eso uh, I'm a 33 time founder. My first company was a home automation company. My second company was a consumer company. Third company actually wanted to work on something that enabled access to information and data. Um, because I wanted to work on something that has lasting impact. Uh, you know, on one side, if you do a search on Google today, it's very easy to get results almost gonna 0.1 seconds later. You have billions of pages at your service to get you the exact information you need. But when it comes to research, it's incredibly difficult. If you first of all you need to, you know, create a surveymonkey account or create a survey account somewhere after you do that, you need to come become an expert in writing surveys. Then you need to figure out okay, I have to ask this question to 100 people. How much you have to pay them. Is this audience even available? And you have to start waiting weeks and spend thousands of dollars to do this. So the gap between search on one side 10.1 seconds free to the other side, thousands of dollars taking months is extraordinary and pulse. The whole idea is to collapse that as much as possibleso the the problem actually started because I was a product manager in my previous company and has had a product. One of things that I love to do is to understand users better. And that's relatively easy on the consumer side, where you can pick up and ask a ton of questions. And even though it is cumbersome and expensive, it's doable. But on the enterprise side, if you wanna ask questions, UH, two business managers or CEO CEO Seo's C Suite executives, it becomes really difficult to do that. And, you know, in my previous company, as a product manager for me to be company, I found this incredibly hard to do on small. There was an opportunity to go and change that, and that's what it is firing. That's the one part. The other part is, if you actually dig into how surveys were conducted, especially in the B two B side, Um, you know, paying CIOs and CEOs and CMOS uh, things like $10 or $5 or a chance to win a dinner or a $10 gift card. It's just not the right way to inspire them to give you data, but what we found is if we actually change the incentive to data itself so that when people participate, they immediately see how they compare against their peers. That is actually really good motivation, just like Glass Door and some of the others have proven so both of those combined together on and our love for data, letters triples.

sure elevator pitch is, uh, what Google is for. Search pulses for research. Um, so pick up your phone, ask questions, and we'll get you the data to help. You better understand your audience in a way that hasn't been possible before. Um, what problem does it solve? It helps you better understand people, um, without having to spend too much time effort energy on what used to be months, if not years, trying to do this and now be condensed into days. Um, if not, if not ours. Um So the problem it solves is for product managers. It helps them better understand their audience. For marketers, it helps them better understand their audience. And in the pain points they're looking toe, you know, solve, um, for journalists, you know, in the future it can help them figure out how to reach their audience, that they want to get an inside or story from and get their perspective. And for normal, everyday consumers like you and me, it can help the problem of understanding people better. So, for example, the elections are coming up in 2023 U. S. Elections, and, uh, it's sort of unclear who's going to win, and the polls that people run today are one way that people figure it out. But it's not available to people like you and me to just run a pole and figure out what thousands of people are doing and saying across the U. S. But both should be able to do that so I should be able to pick up my phone and ask people, you know, let's say I want to ask 50 people from each state which way they're going to vote and why e don't have access to such a thing today. But I should be able to and better understand the world, or at least the US in this case, um, as a result of that. So that's the problem it solves. How are the customers solving this pain point? Before they were using traditional, uh, tools, they were using traditional mechanics and means to actually serve these surveys. Eso usual stuff Qualtrics surveymonkey, which are really serving creation tools more than the audience itself. Um, and so, honestly, most people are actually not even looking to solve for this problem because it just was too hard for them on DSO. They used to skip this research part altogether.

um when we started working on this project, we actually released a website without any product, just to make sure that there was enough traction and we started running ads to see if not people actually cared about what we're building and Onley. Once we were convinced that there is something to be built here, Could we actually start building the product? So we vetted it out. We we really tested the market to make sure that there was a product to be built here before we started building Onda. Um, in terms off how this evolved, Um, once we started seeing traction and once we started going beyond just the website, we started building a messenger bought as an M V P T. To make sure that our, you know, thesis continues to be proven true. And once we were, we sort of verified that after after a couple weeks, we were then able to start building the project full on. So the first I would say 12 weeks, maybe even 16 weeks, uh, if not a little bit longer, even were actually spent and just verifying the problems that, and validating that customers were looking for a solution to this problem to begin withWell, we were lucky enough to get funding, and so we we raise some capital. Um, And then after that, we were part of the Y Combinator accelerator. That actually helps us accelerate our growth as well. And then our user base started to grow and customer base started to grow. From there, we hired our first sales team. We hired our first, uh, sort of marketing team members beyond the engineering group. And yeah, that's how we started to evolve. So normal. Usual scaling of a company, lots of learnings. Of course, along the way, one of the challenges that's very unique to us is, uh, community feels very niche and feels very sort of personal when things they're small and things are intimate. But as you start to scale this, that sometimes goes away. So how do you maintain that sort of comfort? Andi? Intimacy, even as you scale is a is a very particular problem. So yeah,