The CEOs Shaping the Future of Market Research

In a captivating exchange, Greg Wong, the Chief Executive Officer of Riwi, and Dmitry Gaiduk, the former CEO of CoolTool, engage in a profound conversation surrounding the strategic direction behind Riwi's recent acquisition of CoolTool. Together, they explain their collaborative endeavors to establish an all-encompassing market research platform that seamlessly integrates state-of-the-art technologies. Greg elaborates on Riwi's groundbreaking method of gathering global sentiment data through RDIT technology, while Dmitry highlights CoolTool's expertise in neuroscience and non-conscious measurement methodologies.

The CEOs emphasize their shared goal of combining AI-powered tools with research services to develop a comprehensive solution catering to both corporate entities and academic institutions. Their collective vision is to spearhead an innovative insights platform that harmonizes survey design, data analytics, and reporting processes. Central to their successful merger are considerations of cultural alignment and the reciprocal inspiration they draw from each other, driving them towards reshaping the landscape of market research through inventive practices and substantial impact.

This discourse serves as a testament to the forward-looking mindset and cooperative spirit embodied by these two pioneering executives who are at the forefront of propelling the industry towards unparalleled progress and advancements. Their strategic partnership underscores a commitment to revolutionizing market research by infusing it with innovation and a collaborative ethos, setting a new standard for the future of the field.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of our CEO Series of interviews. And today I am joined by my good friends, Greg Wong and Dmitry Gaiduk, formally, at least Dmitry formerly, of Cool Tool now part of Riwi and Greg obviously as the CEO of Riwi, so welcome guys. How are you?

Greg Wong: Welcome Lenny. Glad to be here. Thank you for having us.

Leonard Murphy: Glad to have you. 

Dmitry Gaiduk: Hey. 

Leonard Murphy: Full disclosure my history of both companies goes back a long time. I am on the board of Riwi and that's also why I wanted to do this particular interview because I think that the vision that you guys have put forward and going through the recent acquisition of Riwi to acquiring Cool Tool is just really cool and exciting. And so that's why I wanted to have both of you on to talk about that. So the rest of the industry could realize "oh. Oh, that's really cool." So, now, rather than steal your thunder, let's talk about kind of the origin story for each company real quick and then we'll get into what that coolness factor is. So, Greg. Why don't you talk about Riwi first and Dmitry and talk about Cool Tool and then how about the joining of the forces?

Greg Wong: Absolutely. Thank you. So Riwi was founded about 15 years ago really as a way to disrupt the original panel industry. Our original founder was a global health professional and he was looking for ways to collect sentiment data around the world. And if you kind of go back 15-16 years ago, it was really through panels or through focus groups. And so he invented this technology called random domain intercept technology or RDIT, which is really a way of intercepting people online and providing them a survey. No incentivization, no bias for people trying to get rewards people just answering surveys around the world because they were really interested in the topic and over those that span of years. We've done about two billion survey responses and 229 countries and 35 different languages. We've really done this at scale and what we're really specialize in is in helping get that sentiment data in places that are hard to reach right not necessarily just place where everyone can go but you want to get there in China, you want to get data in Russia, in Ukraine, in Iran. We're able to get data all around the world. We then acquired another company, but two years ago called Research on Mobile, which did programmatic sampling so we went from doing full-service market research using our own RDIT sample. Now we added programmatic sampling where we probably...where we Syndicate data and recipients to all the marketplaces as well as to our own studies. And that was the history of Riwi.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool and you did win the Insight Innovation competition in 2015, I believe it was so way back. Yeah, and…

Dmitry Gaiduk: We also have one of them we also have one, yeah.

Leonard Murphy: You also won the essay Innovation competition. So, Dmitry, let's have a cool tool.

Dmitry Gaiduk: Okay, so Cool Tool exists more than 10 years and many folks in Industry knows us as a innovative technology companies. So we developed different proprietary technologies. Most of them focused on applying non-conscious measurements for different areas like at package testing you actually search and to build many different products and Technologies and self-service platform combining both robots survey engine and all those and neuro marketing science-based methods in one platform. And that was always our go to innovate and to bring new technologies to the market. So here we think

Leonard Murphy: Yes and the combination of sample, service ,and technology. I guess that's the core but tell us a little bit more. Hey, Greg, what drove you to think? This is a really good thing for Riwi and we should mentioned Riwi is a public company. So...

