Survey success: Recollective’s market-research software making its mark

March 12, 2024

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While the recent tech downturn sent shockwaves through boardrooms around the world, Recollective kept its bearings. The Ottawa-based market-research software firm has had plenty of practice navigating turbulence over the past 25 years, changing course more than once when storms emerged. Now, co-founder and CEO Alfred Jay says he’s hoping the release of two new products will help Recollective kickstart the momentum it had been gathering before economic headwinds recently slowed its progress. “It’s been tougher in the last six months than six months prior,” Jay acknowledges. “But I’m starting to see signs of promise.” Recollective’s software allows companies to conduct online market research in real time, providing a forum for consumers to engage with each other and answer questions via text or video in a setting akin to a virtual focus group. Where such gatherings would typically be limited to a few dozen participants in person, Recollective’s customers have access to a much wider, more diverse sampling of opinions that could include input from tens of thousands of consumers around the world. “They can really improve the way they make decisions because they can weave customer input into decisions in real time,” Jay says of Recollective’s clients, which include market-research firms like Ipsos as well as companies that conduct their own market research, such as home appliance giant Dyson and digital music service Spotify. About 2,000 companies now subscribe to the Ottawa firm’s cloud-based platform, which is available in 28 languages. Over the past five years, Recollective’s revenues have soared 400 per cent, and its headcount has risen from 24 employees in December 2019 to 110 today.

Humble beginnings

It’s a far cry from 1998, when Jay and fellow Ottawa entrepreneur Philippe Dame formed a company to help people surfing the nascent World Wide Web interact with each other. At the time, community-engagement software as a service was a novel concept, and it didn’t take long to catch on. Within two years, the startup’s initial offering, a free platform called CommunityZero, had 1.5 million users who had formed 150,000 online groups around the world. But free products don’t pay the bills, and in the days before online advertising on such platforms was commonplace, Dame and Jay found it difficult to monetize their idea. In addition, the 2008 financial crisis hit their venture, then called Ramius Corp., hard. So the company changed course and launched Sixent, a platform aimed at enterprise customers that made it easier for employees to collaborate. Though Sixent’s users included major organizations such as Ciena, NASA, Nortel and SAP, the software wasn’t exactly a gold mine as Ramius struggled to stand out in a crowded space. “Although we kept above water, it wasn’t an extremely vibrant place to be,” Jay, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey Business School, concedes. “We got tired of boiling the ocean.” The turning point came in 2011, when Ramius developed a new product, Recollective, after noticing a growing number of companies were using its software to survey their own clients. “It really became obvious that there wasn’t a really amazing platform for qualitative research,” Jay explains.

Slow ascent a blessing

The company’s third offering was indeed the charm. Still, Jay says it took a while for the new software to gain traction, and for broadband networks and online video capacity to catch up with the product’s capabilities. Looking back, he considers Recollective’s slow ascent to be a blessing in disguise. “For us, it was great because it gave us time to build out a very full-featured product,” he says. “When those technologies finally arrived, the foundation was much stronger. “We had negative working capital for years. But we survived and ultimately came through with a much better understanding of what we want to be, what works, what doesn’t, what we can be very good at and what we’re not.” The bootstrapped venture gradually built a solid customer base for a product whose time had finally come. In 2019, Ramius changed its name to Recollective to reflect its decision to focus on its flagship software. From his desk at the firm’s headquarters in the World Exchange Plaza, Jay has much to smile about. He says Recollective’s latest offerings will streamline access to external surveys and allow customers to integrate quantitative research data from Qualtrics, one of the world’s most prominent experience-management software companies, into their own research projects. Artificial intelligence could revolutionize the way companies solicit customer feedback, Jay adds, and he says Recollective’s engineers are working hard to capitalize on AI’s potential. “The ability to do qualitative research at scale supported by AI opens up huge opportunities,” he says. “I think we’re in the right market. I think we just need to see this economic cycle turn a bit and some of these headwinds go away. When (economic conditions) co-operate, we should be in a good position to see the fruits of those labours.”