Academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies face a brutal trade-off: rich longitudinal data vs. participant burden. LifeData's eDiary and ESM platform collapses this tension. With just 15 employees generating $1.3M in revenue, they've achieved what most SaaS companies need 50+ people to accomplish. Their secret? Vertical focus so deep it becomes a moat. They're not building for everyone—they're building for the specific workflow of experience sampling methodology.

Here's the counter-intuitive part: 2,775 monthly visits with 29% direct traffic suggests something rare—a product that sells through relationships, not SEO. The 17% organic traffic is nearly an afterthought. This is a bottom-up, word-of-mouth play in a niche where trust matters more than scale. The keywords reveal the story: 'experience sampling' (770 volume) and 'does experience sampling include diary studies' (240 volume) are hyper-specific queries from researchers who've already made their decision.