The mortgage guy who built a feedback & machine
Harris does not sound like a SaaS CEO when he talks about reviews. He sounds like somebody who had to read them. "The online reputation management landscape is really messy," he told RealTrends back when his company was still called SocialSurvey, and the messiness was the pitch. He had spent the better part of two decades in mortgages and real estate - owner of RE/MAX Victory, COO of Victory Financial Group, SVP of sales and marketing at Commerce Mortgage - and the reviews showing up online had nothing to do with the closings actually happening offline.
So in 2015 he started a company to close that gap. The early product was as practical as the problem: when a loan funded or a transaction recorded, the customer got an automatic survey. The answers went where they could matter - Google, Facebook, Zillow, the agent's own site, the lender's internal scorecard. He plugged into Dotloop and Lone Wolf so the trigger was the transaction itself, not a marketing department's reminder.
That was SocialSurvey. In 2019 it raised a Series A. In 2020 Harris wrote CX 2.0: Create WOW Customer Experiences, a book he says came out of executives asking him the same question after his keynotes until he wrote down the answer. In 2021 the company became Experience.com, traded its name for a URL most lawyers would call a small miracle, and reframed itself as an Experience Management Platform (XMP) rather than a survey tool. The customer-feedback firehose is still there. It just feeds more places now.
What he is actually building
Inside Experience.com, the bet is that the survey was always just the first step. The interesting layer is what happens to the data after it arrives: which reviews surface where, who responds, how Google's local pack interprets it, and increasingly - how an AI chatbot decides whether to mention your name when somebody asks for a mortgage broker in Phoenix.
That last part is new. The 2025 vintage of the company talks fluently about AI search ranking, AI citation management, reputation control in AI platforms, and something they're trademarking as Search Rank Score. The underlying instinct is the same as 2015: figure out what signals the gatekeeper is reading, and feed it cleaner signals. The gatekeeper just stopped being only Google.
The contrarian on five stars
Harris is famously unconvinced that perfect ratings are a flex. He likes companies that respond to complaints with an admission. "I trust a company that graciously says, 'I blew it,'" he told HousingWire in 2018, and the line keeps showing up because most CEOs in his industry would never admit it out loud. His thesis is volumetric: a thousand reviews averaging 4.7 will out-convert a hundred reviews averaging 5.0, every time, because consumers have learned to suspect the perfect score. The David Mussari Berkshire Hathaway team - 600 agents, 32 offices - is the case study he brings out. 55% survey completion. 4.9-star average. 20% growth over three years. Volume plus honesty beats curation.
The Ohio State chapter
The earlier biography is small-state and unglamorous in a way you'd never guess from the polished San Ramon photos. Harris went to The Ohio State University between 1988 and 1992. The next twenty years he spent on the operating side of the housing economy - the loan officer dinners, the franchise P&Ls, the comp plans, the closings - long enough to know exactly which workflow was broken when he finally decided to write software for it. Founders who arrive at SaaS through the customer entrance tend to build differently than the ones who arrive through Stanford CS. Harris is the customer-entrance kind.
The book that got smuggled in
CX 2.0 reads less like a tech-CEO vanity project and more like a workbook. Nine steps. A lot of "data-in-motion versus data-at-rest" language. The argument: the survey you send a week after the appointment is asking the customer to perform memory; the survey you trigger seconds after the appointment is capturing experience. One is archaeology. The other is journalism. Harris sells the second one.
What's next
The company's most recent keyword list reads like someone who has spent the last six months in conversations about LLMs - AI search visibility tools, AI reputation scoring, geo analytics, AI search readiness. The interesting question is whether reputation management on AI platforms turns out to be a new market or a feature on top of the old one. Harris is betting it's a new market, and he's betting Experience.com gets there with a head start because the underlying signal - what real customers said about a real transaction in real time - is the same signal a chatbot would want to cite, if you could only get it to.
He's also branched into a second venture, Reignlist, Inc., aimed at real estate commission opportunities. It's the closest thing he has to a hobby project and it still happens to live inside his original industry. Some founders escape their first business by starting an unrelated one. Harris keeps starting more companies inside the same building.
How to read the operating numbers
Public/aggregated figures. Last funding event: March 2019. Revenue is reported, not audited.