Nihal Advani knows the trials and triumphs that come with being an entrepreneur in Chicago.
His startup QualSights, a leading automated quantitative and qualitative research platform for consumer insights, is one of Chicago’s fastest-growing software companies, but it wasn’t always supposed to be what it is today.
“One of the things that’s exciting about us is we’ve been around 10 years, but we were doing something very different,” Advani told the Chicago Business Journal. “I launched in 2012 as a travel-planning company called Georama.”
Since 2012, however, Advani has pivoted a couple of times, eventually landing on QualSights.
“That really changed the game for us. We went for a struggling startup in terms of product-market fit and revenue to the last three years basically going gangbusters,” he said.
QualSights now claims to be the fastest-growing software company in Illinois, based on Inc. 5000 rankings, increasing its revenue by more than 4,000% and doubling the size of its team to begin the year, according to Advani.
As a travel-planning company, Georama helped people find, plan, book and share their trips and created more personalized virtual tours for tourism companies, hotels, colleges and other organizations. Advani described it as TripAdvisor meets Booking.com.
The startup was a passion project for Advani, an avid traveler and adventurer who quit Microsoft to start his own thing, but he soon realized that an oversaturated market presented a difficult road ahead for Georama.
“We were one of hundreds of startups trying to do something in the travel-planning space. Everyone was failing and we all pivoted or died,” he explained.
Advani pivoted to become more of a live virtual travel site, using live video to help customers travel to places they had never been before.
At the time, Advani said he had a very strong technological infrastructure to help people virtually travel to places, but the startup was failing to find any consistency.
It was then that Advani realized he needed to become “the master of one vertical” and after doing market research found that research and insights is where he needed to be.
He pivoted to QualSights in 2018 and hasn’t looked back since.
Today, while the company is mostly remote with only about a dozen employees working out of a WeWork office in Chicago, the startup’s head count has reached almost 80 after being at 17 less than two-and-a-half years ago.
Meanwhile, as the company embarks on its first institutional investment run, Advani said QualSights has had some of the top angels investors in Chicago — such as Gian Fulgoni, former CEO of Comscore — involved. But he found that for some investors, the company was “too far ahead” of a traditional Series A since it has been profitable since 2020.
“One issue with investors is they typically have a box or thesis where they … need to catch a company at a certain stage,” Advani said. “We were past that stage. Because of our profitability and revenue growth, our valuation is much higher than what fits into their typical box.”
Advani’s journey is a good reminder about how important it is for entrepreneurs to stay nimble.
“It was hard, not just for me, but also to get the entire team to then drop everything we were doing two times over and switch to something new. That wasn’t easy,” Advani admitted.
But for Advani, it came down to the four P’s of entrepreneurship: passion, persistence, patience and the ability to pivot.
“I think being nimble and being able to really adapt is very important to being able to survive and thrive,” he said.
His advice to other young entrepreneurs is to pay attention to the signals.
“Some things take time, and you can’t get discouraged too soon either, but in our case, we had great technology and clients, but our revenue wasn’t consistent,” Advani said. “We weren’t scaling; we were just going up and down. It wasn’t a product-market fit and we realized we just hadn’t found it yet. The funny thing is, you don’t know while you’re in it, but then when you find product-market fit, it’s very obvious because things start moving really fast.”
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