One of the many challenges businesses face is growth and exposure.  How will costumers find out about the great services your company offers if they don’t know your company exists? Our next guest has started a service that helps companies do just that.

Please introduce yourself to our readers: 

I am Sean Si, the CEO and Founder of SEO Hacker and Qeryz.  I am a data analyst and urgency junkie who spends his time inspiring young entrepreneurs through talks and seminars.

You are working on something pretty cool. Care to share a little bit about that?

Qeryz is a survey tool for websites that allows you to capture customer insights 700% more effectively than your traditional survey, without sacrificing the quality of the data. You could actually see it at work on our website.

What made you decide to follow that path?

I started my first company almost four years ago. It’s an SEO services company.  Like all services companies, it’s hard to scale up. Increasing revenue through acquiring clients almost always means increasing overhead through onboarding new people to join your team.

As it happens, the profitability was not where I would have liked it to be. Don’t get me wrong, SEO Hacker is doing tremendously well right now with more than 20 people in our team. However, it’s a company that’s servicing other companies. Some of those companies would have internal problems along the way and decide that they won’t renew our contract. It’s a small basket with big eggs scenario.

So I thought about going into SaaS but I had just an inkling of an idea on what product I should build. I knew it had to be in my field of expertise somehow. It just so happens that I needed a survey tool for one of my SEO conferences here in the Philippines and I hired out one in particular that was absurdly expensive (but I had no choice, it’s what fits the bill!)

After the event, I felt bad that I had to hire out this tool. And that’s when the lightbulb turned on. I hired a team of programmers and directed Qeryz into being. It’s priced very fairly and it’s really all you need in getting insights from your customers. Best of all, we have a forever free account where users can keep all their data even when they opt-out of the service.

Have you taken any outside funding?

Nope! I’m the sole financier of the company. We’ve burned a year and a month into the runway already and we’re generating revenue but we’re not yet profitable.

Do you have any partners?

I gave some equity to the owner of the programmer I hired so yeah I consider him as a partner.

What outcome do you hope to achieve? (What is your vision/goal for the company)

I hope that the company will be able to serve people like me who are running digital marketing campaigns and need valuable customer insight in order to direct their campaigns better. Data is a very important thing today because of the clutter of competition in the web. Assumptions have to be tested and verified before being carried out into production.

What is your company culture like?

Well for SEO Hacker, all of us are in our twenties. I’m 26 years old and the oldest in the team is 29. So it’s a very bubbly team. When you step into our office, you’ll see young faces smiling and throwing jokes at each other. Depending on the time/day of the month. Sometimes when it’s crunch-time and we have tons of reports to build and send, things simmer down and the atmosphere is really intense – in a fun sort of way.

With Qeryz, the team consists of five. That’s four people in product development and me for everything else. So the culture is very raw. Again, all of us are in our twenties. The product team is very serious with their work so you’ll find them working pretty much all day, every day.

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what 3 things would you bring?

The bible, my mobile phone and the urine-to-drinking water converter that I saw in Waterworld (Kevin Costner). That should keep me going.

Thanks for sharing Sean!  You can connect with Sean on his LinkedIn.