Rajiv Lamba and the expensive art of listening

Rajiv Lamba made a mistake with an unusually awkward audience: his own customers. SurveySensum, the feedback business he founded, had an early product packed with engineering effort and competitive ambition. When the team took it to market, it discovered that the product did not match what buyers needed. A company devoted to listening had managed to talk over the answer.

There is something almost reassuring about that admission. Expertise does not confer immunity from the errors it helps other people avoid. A researcher can become enchanted by his own hypothesis. A founder can mistake a rival’s feature list for a customer’s shopping list. The market, which has little interest in anyone’s professional credentials, eventually sends back its corrections.

Lamba has described that episode as a lesson in understanding the buyer before investing heavily in development. It is a useful place to begin his story. The interesting question is how someone who spent years studying consumers learned to accept being studied, judged and corrected by them himself.

The invitation that changed the job

Born in New Delhi and now based in Singapore, Lamba built much of his career in Indonesia. His route into research began with an education in mechanical engineering at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, followed by an MBA at Xavier Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar. In 2004, an invitation from a college colleague took him to Indonesia.

The professional trail included Insight Asia, Mindshare and Nielsen. Then, in 2011, he joined Kadence International in Indonesia, a smaller firm run by a friend. Moving from a familiar employer to a boutique business meant acquiring responsibilities well beyond consumer research. A smaller company has a way of discovering that the person answering one question is also available to answer six others.

The Kadence chapter included expansion into Vietnam and the Middle East. Cross Marketing Group bought Kadence in 2014; Lamba stayed through the earn-out period and left in 2017. That sequence matters. His education in entrepreneurship included building an operation and living through a sale, with the obligations that follow the celebratory announcement.

By the time he began again, he had already seen how a research business grows beyond the researcher who helps run it. There were teams, territories and commercial systems to understand. Consumer insight was still the profession. Running a company had become another one.

A polite answer can be an expensive answer

The problem that drew Lamba toward NeuroSensum was the distance between what people say and what they respond to. He observed that consumers he encountered in Southeast Asia could be reluctant to give direct criticism of a product or advertisement. His account concerns the research situations he experienced; it is a reason to examine an answer more carefully, rather than a verdict on every consumer in a region.

For a company deciding what to make or how to advertise it, courtesy can complicate an already difficult decision. An agreeable response is pleasant to receive. It can also be a poor foundation for spending money. Research exists partly to make that distinction visible before the bill arrives.

NeuroSensum began in 2018, combining conventional research with techniques such as eye-tracking and facial coding. The ambition was to add evidence about responses that a questionnaire might leave unexplored. Lamba’s interest was commercial and specific: improving the way businesses understood reactions to their products, packaging and advertising.

That approach gave him one way into the customer’s experience. SurveySensum would address another obstacle: the cost and time involved in getting an answer at all. A carefully designed study is useful only when a business can commission it often enough for its decisions.

Research with a shorter queue

SurveySensum launched in June 2019. Its subscription software let businesses create surveys, distribute them through different customer touchpoints and analyze responses in real time. The launch followed NeuroSensum’s seed backing from Alpha JWC Ventures and a May 2019 Series A involving SIG Asia and other investors.

The proposition was easy to recognize. Consulting offers expertise, but a company may have more questions than its research budget can accommodate. Software gives a team a way to ask more frequently, through channels it already uses. The value sits in the everyday decisions that would otherwise proceed with an assumption and a hopeful nod.

The 2019 launch described a hotel collecting feedback through email, messages, websites, tablets or QR codes. A negative response could prompt the hotel to contact the guest and address the experience. It is a modest example, which is precisely why it works. No grand theory of loyalty is required to understand a disappointed guest who would appreciate a reply.

There is also a clock inside that example. An answer received while someone can still act has a different use from an answer delivered after everyone has moved on. Lamba’s software venture made that timing part of the product’s purpose.