Greg Wong: Riwi is definitely public company. Maybe it starts with the vision of what we're really trying to do and we're trying to help our customers make better decisions through unique and trust and transparent data through actionable intelligence and insights. And so when we really think about what we're doing and how we're going about doing that is we're really doing two things. We're building a technology platform that can be leveraged by either brands market research firms, or governments academics to manage all their market research. The other thing that we're doing is we're building a big data platform again, we've got two billion survey responses in this platform many of those which were able to resell and make available to people as we grow this set of data we're able to query it and ask people can ask questions. What is gonna happen with inflation in this country who's gonna win the election over here and leveraging ongoing data that we collect as well as the historical data you can get some really interesting insights. So the combination is what we're building, but then you add Cool Tools to the mix and you think about our technology platform, we always did surveys. They, Cool Tool, may have a slightly better survey engine in some areas. But what they didn't add from our research Tech is all the Neuroscience. It's the non-conscious data captures one system but not just system wisdom too, but fully integrating to one platform. We see this all over the place that maybe someone has eye track and a facial recognition, but it's completely prevented methodology disconnected from the actual survey with Cool Tool, we bring all that together with the sample and with all look of other services and expertise to really help market researchers get whatever information they need. And again, we're just starting right? So nothing in our vision says survey, this is just part of what we're building in this research platform, but we are hoping to become the research platform for the industry over the next number of years.

Leonard Murphy: That's an exciting vision. So Dmitry, I'm sure you heard that sales pitch from Greg and thought yeah, where do I sign up? So?

Dmitry Gaiduk: Yeah, actually very excited by this sales pitch and it's perfect in terms of this vision of Riwi and if it's perfectly actually to what we did and it allows us to not only to develop for these technologies in one family products that is division allows us to build the future of industry. So it's not only about non-conscious data. It's not only about just one platform. It's about dealing with different data helping our clients to make a marketing decisions and I felt really good synergy between our teams. So those things we have, we can bring to Riwi team and Riwi team is a really nice right now. We already like one week there together. And I gave me the excitement right now is even more than it was before because they feel very complementary roles of our teams want to another and that brings us to something really interesting and exciting future hope the whole industry will hear of this.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. Very, very cool. So, still in the honeymoon period hopefully it transitions into a long-term happy marriage, which I think that it will so that's fantastic. So now lets talk about what's next. Obviously, you got a ton of integration work, Greg you kind of outline this broad vision, but we are in a period of just massive disruption in from various forces. Obviously, the two-letter word AI is one of those but also an expansion of the democratization of insights across, multiple stakeholder groups, which is great the pies getting bigger. There's all new players and they're in the space some that we traditional suppliers, but also brands leveraging data themselves to an extent becoming competitors as well. So as you're thinking about this, you got all these ingredients and what the recipe is gonna look like. What else are you factoring in what's getting you excited and thinking all right. We know this from some challenges here, but we think this is why we win.

Greg Wong: Yeah, no, thank It's great question. So you hit on a couple of things right? One of it is around Innovation. And one of the things that we really appreciate about the cool tool platform and the cool tool team to be honest is they're incredibly Innovative. When you think about they have built all these AI algorithms that underpinned a lot of their technology and really as an amazing sample company and of course we leverage full service to do a lot of that stuff but be able to learn from the cool tool team being able to take the colonel of the AI nuggets that they've already built that underpins or platform and expand that beyond the current use cases. They do it then across the rest of really platform. I think is really really exciting. The other thing is really historically been really strong and Financial Services public policy academics, but there's a lot of other areas especially the research marketing side was not really really strength you start adding cool and opens up a whole new customer segment things like understanding packaging research or the buyer journey for any commerce site UI/UX research. There's so many different areas of cool to opens up and part of it is gonna be learning, and the cross training between the team. So integration, as you said is key not only technical integration, but knowledge sharing across the teams. How do we share these great technology we have and then also take these services that we now offer on a global basis and, again, really make an international so historically really 75-80% of our business was done internationally, right and we're going more and more in the US. We're trying to also expend more in China and other places but Cool Tool offers us these other areas the other vectors of growth. What I think is going to be incredibly exciting and on a personal level. I'm just so excited to learn from Dmitry and the rest of the team the things they do is so different than what Riwi has historically done that it's exciting and I can tell you the energy we see within Riwi after the acquisition is incredible as Dmitry has indicated because everyone is interested and cross trained and learn from each other and I think that's from a culture perspective. Acquisitions, either succeed or fail basic culture and we're seeing a really strong synergy and culture. So again, we're so thrilled about this.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. Very, very cool. It does my heart good to hear that. So, Dmitry how much I know you're Mr. Visionary, I mean always thinking about the future and you you've got a lot of work in front of you to do everything that Greg just talked about, but yeah, but what's in the back of your mind, I'm thinking yeah, we're gonna get all this done and then we're gonna kick ass with next thing.

Dmitry Gaiduk: Okay, maybe not in this interview Lenny. Sorry and maybe yeah,

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, you don't want to give it away. I get it. I get it.

