Hi HN!
I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question (https://greatquestion.co) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release.
The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news.
By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls & paying incentives. The research community calls this Research Operations. We’re setting out to fix these problems by building tools that make it easy for small teams to do what companies like Facebook and Google do with massive teams of research coordinators.
We help you do better customer research, more often in four ways:
First, we help you build an on-demand pool of research subjects. These are customers who opt in to be notified about customer interview requests and surveys, or find out about beta product releases. They could also be customers you find in other forums or communities, through content marketing or direct outreach.
Second, we let you book time with a customer in a couple of clicks, or send out a survey or prototype test. We give you templates to save you creating these things from scratch every time, but also to keep you following best practice. Templates like Product Market Fit surveys are live now with more advanced ones like Van Westendorp pricing surveys coming soon (email me for early access).
Third, we handle all the messaging on platform to protect the privacy and consent of your users but also to manage what's called "participant fatigue", and handle any incentives to make sure you get the responses you need.
Finally, we make it easy to share what you’re learning with your team. Store your notes, observations, video files and transcripts in one place. Post it to Slack, get an email digest of learnings & upcoming interviews, and find previous research reports in one central place.
All of this is to say we’re building the tool we wish we had while building product at our last startup, and also in the belly of the beast after we got acquired. The tool that helps you go from having some big gnarly question to start getting answers in minutes, and which brings your team along for the journey. We use the tool religiously in-house and it's had a massive impact on not only our own product development process, but our first engineering hire (ex Twitch) has noted how much more connected he feels with our customers and the product he's building.
What do you all think? We’d love your feedback on the product and our approach. In particular we’d love to know how customer research works at your company and the challenges you face making it happen!
This seems like a great tool to help corral all the disparate parts of conducting research. As a designer (who does a lot of research), I see a lot of value here, and I think you could make a big impact for those of us who do this often.
Some thoughts and questions:
- I think the pricing will have to be inexpensive enough for decision makers to want to handle recruiting in-house rather than hiring a dedicated third-party recruitment/research firm. Recruiting is extremely tedious and time-consuming. A researcher shouldn't have to waste the majority of their time recruiting, and a bootstrapped designer/PM would have even less time.
- It looks like this helps create a candidate database of existing customers only. Why should we use this over a Google sheet or Airtable/Notion/anything with light CRM capabilities? What about potential customers or customers of competitors? We can use something like Usertesting.com or User Zoom to recruit from a public pool of candidates and use screener questions to approximate our user base.
- On the post-study side, how will you beat something like Dovetail in terms of showcasing findings and other studies?
I think having everything in one tool is a powerful motivator. But I would be concerned that smaller teams try to make make use of the tools they already have, and won't pay for another one, and as you mentioned, larger teams can afford to pay for the recruiting team or all the individual tools.
With all that said, you seem to have solved a lot of pain points in this process, so I'm looking forward to seeing you succeed.