Hello, it's Team Walla. Today, I've opened my laptop to share why we created Walla.

Before Walla

We've been operating an application for collecting unstructured data (such as images, location, and voice). However, since the app was our primary focus, we didn't create a dedicated space for data requesters. We always had to manually receive data project requests and then transfer them to our servers. So, our initial idea was to create Walla to receive data projects effectively and provide requesters with a monitoring space.

Insights Gained While Creating Walla

While operating our app service, our primary customers were university research labs and government entities. Although we were grateful for the numerous projects they entrusted us with, our team had a strong desire for growth, and we still had a thirst for corporate customers. We constantly pondered, "What kind of data do businesses need these days?" Through extensive research and meetings, we discovered that many companies preferred to collect customer feedback directly within their organizations rather than outsourcing data collection.

We also learned another surprising fact. Most companies use Google Forms for data collection when there are many other excellent form builders available. We were astonished to find out that the majority of businesses stuck with Google Forms simply because they had started using it initially. This revelation was quite impactful.

The primary goal of creating forms within companies is diverse, but it all comes down to collecting customer data. Businesses brainstorm and create forms, send them to customers via email, manually review responses, purchase gift cards, send them out, and then analyze responses in spreadsheets—a lengthy process we aimed to streamline.

1. Therefore, Walla was designed to seamlessly import and utilize Google Forms and allow data to accumulate within existing Google Forms. No matter how great a tool is, it's useless if it's not used in daily operations.

2. We also aimed to consolidate various functions used in customer data collection tasks. We were the first in South Korea to introduce Zapier, a tool that integrates with over 5,000 other applications like Slack, Notion, and email, into our form builder.

3. Additionally, we created various visual tools to allow teams to share and monitor form tasks, including visual logic maps, view and churn rate tracking, and automated analysis reports.

Recognizing the Limitations of Customer Managers

Recently, we examined how Walla's customers are using our platform. Here's a summary:

1. Most companies primarily used Walla for customer surveys, with the majority featuring open-ended questions.

2. Customer managers are generally not data experts or developers, so they often involve developers from other departments in customer data analysis.

3. Based on a team of three customer managers and the company size, each team had to analyze over 8,000 open-ended responses in a single month.

After addressing the initial pain point of fragmented customer data collection, we identified a deeper issue. Therefore, we initiated development to address this problem. We added survey response analysis features to Walla.

For example, we implemented prompts like

"Write these responses in an email"
or "The correct answer is ***. Grade it"
or "Categorize keywords."

Then, we added new columns to the data sheet with the results. This allowed us to easily handle the remaining data cleaning that previously required manual efforts throughout the month. For specific details, please refer to the [Analyzing Response Data with GPT] guide.

Walla's Growth

It has been a few months since Walla was created. During this time, we've experienced significant growth.

• Our initial desire for corporate customers is gradually being fulfilled. Whenever a payment or subscription is made, we receive notifications on our Discord channel, and each time, it brings us immense joy and excitement. It's not just about making money; it feels like a fish that was swimming in a dark and cold sea has finally encountered another living fish.

• We continue to experiment and face challenges. Thanks to these efforts, we are proud to have achieved several "firsts" in the industry, such as "South Korea's First Zapier Integration in a Form Builder" and "World's First GPT Integration in a Form Builder." Although we are a small team of five, we are all dedicated to thinking about how to make our service better and quickly implementing those improvements.

• In just four months, Walla has grown by an astonishing 2,350%.

Walla may not have been created overnight, but it was built through three years of endless experimentation, failures, and overcoming challenges. Many ideas were born and abandoned repeatedly until Walla came into being. Yet, despite it all, we still respond to customer inquiries at 2 AM and develop dozens of new features every week. Please continue to follow Walla's adventure.

• Edit by Yuvin Kim, Co-founder of Walla, Paprika Data Lab Inc.

• This content is current as of March 10, 2023.