Dmitry Gaiduk: Give us some time, but I would say Greg is a little bit shy to mention and reveal a great customer success and sales team which is very like for us and this story provides really good hope that especially in these age where the speed of this changes in the industry is so fast. Now we have not only all necessary ingredients, but also great spirit Goodwill and most importantly resources to develop those things we discuss so yeah it will be available soon, but even during this week the generated so many great even like ideas nobody think before this and before the moment we joined forces. So it's really exciting at this stage. And yes for us the most important part is finally have enough resources to develop great things for our clients and for industry and not only develop but also deliver them. This is very important, to deliver, to serve to perfect some stuff. This is very important part because we were innovating for 10 years, but those Innovations like to be honest we're appreciated by not that part of the world and market research world. Yes. We were still small team right now when we join forces, we have fantastic resources and fantastic team together to grow this innovation.

Greg Wong: It's interesting Lenny. I think Dmitry touched on customer service and Riwi grew 50% last year. And the reason we grew 50% is not just because we had this great technology. It's because of the customer service team and we give a lot of credit to our customer success team our implementation our project managers. They really go above and beyond to make sure our customers always get what they need. And I think the other thing that we're seeing in industry, I'm sure you see this more than anybody, is scale matters, right customers would rather not have to deal with five vendors if they can deal with one vendor that can handle their sample, their system, their programming their analysis and report writing and just going even beyond that into other types of solutions social media listening to other things if they can have one neck to choke across everything that's the preference and  so we are really trying to build out this end to end market research platform so that not only our end customers but the market research firms that we work with can leverage us in multiple dimensions. They can use this for a piece or they can use this for everything but we want to be the one-stop shop so that again we become the easy button, staple to find the easy button wanna get this done. You want to get this result. You want to understand something. How do you do it? You press the easy button, you press Riwi.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. As a CEO, you should also be the CMO Greg. I mean with that type of thinking all right, I want to be conscious of your time as well as the audience. So, final question from each of you. Where are you finding inspiration today? Business or not, right? What are you doing that just refreshes and recharges those juices and get you going for thinking about all the opportunities ahead? So, Dmitry you first know and then we'll end with Greg.

Dmitry Gaiduk: Very interesting question. Okay, probably first of all from my kids so my kids is a big source of inspiration and also the source of sort of responsibility. I would say so you need to think twice before you do something and how you will explain those skills. Those kids are really smart and already asking right questions. So I need to be prepared and everything what I'm doing I'm doing for my family too. So this is first and biggest source of inspiration. The second one will be actually like probably recognizing that moment in industry because I was always to be honest a little bit irritated by the scale of changes in our industry. It's very traditional and nothing was changed for years. Right now, it's really good to see how it's changing and bringing expertise from other sectors and to see how those different AI projects in different other areas growing to bring it here. It's just great fun to do and when you have fun from what you're doing just it's a right thing and the third one probably will be the ocean. So yeah, the ocean is like I always dreamed of living by the ocean and right now I live by the ocean and ocean is actually full of energy and kind of limitless so for me this but I need energy when I need some inspiration. I go to the ocean just like little walk or a little run and I'm recharged.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. So the benefits of living in Portugal so yeah, Greg. How about you?

Greg Wong: Yeah, I don't think my answer is quite as good as Dmitry's but I think my inspiration is really coming from two places. First, it's our employees. I talked to our employees and I learned every single day from them, they're doing amazing work and a great projects and when we talk about the work we're doing we talked about what we're actually accomplishing for our customers. I find that incredibly interesting and not only the work but even their personal stories, right? So I think that's great. Second thing is our customers, we have a lot of customers a lot of different areas. And for some people we help them with better marketing research. We also have a segment of customers our International Development customers, who are doing really impactful work, right we're doing things on gender-based violence. We're doing things on women's right, we're doing things on migration patterns in various countries, on food safety, water safety. These are this work that we're collecting data and providing information. We're just part of a much larger machine, but when these USAID or world food program type work that we're just a part of or helping actually make impact and for me, My tire career I've worked in data management commerce software p all these things always about helping other people make money. And listen. I love that. I am passionate about it. But one of the reasons I joined Riwi was because we actually make an impact on the world social impact and it's the first time in my career and something that I really wanted is when I look back at the end I can say we've done great for our shareholders, but we've actually left lasting impact in a lot of these areas and a number of countries and for me that's actually important and I get a lot of inspiration from seeing the results of that work and see what our customers come back and tell us we help them accomplish.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah the, audience if you're not following Riwi on LinkedIn, really encourage you to because you guys are great with always sharing that content related to that piece of things. I mean, it's just a steady flow and even being connected to the business, I'm often surprised damn we did that? That's really cool. So I get that. Guys best of luck. Obviously, we're gonna stay in touch at it significant level, but for audience pay attention, these guys are going to change the world. They've already done really really cool things and… I'm thinking it would be a really bad bet to bet against them. So, yeah,…

Greg Wong: I agree.

Leonard Murphy: So there you go Gregg, Dmitry. Thank you so much best of luck. Audience, thanks for tuning in and that's it for this edition of the CEO series. Bye.

Dmitry Gaiduk: Thank you, Lenny

Greg Wong: Thanks, Lenny. Bye.