way to make it very simple to delineate or differentiate is that one is a lot more uh used and dedicated and and you know positioned in the pre-production stages versus the post-production stages that's one way to look at it yeah yeah yeah really interesting okay so when you came on you're doing about about four or five months ago you had done about 6.5 million i think and like recognized mrr in april what are you guys up to now today um we are i mean i'll give you the basic the the numbers in terms of run rate and for for the year i mean right now we're looking at clearly uh surpassing and the 80 million dollar run rate because we grew when we spoke to you we were growing at almost like i would say 45 40 to 45 we're now growing at 55 so it's not a hell of a lot more it's not like we're doubling in growth but we are growing more will you break dollar run rate...