Aussies survive Y Combinator, snag $3.3m investment

“The level of adrenaline we were working at, condensing three years of pain and suffering and getting the company into investment stage, was like jumping out of a plane,” said Mr Dwyer, of the three-month program.

“And that all came down to a one-minute pitch with one slide.”

Via Zoom to a panel of Silicon Valley investors, the pitch was this: GreatQuestion software collates customer interviews, surveys and prototype tests, and allows companies to analyse and understand what their customers are telling them, with or without words.

“Finding the right customers to talk to is difficult, and there are lots of different research methods and incentivisation strategies, so we help companies manage all that and then analyse what they’ve found,” Mr Dwyer said.

Mr Dwyer, who lives in San Francisco, and Mr Murray, who lives in Melbourne, previously built web development marketplace Elto in 2012, which they sold in 2015 to GoDaddy for an undisclosed amount.

GreatQuestion is entering a market dominated by players such as Qualtrics, with a $US20 billion market cap, and Momentive, which was previously named Survey Monkey, and has a $US5 billion market cap.

Mr Dwyer said these companies had failed to innovate or modernise the tools needed by digital companies that wanted to understand and analyse customer feedback.

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