 Welcome everyone to this CUBE conversation featuring UnitQ. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and we are excited to be joined by Christian Vicklen, the founder and CEO of UnitQ. Christian, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much, Lisa. Pleasure to be here. Let's talk a little bit about UnitQ. You guys were founded in 2018, so pretty recent. What is it that UnitQ does and what were some of the gaps in the market that led you to founding the company? Yeah, so me and my co-founder, Nick, we're actually doing our second company now, so UnitQ is number two. And our first company was called Scout. Years ago, we were back by recent Horowitz and it was very different from UnitQ. It's a social network for meeting people. And it was really during that experience where we saw the impact that quality of the experience, quality of the product can have on your growth trajectory. And the challenges we faced, how do we test everything before we ship it? And in reality, a modern company will have, let's say, 20 languages supported. You support Android, iOS, web, big screen, small screen. You have 20 plus integrations and you have lots of different devices out there that might run your binary a little differently. So who is the ultimate test group of all of these different permutations? And that's the end user. And we saw the big gap in the market, sort of the dream platform for us was UnitQ. So if this would have existed back in the day, we would have been a happy purchaser and customer. And it really comes down to how do we harness the power of user feedback? The end user that's testing your product every single day in all different configurations, and then they're telling you that, hey, something didn't work for me. I got double billed or the password reset link didn't work or I couldn't, you know, when the ad has finished playing on my app, the music doesn't resume. So how do we capture those signals into something that the company and different teams can align on? So that's where UnitQ, the vision here is to build a quality company, to help other companies build higher quality products. So really empowering companies to take a data-driven approach to product quality. I was looking on your website and I noticed that Pandora is one of your customers. But talk to me a little bit about a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what UnitQ was delivering. Right, so maybe we should just go back one little step and talk about what is quality. And I think quality is something that is a bit subjective. It's something that we live and breathe every day. It's something that can be formed in an instant. First impressions last. It's something that can be built over time that, hey, I'm using this product and it's just not working for me. Maybe it's missing features. Maybe there are performance-related bias. Maybe there's even fulfillment-related issues. Like we work with Uber and HelloFresh and other types of more hybrid-type companies in addition to the Pandoras and Pinterest and Spotify and these more digital-only products. But the end users are producing this data. They're reporting what is working and not working out there in many different channels. So they will leave app reviews. They will write into support. They might engage with a chat support bot. They will post stuff on Reddit, on Twitter. They will comment on Facebook ads. So like this data is dispersed everywhere. The end user is not going to fill out the perfect bug report in a form somewhere that gets filed into Gira. I like they're producing this content everywhere in different languages. So the first value of what we do is to just ingest all of that data. So all the entire surface area of user feedback, we ingest into a machine and then we clean the data. We normalize it and then we translate everything into English. And it was actually a surprise to us when we started this company that there are quite a few companies out there that they're only looking at feedback in English. So what about my Spanish-speaking users? What about my French-speaking users? And when that is done, like when all of that data is neatly organized, we extract signals from that around what is impacting the user experience right now. So we break all of this data down into something called quality monitors. So a quality monitor is basically a topic which can be again, passive reset link not working or really anything that's impacting the end user. And the important part here is that we need to have specific actionable data. For instance, if I tell you, hey, Lisa, music stops playing. It's a growing trend that our users are reporting. You will tell me, well, what can I do with that? Like what specifically is breaking? So we deploy up to 1500 unique quality monitors per customer. So we can then alert different teams inside of the organization of like, hey, something broke and you should take a look at it. So it's really breaking down data silos within the company. It aligns cross-functional teams to agree on what should be fixed next. Cause there's typically a lot of confusion. Marketing, they might say, hey, we want this fixed. Engineering, they're like, well, I can't reproduce or that's not a high priority for us. The support teams might also have stuff that they want to get fixed. And what we've seen is that these teams, they struggle to communicate. So how do we align them around a single source of truth? And I think that's for unit Q is early identification of stuff that's not working in production. And it's also aligning the teams so they can quickly triage and say, yes, we got to fix this before it snowballs into something. We say, you know, we want to catch issues before you go into crisis PR mode. So