Understanding the customer’s journey on a website or app is critical to business success. As a result, the global digital experience and analytics software market is large and growing fast, reaching $10.20 billion this year, rising to $22.94 billion by 2028, according to Grand View Research.
One company helping to define the category is Atlanta-based FullStory. Founded by fellow Georgia Tech graduates Scott Voight, Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber in 2014, FullStory develops software that records user interactions on a website or app providing product and support teams insight into the interactions of visitors and customers and positions itself as new kind of platform, designed to help companies answer any question they might have about their digital experience.
The fast-growing FullStory currently has some 350 employees, over 3,000 customers, including the likes of Peloton, The Financial Times, VMware and JetBlue. As a result, the company has attracted $172.2 million in venture funding, including its most recent $103 million D round led by Permira at a $1.8 billion valuation. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, Dell Technologies Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Stripes, GV and Glynn Capital Management.
The company is among several Atlanta-based unicorns and its founding story reads like a history of the Atlanta Tech start-up scene over the past twenty years. “In 1997, I got lucky at graduation in this person that I knew from Georgia Tech recruited me to join his startup (nFront). And so I fell in with this nine person startup and we went from nine people to a category leader in internet banking systems. And we took that company public in two and a half years and actually the software still runs today,” says Voigt, now CEO of FullStory.
After experiencing a successful IPO and following the company’s acquisition, Voigt went to work for a venture firm (Noro-Mosely Partners) in Atlanta, where he got to see entrepreneurs come in and pitch the firm and learn how really good CEOs operate. “I was like, ‘Man, it would be cool to try that at some point.’ And so like all good junior level venture people, I went to business school (Wharton). Out of business school, this is where the FullStory story starts to pick up,” says Voigt.
After graduation, he rented a cubical at Georgia Tech and in the cube next to him were two brilliant computer scientists, Webber and Johnson. “They were working on a little two-person start-up. The three of us just had good chemistry and I ended up joining Bruce and Joel's start-up. In 2004, we actually had Larry Page (Google co-founder) in Atlanta and at Georgia Tech on a Sunday morning. We’re pitching our hearts out to Larry Page like, "our product's great. You should buy our product because it will help you solve these problems. Atlanta is great because of Georgia Tech and all these great engineers, you should let us open that Google engineering office in Atlanta, if you buy us," says Voigt.
And that’s what happened. The trio’s company, Innuvo was acquired by Google in 2005 and served as the hub for Google’s Atlanta engineering office. Webber and Johnson joined Google, while Voigt left to join another Atlanta-based MarchTech company, Silverpop, where he stayed for the next five years. “But the whole time I was there, I would bug Bruce and Joel and Bruce and Joel would bug me. And it's like, "When are we going to get the band back together?’ It took us, I think, six or seven years to get the courage, to quit our day jobs and start a company again,” says Voigt.
Google closed the Atlanta office in 2013 after Webber and Johnson, who is credited with founding the Google Web Toolkit project and leading the Atlanta office, left the company to rejoin Voigt to found a new MarTech company, Monetology, focused on developing a project management tool for marketing teams.
Johnson brought along several of his fellow Google engineers and the founding trio self-funded the launch of the company. “Ben Chestnut, who is the CEO of MailChimp, I like to say he took pity upon us because we were a team of eight burning money and he was like, ‘I'll tell you what, here's an office in MailChimp. You guys just work in MailChimp and we'll give you some services work for us, give us a couple of engineers worth of time, you can build whatever you want to and then if it all works out, great for you,” says Voigt.
While testing Monetology’s product fit with customers, the entrepreneurs stumbled upon the larger opportunity in the user experience space and renamed the company. “And so, we pivoted and to call it a pivot is an understatement, it was a control-alt -delete. New people, new era, headed in that direction.
“And so, we launched FullStory in 2014. Almost instantly, we fell into product market fit. What we were doing really is turning the lights on for product teams. For the first time, they could understand every customer interaction. And that was just a brand-new category of software. And we were one of the first ones doing digital experience intelligence,” says Voigt.
Voigt was born in Boise, Idaho, but grew up in Georgia. His father spent most of his career at HP, so the life of an entrepreneur and the urge to build something from nothing came to him by happenstance and a bit of luck. He was offered a job at Deloitte after working there while in grad school, but was advised by his father to try the start-up his Georgia Tech fraternity brother offered.
“I think, if I were to craft the narrative in hindsight it's locked all the way down. But that was a lucky fork in the road because, I got to go and see that first experience. We were a team of nine people when I started. We were all doing all the things you have to do to build a business. We were fortunate to see some success with it and it was just fun trying to build that. That's probably what set me down this path,” says Voigt.
As for the future? Voigt states, “We truly believe the market opportunity for us right now is enormous. If you believe by a CEO's statement that everybody in the world should have something like this and that we are the pioneer of a new paradigm of a digital experience system of record—if that's true, then we can run for years and years as an independent company. It's hard to predict whether that means we're a public company or a private independent company.”
Fast-Growing FullStory Defining Customer Experience Intelligence Market - Forbes
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