How Sprig Grows: The Story, Product Philosophy, GTM Motion, and Competition

Sprig is one of the hottest PM tools in the space. In today's post, we go deep after 11 conversations -- including 6 with Sprig team members themselves -- on what makes this $330M company tick.

Six years ago, Ryan Glasgow was helping scale Weebly (later acquired by Square) as a product manager when he noticed something interesting: gathering qualitative user feedback at scale was incredibly hard.

But unlike most PMs who just complain about the problem, Ryan decided to do something about it.

His first attempt?

An SDK so simple it only asked users three questions: quality, functionality, and usability:

• No customization

• No targeting

• Just three questions rotating through your product

That MVP would eventually become Sprig - a company now worth $330M and used by tech giants like Figma, Notion, and Coinbase.

But the journey from basic SDK to product experience platform holds fascinating lessons about building in today's world.

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Today’s Post

In today’s post, we'll explore:

1. The Story of Sprig

2. How Sprig Builds Product

3. How Sprig Grows

4. Market Position

My analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 6 members of the Sprig team - Ryan Glasgow (CEO), Chipper (Head of Marketing), Kevin (Head of AI), Tanner (Senior PM), Ana (AI Product Lead), and Jack (PMM) - 3 customers, and 2 customers of competitors.

Let's dive in to see how a simple idea about product feedback evolved into a platform that's reshaping how companies understand their users.

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I’m traveling India! Join me.

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1. The Story of Sprig

Chapter 1 - The Problem (2018)

Ryan Glasgow had a problem.

As a PM at Weebly, he needed to understand what 50 million users thought about his product.

He couldn't email them all personally. The existing tools were too slow and clunky.

He had identified a potent idea for a future business.

Chapter 2 - The First Version (2019)

So he teamed up with engineer Kevin Mandich and built something radically simple.

An SDK with just three questions:

• Quality?

• Functionality?

• Usability?

No customization. No targeting.

Just three questions rotating through your product.

Even that basic level was finding success with folks

— Kevin, now Sprig's Head of AI

They landed Square as their first enterprise customer.

Chapter 3 - The Long Game (2019-2020)

While most startups rush to market, Sprig did something unusual.

They spent two full years in development. Working with companies like Dropbox and Robinhood as design partners.

Zero marketing. Just patient, methodical improvement.

The team manually created every survey. They personally verified every piece of analysis.

It was painfully slow. But it built trust.

Chapter 4 - The Technical Breakthrough (2020)

Everything changed when they introduced event-driven architecture.

Now companies could target surveys based on specific user actions. Capture feedback immediately after key experiences.

Two seconds after checkout? No problem.

The dam had broken. By December 2019, they were processing over 10 billion API interactions per month.

Chapter 5 - Multi-Product Evolution (2021-2022)

Glasgow noticed something fascinating.

Product research wasn't just for researchers anymore.

We started narrowly trying to cater to researchers. But we realized everyone was doing research - PMs, designers, engineers, even heads of engineering.

—Ryan, Founder and CEO

In 2021, they launched voice and video surveys. The changelog shows a rapid-fire series of launches:

• Concept testing with Figma integration

• Video interview templates

• Multi-language support

• Matrix survey questions

• Always-on feedback buttons

Each addition carefully chosen.

Each one making research easier for product teams.

Chapter 6 - AI (2023-Present)

While everyone else is jumping on the AI bandwagon in 2023, Sprig has been building AI since 2019.

If you called it AI in 2019, you got a little smack on the hand. Everyone would say 'hey that's not AI, you're just doing machine learning.'

—Ryan, Founder and CEO

But they kept building.

Today, their AI can:

• Automatically analyze open-ended responses

• Group similar feedback into themes

• Generate product recommendations

• Identify user behavior patterns in session recordings

Chapter 7 - Sprig 2.0: Beyond Experiences (2024)

In September of this year, Sprig launched their biggest evolution yet: Sprig 2.0.

The vision is simple but powerful: Build for people, not data points. So they put it on the 101:

The platform now has three core AI capabilities:

1 - Ask: A prompt-based study generator.

Want to increase onboarding conversion? Ask. AI creates and launches the perfect study.

2 - Observe: AI watches user behavior in real-time through:

From replays to heatmaps, surveys (in-product feedback), and feedback (always-on user input).

3 - Recommend: AI analyzes all this data.

It identifies challenges and friction points and suggests specific product improvements. It works like a PM's AI thought partner.

The days of manually poring over dashboards are over

—Ryan, CEO and Founder

Chapter 8 - The Future for Sprig

Sprig’s vision goes beyond surveys.

Sprig wants to build self-optimizing products. Products that constantly learn from user behavior.

Products powered by AI agents that work autonomously for product teams.

It's like the iPhone app store just came out and everyone's trying different things. There's a gold rush of new ideas.

—Ryan Glasgow

With 30 thousand customers, Sprig is well on their way.

So how does Sprig build product and grow? Let’s break it all down in the most detail done yet…