About Us
Our mission and background
Our mission is to help the world listen better.
Let’s be honest… We would all be a lot better off if we stopped talking so much and learned how to listen to what each other is saying. We’d gain a better appreciation for each other, and make smarter decisions in our personal and professional lives.
However, listening is difficult – especially if you’re working in an organization that serves and impacts hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. How do you listen in a way that is scalable and doesn’t slow down your decision making?
This is the problem we’re out to solve at Advise.Us. We’ve developed a scalable, on-demand platform for you to listen to the people that matter to you and get the feedback & advice you need to make smarter decisions today.
Our mission at Advise.Us is to “help the world listen better.” We provide the tools, training and expertise to make it possible for organizations of all sizes to truly listen to the people they serve and make smarter decisions as a result…
Meet our founder
Advise.Us was founded by Matt Foley, a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience building products designed to help organizations of all sizes gather the feedback they need to make smarter decisions.
Matt began his career at Harris Interactive, where he traveled around the world conducting in-person focus groups and interviews on behalf of Fortune 500 companies seeking to better understand their customers and build new products and services around their needs.
He quickly realized that there were more efficient and effective ways to capture this kind of feedback, so he left to become a Co-Founder of PluggedIN, which built private online communities to help companies continuously engage with their stakeholders and “co-create” products and services alongside them.
PluggedIN was acquired in 2011 by Edelman (the world’s largest independent PR firm), where Matt stayed on as a Senior Vice President to continue to build out and grow the PluggedIN Communities product.
Matt left Edelman in 2013 to pursue his mission of making these powerful collaboration and co-creation tools accessible to small and medium-sized organizations that previously could not afford or figure out how to use them.
He is currently on the founding team of three startups outside of Advise.Us, including FocusGroupIt, QualNow and Soundingbird. In addition, Matt is an active contributor to his local startup community in Rochester, NY, leading up the incubation program at NextCorps and running the Rochester Tech Startups networking group.
When he’s not working, Matt can be found hanging out with his 2.5 year old son, reading, playing guitar or getting outside by mountain biking or snowboarding.