At any stage of the game - from early stage startup to massive tech enterprise - companies rely on market and product research to make business decisions. The issue is finding people willing and able to give them the feedback they need.
Dennis Meng, a Boston-based entrepreneur, knows this problem all too well from personal startup experience. So he and his business partners - Basel Fakhoury and Bob Saris - founded User Interviews, a venture aimed at revamping the recruiting process for market and usability testing.
According to Meng, CEO of User Interviews, a few years back, he and his co-founders were working on another venture called MobileSuites. It’s a mobile travel app that connects travelers with hotels to make booking services easier. They had worked on the startup for two years, had secured angel funding and participated in an accelerator program down in New York when they realized it wasn’t growing as anticipated.
"One day, we woke up and realized it wasn’t going to take off in the way we thought it would."
“One day, we woke up and realized it wasn’t going to take off in the way we thought it would,” Meng said. “But in the process, we found that recruiting was a big problem we faced to get feedback. We wondered if it was a problem that affected all market researchers and companies trying to do usability testing.”
Turns out, it is. They had stumbled upon a major pain point for businesses and they ran with it. After making a few calls to people and discovered they’d be willing to pay money to have user testing recruiting taken off their plates, the User Interview team began to build out a platform.
Meng explained the process:
We’ve specifically been building a large audience across the country, who have expressed interest in being a part of market research or usability testing. We have 20,000 participants who have opted in. Whenever we have clients who want to recruit for research, they have to fill out a form asking basic questions about the kind of research they’re doing, the time it’ll take to conduct the study and the audience they’re looking for...Participants are notified about a new opportunity and they can choose to fill out a screener to see if they qualify and then sign up to partake in the process.
When completing the preliminary request for testing participants, market researchers have the option to add custom notes, along with selecting from drop-down fields. They also can specify whether they want studies to be performed in person or remotely.
Ultimately, what used to be a multi-week process for companies now takes a matter of days through the platform. And it costs them a flat rate of $10 per participant.
User Interviews, which has bootstrapped aside from some of the investments the team was able to roll over from MobileSuites, broke ground in August, 2015. Now, it has 20,000 people willing to participate in testing. And the participants have collectively made more than $100,000 so far. Additionally, the platform is being used by more than 100 market research firms and tech companies, including Constant Contact and Yahoo.