The feature list meets the buyer

Building software introduced a different discipline from selling research projects. Lamba’s account of the early SurveySensum product is candid: the team spent too much attention on competitors and engineered beyond the essentials of a minimum viable product. The first market test exposed the mismatch.

A feature can be easy to defend in a meeting. Someone else has it. Someone has asked for it. Someone can imagine a presentation slide on which it looks indispensable. The buyer has a less accommodating test: will this help with the problem that brought me here?

The lesson Lamba drew was to identify target buyers carefully, understand their difficulties and put a lean version into their hands sooner. That advice has particular weight coming from a founder in customer feedback. His own product had to submit to the same scrutiny it promised to make available to clients.

There is no need to turn the mistake into a heroic ritual. It cost effort and required correction. Its value lies in the change it prompted: letting the market shape the product before competitive anxiety shapes the engineering bill. A useful first version can leave things out. Sometimes the omissions are evidence that somebody finally listened.

“Feedback is useless unless it leads to action.”

Rajiv Lamba

Growth that has to pay its way

Lamba’s public conversations repeatedly return to sustainable growth. In a 2021 discussion of building a technology company as a nontechnical founder, he addressed keeping the core product simple, using the relationship between his two brands and choosing sustainability over aggressive expansion. Those concerns fit a business with both consulting and software operations, each with its own demands.

By December 2024, he said the combined organization had reached break-even in 2022 and remained profitable. He also described a change in its geographical mix: Indonesia had represented roughly 95 percent of revenue in 2021 or 2022, compared with about 60 percent at the time of that conversation. India accounted for approximately 15 to 20 percent. These were his reported figures for the combined business.

The percentages tell a more useful story than a map decorated with office pins. An operation can have an international presence while still depending heavily on its first market. A changing revenue mix suggests that customers elsewhere are beginning to carry more of the business. It also gives the founder a new set of markets to understand.

His language about cash flow makes sense alongside his earlier earn-out experience. Growth creates choices, but it creates obligations too. Profitability offers some room to make those choices without treating the next funding round as the only possible answer.

Friday’s other deliverable

In 2018, Lamba described spending one or two hours each Friday training employees. He also spoke of flexible working hours and allowing people to leave to start their own research firms. For a founder who had entered a smaller business through a friend’s invitation, the willingness to let another person begin is a fitting detail.

Training is an unglamorous entry on a chief executive’s calendar. It rarely supplies a dramatic photograph. Yet it gives practical meaning to the idea of building future leaders. A business cannot depend indefinitely on one person knowing how every client conversation, research project and decision should proceed.

The personal details are less corporate. He has named rendang, grilled fish and nasi goreng among the Indonesian foods he enjoys, and described family holidays in Bali. In that period, he called Indonesia his first home. The place where he built his career had become somewhere to belong, as well as somewhere to do business.

There is a welcome difference between a market written on an expansion plan and a country associated with meals and family trips. Lamba’s working life crosses borders. Those small details give one of the borders an address in memory.

What happens after the answer?

In his writing about AI and consumer research, Lamba has emphasized explaining how data will be used and respecting privacy and consent. He has also discussed personalization as a way to show customers that a business understands their needs. Both ideas place a responsibility on the company asking the questions.

A customer’s willingness to answer does not settle what a business should do next. There is the task of interpretation, followed by the harder task of changing something. An automated summary can help a team understand repeated complaints. A person still needs to decide who will respond and what will improve.

His recent public activity extends that conversation beyond product demonstrations. In September 2026, he shared an invitation to a Jakarta customer-experience leadership roundtable focused on business impact. A December 2025 profile described SurveySensum serving more than 300 enterprises in over 20 countries. The dated figure marks the reach of the work, while the roundtable’s subject returns to its purpose.

The question at the end of Lamba’s story is the question at its beginning. Did the answer change the decision? His own early product gives him a reason to ask it without condescension. He knows that listening can be expensive when it comes late. He has also built a business around the possibility of doing it sooner.