we want to get this, we want to address it early in the cycle. Talk to me about when you're in customer conversations, Christian, the Martek landscape is competitive. There's nearly 10,000 different solutions out there and it's growing really quickly. Quality monitors that you just described, is that one of the key things that you talk to customers about that's a differentiator for unit Q? Yes, I mean, it comes down to, as you're building your product, right? You have a few different options. One is to build new features and we need to build new features and innovate and that's all great. We also need to make sure that the foundation of the product is working and that we keep improving quality. What we see with basically every customer that we work with, that when quality goes up, it super charges the growth machine. So quality goes up. You're going to see less support tickets. You're going to see less one-star reviews. Less one-star reviews is of course good for making the storefront convert better. You know, I want to install a 4.5-star app, not a 3.5-star app. We also see that sentiment. So for those who are interested in getting that NPS score up for the next time you measure it, we see that quality is of course a very important piece of that. And maybe even more importantly, so sort of inside of the product machine, the different conversion steps, let's say sign up to activated to coming back in second day, 30 day, 90 day and so forth. We see a dramatic impact on how quality sort of moves that up and down. The retention function, if you will. So it really, if you think about a modern company, like the product is sort of the center of the existence of the company. And if the product performs really well, then you can spend more money in marketing because it converts really good. You can hire more engineers. You can hire more support people and so forth. So it's really cool to see that when quality improves, it super charges everything else. I think for marketing, it's how do you know if you're spending into a broken product or not? And I feel like marketing has, they have their insights, but it's not deep enough where they can go to engineering and say, hey, these 10 issues are impacting my MPS score and they're impacting my conversion. And I would love for you to fix it. And when you can bring tangible impact, when you can bring real data to engineering and product, they move on it. Cause they also want to help build the company. And so I think that's how we stand out from the more traditional martech because we need to fix the core of sort of this growth engine, which is the quality of the product. Quality of the product. And obviously that's directly related to the customer experience. And we know these days, one of the things I think that's been in short supply the last couple of years is patience. We know when customers are unhappy with the product or service, and you talked about it a minute ago, they're going to go right to Reddit or other sources to complain about that. So being able to for Unicute to help companies to improve the customer experience isn't, I think, table stakes for businesses. It's mission critical these days, yeah? It is mission critical. So if you look at the, let's say that we were going to start a music app. Okay, so how do we compete as a music app? Well, if you were to analyze all different music apps out there, they have more or less the same features. Like the feature differentiation is minimal. And if you launch a new cool feature, then your competitor will probably copy that pretty quickly as well. So competing with features is really hard. What about content? Well, I'm going to get the same content on Spotify as Apple Music, as Deezer. So competing with content is also really hard. What about price? So it turns out you'll pay $9.99 a month for music. Like there's no $1.99, it's going to be $9.99. So quality of the experience is one of the last vectors or areas where you can actually compete. And we see consistently that if you're beating your competition on quality, you will do better. Like the best companies out there also have the highest quality experience. So it's been, you know, for us at our last company, measuring quality was something that was very hard. How do we talk about it? And when we started this company, I went out and talked to a bunch of CEOs and product leaders and board members that said, how do you talk about quality in a board meeting? And they said, well, we don't have any metrics. So actually the first thing we did was to define a metrics. We have this thing called the unit Q score, which is on our website as well, where we can base, it's like the credit score. So you can see your score between zero and a hundred. And if your score is 100, it means that we're finding no quality issues in the public domain. If your score is 90, it means that 10% of the data we look at refers to a quality issue. And the definition of a quality issue is quite simple. It's when the user experience doesn't match the user expectation, there is a gap in between. And we've actually indexed the 5,000 largest apps out there. So we're then looking at all the public previews. So on our website, you can go in and look up the unit Q score for the 5,000 largest products. And we republish these every night. So it's an operational metric that changes all the time. Hugely impactful. Christian, thank you so much for joining me today, talking to the audience about unit Q. How you're turning qualitative feedback into pretty significant product improvements for your customers. We appreciate your insights. Thank you, Lisa. Have a great day. You as well. For Christian Vicklin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE conversation.