Perseverance and pivoting lead to Chicago tech company's success

If Nihal Advani has taken away one major lesson away from launching one of Chicago's fastest-growing tech companies, it's the importance of finding the perfect niche.

Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a platform that specializes in technology providing quantitative and qualitative research on consumer product experiences. The company has raised $4.5 million in venture capital since its inception a decade ago and has grown 4,500 percent from 2018 to 2021 ⁠— a big change from its origins as a small virtual travel startup.

"It's been quite a journey from where we started to where we ended," Advani said.

Advani, who is originally from India, moved to the U.S. when he was 18 years old to study at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned a degree in business management. His introduction to the tech sphere began with an internship at Google in the summer of 2006, and the following year, he began a career at Microsoft, holding multiple roles at the tech giant before launching Georama ⁠— the company that would later evolve into QualSights ⁠— in 2012.

"Even in college, I always dreamed of being an entrepreneur, but I thought I wasn't ready yet," he said. "When I picked Microsoft post-graduation, my goal was to get into the space and learn as much as I could. It was quite rewarding ⁠— they treated me really well, and I had a great time, and five years in it was time for me to take that jump ... It was something I always wanted to do."

Georama's initial focus was travel planning, offering clients a chance to virtually visit locations through live video, Advani said. The company eventually expanded from tourism to other areas, such as virtual campus visits, and in 2018, it shifted to a new focus: helping brands understand human behavior.

Advani said he was inspired to pivot after participating in an accelerator program in 2017 dedicated to helping businesses find the right vertical, explaining he realized "we were trying to be everything to everybody." At that time, qualitative and quantitative research was one of the areas on the company's shortlist of possibilities,

"We went through a variety of different tests, including actual sales tests and email marketing and things like that to see what was resonating with clients," Advani said. " ... It was funny and ironic that we did research and insight to figure out that it was research and insight that was most viable for our team."

Today, QualSights partners with companies in a variety of industries, including CPG, pharmaceuticals, retail and tech. Consumers use QualSights' technology to capture their experiences interacting with products, such as shopping, cooking and cleaning, providing invaluable feedback to brands.

"We help [brands] understand consumer behavior much more authentically and deeply than ever before, using a combination of video and AI," Advani explained. "...A survey's all about what, and it's great because it's structured, but our technology is all about the why."

Advani said he particularly values Chicago's collaborative culture. When QualSights first launched as Georama, it became one of the first tech companies to participate in 1871, a startup incubator that provides resources to businesses in the early stages of growth. The connections and programming the company received at that time have been invaluable to its success down the line, Advani said.

"It's just really good to have a culture of rooting for each other and wanting Chicago to be a bigger and better hub as the years go by," Advani said.

Advani said he would advise other startups that the "three Ps" ⁠— passion, pivoting and perseverance ⁠— are the key to finding success.

"It's very rare that you'll find that a comppany started with this one thing and stuck with that one thing many years later," he said. "You have to be open to pivoting and being nimble and adjusting as you go."