Meet Umar Akhtar, CMO and Co-Founder of Qudo

Tell us about Qudo

Our key mission at Qudo is to democratise data and make it accessible to all – along with impactful insights – to end the ‘era of assumption’ for marketers. We combine consumer research, analysis and marketing automation to bridge the gap between insight and activation to empower marketing teams’ campaigns.

We want to empower marketers to take their data analysis to the next level by helping brands to understand their consumers far deeper than ever before using insights provided by zero-party data, all in one place.

Marketers face many challenges around maintaining data compliance – at Qudo, we provide a solution to this without sacrificing the quality or power of the data. What’s more, we prioritise the crucial ‘why’ behind what consumers do. After all, every piece of research is created to answer a specific question or delve into a particular consumer group – this is at the core of our platform and guides everything we offer clients.
 

What do you think makes Qudo unique?

Uncertainty really is the enemy of effective marketing. Marketers need answers and answers require data – but good data is often difficult to get your hands on. And even when you’re able to get it, what then? You can have the best and most comprehensive data, but it’s meaningless if you don’t know what to do with it.

When you’re starving and short of time, do you go to the supermarket and buy one of every ingredient, before getting home and scratching your head about what to do with them – or would you rather buy a ready meal that fits your needs? At Qudo, we provide just that – the exact actions broken down into detailed consumer segments based on the behaviours and products most important to them.

In this way, we’re taking all of the guesswork out of ad campaigns, dramatically improving return on investment, and freeing up countless hours that are too often spent in the mire of the research-to-activation process.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

In a short space of time, the way we work has undoubtedly already evolved and will continue to do so. For example, as AI equips us to accomplish more, it will free up more time for critical thinking and creativity. Those who can skilfully weave together disparate elements – be they ideas, data, or even people – will find themselves thriving, and we are determined to be at the forefront of this movement.

We’re constantly looking for how we can genuinely make data more usable and building features to achieve this – like the ability to talk to a segment as though it was a real person to allow a more humanistic way of extracting insights from data.

What can we hope to see from Qudo in the future?

I couldn’t be more excited about what’s next for us – in March 2023, we launched our flagship research and activation platform for marketers, and we’re currently inviting everyone to join our Beta programme. On the horizon, features like campaign management and optimisation features, an AI-powered survey hosting platform, and adding more channels to our Precision Activation tool to span beyond Google and Meta to TikTok will also be launching imminently and we’ll continue to cover the full spectrum as we continue to grow.

We’re moving from a purely dashboard-based software to a hybrid offering that will allow end users to do more than ever before with the platform. Finally, we’ll be looking to roll out the feature I mentioned above, which will allow markets to talk to a segment like it was a person – a kind of “PersonaGPT”, if you will.

We’re continuing to seek a range of venture capital and angel investors with experience in the tech start-up and SaaS space, having secured $6.7 million to date, with our next round of fundraising anticipated for 2024.