Utah Valley: Heart of Utah

QUALTRICS
✧
Top: Tucked away in the mouth of Provo
Canyon, Qualtrics’ 100,000 square foot
Provo office space is one of the most
beautiful in the entire state.
Above: Started as a family operation in a
basement, Qualtrics has become the leading
insights platform.
UTAH VALLEY: HEART
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More than a dozen years ago, Brigham
Young University marketing research professor
Scott M. Smith wanted to create an online
analytics research and data collection tool
sophisticated enough for a PhD, but simple
enough for an intern.
He launched Qualtrics as a father-son
business in the basement of his Provo home
in 2002 with his sons, Ryan and Jared, and
Ryan’s college friend, Stuart Orgill.
Smith believed that he and his small team
could create user-friendly, online research
software to meet the insight needs of small
and large businesses—and that is exactly
what they did.
Profitable since its first year, Qualtrics has
become a billion dollar enterprise with an
international profile boosted by such publications
as Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.
Such success is no accident. Smith understood
from his marketing expertise that
of UTAH
businesses want to know what their customers
are thinking to help them implement
effective business decisions. While the
insights were important in 2002 when
Qualtrics launched, they became even more
essential after the economic downturn in
2008 convinced companies of the importance
of making data-driven business decisions.
“We spent the first five years running
the company out of the Smiths’ basement,”
says Stuart Orgill, Qualtrics co-founder. “If
we needed to transfer a call, we just knocked
on the wall next to us and handed over the
phone. It might sound humorous, but our
basement operation was doing business with
major clients such as Ameriprise and Royal
Caribbean. We were generating more than a
million dollars of business each year,” Orgill
continues. “It even got to the point where
the neighbors were getting annoyed. Just
imagine twenty cars pulling up to the front
of your home each morning—it looked like
a wedding reception was taking place.”
Not surprising, given Smith’s marketing
research background, Qualtrics began as a
research solution for academics. For its first
three years, the company worked solely in
academia, assisting professors and students
working on sophisticated research problems.
Learning to support students’ rigorous thesis
and doctoral positions ultimately helped
Qualtrics’ employees sharpen their software
development skills.
With academia as a niche, every major
university in the United States and more than
1,600 colleges and universities worldwide
now use Qualtrics software. Additionally,
Qualtrics soon realized a major benefit of