Jason Suriano
Founder, Quickify.ai
Referred by one of his customers as the original no-code founder. Jason is recognized as the first person globally to earn a Master of Arts degree in Digital Humanities. With a background as an Instructional Designer and Project Manager, he has spent 20 years in the EdTech/eLearning sector. He has founded three companies, achieving two successful exits, and published his first book, "Office Arcade," in 2017.
One sentence to describe your company
Quickify AI is a cloud-based, interactive onboarding platform with AI content and design tools, that makes it fun and easy for product, marketing, and sales teams to get up to speed quickily.
Can you share your journey into the SaaS industry and what motivated you to start your own boostrapped SaaS company?
When I started my company, we were a Digital Learning Studio providing instructional design and development services.
If you needed a website or app, we built it from scratch. My team and I worked with a lot of Learning Management Systems (LMS), that were big, bloated, and expensive (they still are). While an LMS is great for infrastructure, they deliver terrible user experiences - poor point and click videos, boring activities, and very little course performance data.
In 2015 we used an open source Content Management System (CMS) to build our own internal learning platform from scratch. We called it Trajectory IQ. We used Trajectory IQ to create custom enterprise courses that had interactive activities, and a robust points and badging system that tracked progress and performance. We went on to use Trajectory IQ to create over 300 custom courses for startups, mid-size, and Fortune 500 companies - from employee onboarding to compliance training (and everything in between). Although Trajectory IQ worked well for my team, it wasn't easy for our customers. The CMS was still too complicated - it had a lot of moving parts.
During the pandemic, I started to imagine Trajectory IQ as a SaaS product. For two years I worked with my team on a new version of our CMS with busy product, marketing and team managers in mind. Once we had our new cloud-based CMS in place, I wanted to make it simple to write questions and generate images - the complicated part of creating meaningful learning.
Artificial Intelligence was the missing piece of the puzzle. We integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT (content) and Dall-E (images) directly into our CMS to help customers generate what they need on the fly without pre-build courses or stock photos. After extensive customer pilot testing in 2023, we launched Quickify AI in 2024. Now anyone can create amazing learning programs, share them, and have users sign up with their own email address on any device.
What has been the biggest challenge you have faced thus far and how did you solved it?
There have been several challenges along the way but there are two that stand out. The first was running out of VC funding and bootstrapping the company, including our new product Quickify AI. The second, was moving from custom development for Enterprise to SaaS. We’ve successfully removed a ton of features and while still providing value to our customers, but finding our ideal customer or specific product market has been a challenge - the product is unique and hits several different market segments/ has multiple use cases.
