Database Reference
In-Depth Information
We've developed the tool to cover more and more datasets over time.
Initially we'd built the product to explore venture-backed start-ups. Users
could search for companies with technologies relating to, say, mobile pay-
ments, and then start to analyze them to understand the technology space.
They could find the clusters of companies with similar technologies and see
how mature or dynamic those clusters are. They could see how they related
and find the innovators bridging different technologies. They could see the
profile of investments from different VC firms, or other large companies, and
compare their investment strategies and how they were changing over time.
They could look for acquisition targets, or find competitors or technologies
that had the potential to be disruptive to them.
News was the next major dataset we integrated. We had the realization that
many of the tools we'd already built could be used to help us understand an
emerging conversation in the press. Now users can explore news around a
particular topic, and see the stories that are being published, who are the
thought leaders driving the conversation, how it's changing over time, and how
sentiment maps to different stories. They can find memes and see how they
are emerging. They can look at how different publications are covering a topic.
It's very powerful if you're trying to figure out how to engage with the public,
or want to understand how the conversation around a major topic is playing
out at scale across hundreds of thousands of different sources, or if you just
want to get up to speed quickly on an issue.
One thing that Quid has been very good at is that we have people on the
business side of our team who are very, very good at sitting down with deci-
sion makers, with people who have a whole process for how they decide what
to do, and saying: “What do you need help with? What do you need to know
in order to best make a decision?” And then once they have those answers,
responding with: “Here's how you could use this tool to help you do that.”
And so meeting them halfway and actually making it very clear how we can be
helpful and useful, and feeding back to the team what we need to build better
to enable them to make use of it successful. That's been really important.
It's been critical for me to get to collaborate with people who are so good at
understanding how users work and what their needs actually are. We often
work with them to figure out how different groups of our customers specifi-
cally use the tool, as well as understanding the evolution of how a customer
goes from having their hand held while they get started to very quickly get-
ting to the point where they start using the product in ways we hadn't even
thought about. I think especially for our use case, where we've got people
doing very important decision making, it is very important for us to spend
time with them and talk it through with them to make sure that they're com-
fortable with what they're doing, and that we know what types of questions
they really need to be able to answer.
