Sofia Quintero built EnjoyHQ, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps customers conduct UX research faster. The startup’s focus has always been assisting clients in understanding their customers better, fueling decisions to improve products and services continually. When it came time to extend Sofia’s O-1 visa and continue her U.S. immigration journey, she searched for a company that operated with that same customer-centric attitude and chose Legalpad.
Growing from Diverse Experiences
Early in her career, Sofia dabbled in many different things, from working for a large advertising agency to running a skate shop. She always had side businesses and projects percolating and was curious about doing her own thing. She eventually moved to London, got into the tech scene, and found a partner. “It is a great ecosystem over there,” Quintero said. “I had the opportunity to work with a couple of startups, and then I became the head of growth at one of those. And while working there, I experienced a similar pain that I experienced before when I was doing consultancy projects or even advertising: people were struggling to understand customers, gather enough data and make sense of that data.”
Solving a Repeated Problem
Sofia realized that many organizations, regardless of industry, struggled to make reasonable assumptions about what customers needed or how to improve their experience. “It was a repeated pattern, and so, I started to think about that problem a little bit more.” By 2016, things came together for Sofia and her partner to launch EnjoyHQ. The SaaS product helps companies centralize customer feedback and user research data. EnjoyHQ offers ways to help companies analyze their data and share customer insight and knowledge with the rest of the organization.
EnjoyHQ is used by medium to large organizations in all sectors around the world with the most significant chunk of customers in the U.S. “We have companies in healthcare, finance, B2B, and other marketplaces,” Quintero said. “Within those, we primarily serve user researchers and product designers.” Customers include The Wall Street Journal, Home Depot, Mailchimp, eBay, IBM, GrubHub, and many other household names. “All these companies are trying to understand their customers at a different level,” she added. “The need to understand customers has been there for ages, but it was intensified after the digital transformation fueled by COVID. Every organization realized that it needs to develop a way to keep up with the changes that are happening in the world—and then how to digitalize that experience to make it better.”
UserZoom Acquires EnjoyHQ to Accelerate Growth
While 2020 was a year of exciting growth for EnjoyHQ, the team needed to rethink its next steps. Plans to conduct customer development through networking and conferences quickly faded away with the rise of COVID-19. “I was at this kind of crossroad. I needed to either raise a Series A to scale the team or find a partnership. It was a choice of what would give the company the biggest chance to succeed based on our background, our journey, and what we wanted to achieve.”
The team talked to a lot of people and partners, and one of those partners was UserZoom. “At the beginning, it was all about doing a commercial partnership because we have the same type of customers and complementary products. The conversation very quickly changed into, ‘we can do something much better,’” Quintero said.
UserZoom acquired EnjoyHQ in the summer of 2021, which will help EnjoyHQ reach the next level of success. Quintero is assisting with transition and training sales and product employees for growth. “It was a no-brainer. And they’re really, really great people. So, we’re having a good time.”
Moving to the United States
As EnjoyHQ was exploding in growth, its founders found the workload to be nearly never-ending in Europe. “When we were such a small company with five people in Europe and a big chunk of customers in the U.S., it was challenging to have some balance in your life,” Quintero recalled. “You are waking up super early in the morning to catch up with some of your team members and then staying up very late in the evening doing customer support for U.S. clients. I haven’t had a holiday in seven years.” She knew she had to move to the U.S. to continue.
Quintero added, “If you want to succeed, you have to think about where will the business be best served? Which geographies? Where can I be the most productive? Where can I have the strongest networks? The O-1 visa opened all sorts of opportunities for more revenue, for us to understand the market a lot better, and ultimately for us to get acquired.”
Although Quintero had obtained an O-1 approval with a different firm, when it came time for an extension, she wanted to find a company that could better “understand the challenges and does things pretty much like a startup.” After finding Legalpad on a Google search and having initial conversations, she knew Legalpad was the right partner. “Legalpad not only understood the immigration process and how to help us be successful with our application, but they also understood who we were as founders and how to make our lives easier.”
