Sameer Bhatia’s customers presented him with a pleasantly inconvenient problem. They had found his free quiz tool, put it to work, and decided that free would no longer do. They wanted privacy, security, and their own branding. They wanted to pay. For a founder, this is the sort of complaint worth keeping.
The tool had begun with a narrower audience: people on an IT discussion forum exchanging certification exam questions. Teachers found it useful for other subjects. Companies then recognized something they could use for employee training and assessment. Bhatia followed that expanding circle of needs into the business that became ProProfs.
The sequence matters. A product intended for one group acquired another, then another. The commercial opportunity appeared in the requests people made after using it. Bhatia’s contribution was to take those requests seriously enough to change the offering. Public quizzes could remain free; private business uses could support a paid tier.
The business arrived with a request
Bhatia came to this work with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California and previous ventures in e-learning, online retail, and search. He had tried different kinds of internet businesses. Here, a tool for sharing knowledge gave him a reason to stay.
His favorite word is “delight.” It is an ambitious word for software, a category in which getting through a task without consulting a help article can feel like a minor holiday. He wants people to use his products without first becoming students of the interface.
That ambition carries a practical obligation. The more jobs a tool performs, the more opportunities it has to become confusing. Adding features for companies could easily have made the original quiz maker harder for a teacher to use. The challenge was to give different customers what they needed while keeping the basic experience approachable.
“Our brand promise is simplicity.”
Sameer Bhatia
Bhatia’s team also used its own tools for hiring and training. That placed employees on both sides of the screen. They were building the product and encountering the consequences of its design, a useful arrangement for discovering which supposedly obvious instruction requires an explanation.
Bring your own PowerPoint
Consider the trainer with a folder full of presentations. The material exists. The next job is to put it online, deliver it to learners, and discover whether anyone understood it. A software company can make that process easier, or hand the trainer a fresh assignment disguised as a feature.
When ProProfs introduced Training Maker in 2012, Bhatia emphasized the materials people already knew how to create: PowerPoint slides, Word documents, PDFs, and content on the web. Courses could incorporate existing files and external material, including YouTube videos. Learners would not need to install extra software simply to view those documents.
This was a revealing place to focus attention. The course creator’s previous effort counted. Teaching could begin with material already prepared, rather than a demand to recreate it in an unfamiliar authoring system. The product had to accommodate the work that preceded its arrival.
Bhatia was thinking about the learner’s device, too. In a 2012 conversation about mobile education, he described the difficulty of serving different browsers, operating systems, and screen sizes. The instructor could hardly be expected to become a compatibility department as well as a teacher.
His answer was to handle more of that translation in the software. Uploaded documents could become web pages; content could also be made available for download. The detail is modest, but revealing. An educator has a lesson to deliver. Every technical chore removed leaves more attention for the lesson.
The answer has to fit the question
Once content is online, another problem appears: finding the right piece of it. Bhatia’s example in a Google discussion about engagement was a student looking for an SAT or GRE practice test. The relevant exam material should take precedence over whatever happened to be popular with other visitors.
It is a small distinction with consequences for the whole experience. A busy website can offer plenty to click while leaving a visitor’s actual question unanswered. For someone preparing for an exam, relevance is a more useful welcome than a crowded display of unrelated successes.
Bhatia paired relevance with quality. The two belong together: finding an answer quickly does little good if it is a poor answer. His description of engagement began with the person’s purpose, then worked back toward what the site should show them.
He applied a similar standard to business applications in a 2015 essay. More software and more collected data, he argued, did not automatically mean better results. He called for improved usability, stronger features, and analytics that could help people understand the information they held.
For a training product, the difference is easy to grasp. Recording a score is one job. Helping an instructor see which question confused a class is another. The second makes the record useful for deciding what to teach again. Bhatia’s interest runs through that gap between storing information and putting it to work.
In conversation with Business Rockstars host Ken Rutkowski, Bhatia explained the company through two plain activities: building knowledge and testing it. Courses helped people learn; quizzes checked understanding; surveys collected their response. Each addition sat beside a task the customer already had.
A father’s advice, and a second-product surprise
Expansion has a family connection in Bhatia’s account. His father told him about a business that reached a difficult period too late to enter new markets. The lesson Bhatia took was to explore while resources were available. Waiting for trouble could leave very little room to move.
Success also gave him something to unlearn. The original quiz tool attracted attention readily, and he expected later products to follow a similar path. They did not come with a guarantee of the same reception. He came to see marketing as work that required investment after an initial group of customers valued the product.
Those lessons sit comfortably together. Use a good period to try something new, then give the new thing a realistic route to customers. A previous success is useful encouragement. It makes a rather unreliable distribution plan.
The growing company also put more structure around customer support. ProProfs describes an international team with offices in Santa Monica and Delhi-NCR. The company places human assistance alongside the software, giving Bhatia’s insistence on delight an everyday test: what happens when somebody needs help?
A longer lesson plan
ProProfs’ acquisition of Qualaroo in 2020 expanded its survey capabilities. The company had already been building survey tools since 2012. Buying another product offered a way to add different ways of asking customers what they thought, continuing Bhatia’s interest in useful feedback.
In January 2024, ProProfs announced the acquisition of WebinarNinja, founded by former teachers Omar Zenhom and Nicole Baldinu. The fit was instructional. A recorded course and a live teaching session serve related needs, but they give a learner different ways to participate. WebinarNinja brought live webinars alongside the company’s on-demand learning tools.
That November, PeopleGoal added performance management, goals, reviews, and employee feedback. Bhatia’s explanation linked those capabilities with training and development. A course can address a skill; an ongoing review can help establish where the skill is needed and whether the work has improved.
THE EXPANDING CLASSROOM
Customer feedback
Live and on-demand learning
Goals and employee development
By December 2025, ProProfs was announcing four integrated suites organized around customer support, employee learning, people development, and growth. The announcement page was updated in May 2026. The grouping offers a clear view of how far Bhatia’s working territory has spread from certification questions.
It also brings his original design preference back into view. A broader collection of tools gives a company more ways to help and more ways to confuse. Connecting a course, a support conversation, and a piece of feedback has value when people can understand how the pieces serve their work.
A century, one useful answer at a time
Bhatia’s present interests still include how people learn. ProProfs Research Lab names him alongside behavioral scientist Kristina Tchalova as a leader of its workplace-learning research. It describes surveys of professionals intended to inform decisions about training and employee development. The original interest in understanding knowledge remains visible beneath the expanding product list.
Away from the business, he has described enjoying a home library spanning technology, business, and self-improvement. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters. Reading is a fitting pastime for someone whose work repeatedly returns to the question of how knowledge gets from one person to another.
Bhatia’s stated ambition for the company’s lifespan.
His longer ambition is to build a 100-year company. That is a time horizon capacious enough to accommodate products that have yet to be imagined, and employees who have yet to be born. It makes the next launch one chapter in a much longer undertaking.
The century remains ahead of him. The useful part of the idea is what it asks of the present: keep the company worth returning to. His career so far offers a concrete place to begin. People brought him questions, unexpected uses, and requests for features. He paid attention. At the beginning, some even offered to pay him.