Meet Our Founder
Matt Foley
Founder, QualNow
Matt has been a qualitative market researcher for nearly 20 years. He began his career at Harris Interactive (now Nielsen) as a Qualitative Research Consultant, where he conduct hundreds of in-person and online focus groups and interviews on behalf leading brands like Dell, Hyatt, USAA and Mercedes Benz.
He left Harris to co-found a startup called PluggedIN, which built and managed private online communities that helped brands like T-Mobile, Kraft, General Mills, FedEx, Pfizer & Microsoft to "co-create" products alongside their customers. PluggedIN was acquired in 2011 by Edelman, where Matt became a SVP.
Since leaving Edelman in 2013, Matt has gone on to launch three companies in the online market research space, including FocusGroupIt (2014), QualNow (2017) and Advise.Us (2019).
He is also very active in his local (Rochester, NY) startup community, where he advises startups as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NextCorps, one of the largest incubators in NYS.
Matt has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) from Boston University, and is a professionally trained qualitative researcher and focus group moderator through the RIVA Institute.
When he's not creating or advising startups, Matt can be found spending time with his wife and four-year-old son, mountain biking, snowboarding and hanging out in the Finger Lakes.