I've been a fan of UserVoice since 2008. Back then I was leading business development at a company called Seesmic and UserVoice was emerging as the category-defining product feedback platform that it is today. I remember sitting down with the founder Richard White, talking about what an integration could look like at their office in San Francisco, because I believed so strongly in the importance of using real customer feedback to direct product development.

Seventeen years later, we're joining them in that mission.

This isn't just another acquisition for Curious, it's a deeply personal investment for me. UserVoice has helped over 3,500+ companies make better product decisions by actually listening to their customers. Companies like Adobe, Intuit, and Netflix rely on UserVoice to cut through the noise and build what matters.

One thing that stood out from our very first conversation with the UserVoice of today is how truly product-oriented they are, as you'd expect. They live the value that their product provides. That team (with many there since the early days) is coming along for this next chapter, their leader and CEO, Matt Young, carrying forward in his role as CEO.

Let me share our strategic approach with UserVoice, which aligns closely with our broader philosophy at Curious of continuation and acceleration.

First, we'll be doubling down on what makes UserVoice great today, with a deep commitment to building the best product in the space. UserVoice earns the trust of customers by showing that a product team is really listening - not just collecting feedback, but showing how the team is taking action on it.  

Next, we'll be reintroducing the self-service model as a way to ease the entry into UserVoice and expand the offering to more than just enterprise customers. We see tremendous opportunity in democratizing product feedback management – making it as accessible and intuitive as modern project management tools have become. Too many companies still manage feedback in spreadsheets or lose valuable insights in the noise of Slack channels and support tickets.

Finally, we'll be leveraging generative AI to not just collect feedback, but to synthesize it intelligently. Imagine AI that can identify emerging patterns across thousands of customer conversations, surface hidden feature requests buried in support tickets, and automatically connect feedback to business impact metrics. We're building towards a future where product teams spend less time organizing feedback and more time acting on those insights. We also want to build a platform that surfaces insights beyond just the obvious channels, where historically it may have been hard or impossible to surface.

The case of UserVoice is a great example of why we exist. UserVoice has built a great business over the course of more than a decade, but their cap table of mostly large VC firms (having rasied over $9M over the life of the company) wasn't excited by a long-term, profitable orientation. It's not their model, so companies like UserVoice often get forgotten. Our purpose is to re-commit to the great business and the customers they service.

This is day one of the new UserVoice chapter, and we couldn't be more excited about what's ahead. The voice of the customer has never been more important.