The Next Wave: unitQ -- The Quality Company

After we sold Skout, I took some time to recoup after an amazing 9 year journey with a kickass team, community and product. I’m very proud of what we accomplished -- no regrets and tons of great memories!

After the sale, I was able to spend more time with my wonderful family and friends and focus a bit on myself (surfing!) -- but work came to a screeching halt. No more meetings, product reviews, marketing pow-wows, 1-1s with co-workers, etc. Crickets. That binary change was both relieving and honestly, a bit stressful. You’re no longer needed! 

In early 2018, I felt it was time to get the old gang together and start something new. One of the primary challenges we faced while running Skout was: How do we stay on top of product quality in real time? With so many platforms, languages, releases and 3rd party integrations -- there was always something broken, somewhere. Product quality can make or break a company, so why was our workflow ad hoc and manual in nature? Because no one had built a platform that captures user signals in an actionable way in real-time.

A user base is the ultimate quality team -- because they sit on every configuration (device, language, network, etc) and are testing your product all the time. So what if we could capture the data they produced in a systematic and timely manner, to help us navigate the waters? What if we could build a DataDog for human data, instead of machine data?

Introducing unitQ: We’ve spent the past two years building a powerful platform that we are proud of -- unitQ Monitor -- and formed an incredible team that consists of amazing people, some old faces from Skout, and some new. We were lucky enough to have both large and small companies take a bet on our first release last year. Since then, we’ve progressed into large deployments across support, product, engineering and leadership.

In Q4 of last year we knew that we had it.. we’re really sitting on something magical! Customers were raving about us and the data showed that our partners took action on the insights we surfaced. This resulted in an average 20% improvement in product quality within 30 days of customers using unitQ Monitor. Big engagement and retention boosts come from polishing the diamond you’ve already built, by leveraging an existing asset (your users and the data they produce) -- how cool is that?

The natural step for us was to find a partner to join the next phase of our journey. I’m thrilled to announce our $11M Series A led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund! We went with Anna Patterson and her team because they reminded us of ourselves: Humble, hard working, honest and transparent communicators -- with a big passion for building stuff that has a real impact!