When I interview entrepreneurs, one of my favorite questions is how they picked the name for their companies. Sometimes, the name is a play on two different words, both giving you a glimpse of the founders' sources of inspiration. In other cases, the name of the company is linked to an anecdote, which can be really personal.
In the case of User Interviews, the name of is plain and simple. This startup provides companies with users they can interview for marketing research purposes. Recently, they raised a $1M seed round led by Accomplice.
One year ago, we told the story of the origin of the business. The three co-founders Dennis Meng, Basel Fakhoury and Bob Saris were working on a mobile app for travelers, MobileSuites, when they realized that it wasn’t going to take off in the way they thought it would. As a side effect, they faced the problem to recruit people able to give them feedback, a challenge they shared with market researchers and companies trying to do usability testing. In September 2015, the User Interviews platform was born.
For this story, we checked in with User Interviews to understand better how their service works.
Researchers and product managers may not know where to find people willing to give their feedback on, for example, a company's product. They may ask internally, ask friends, ask around, but the whole process is usually time-consuming.
"Most big tech companies these days are running product tests and usability studies at regular intervals," co-founder and CEO Dennis Meng said in an interview with BostInno. "Through our platform, we make it very easy for these companies to find the people they're looking for, schedule them and pay these participants for their time."
User Interviews said they primarily work with tech companies, but also market research agencies, innovation agencies, as well as consumer electronics companies, financial services or mobile gaming companies. Meng mentioned AT&T, DirectTV, Eventbrite and Glassdoor.
"What [our customers] like about User Interviews is that they're able to recruit participants for [remote interviews], but they're also able to recruit participant for in-person studies at their offices," said Meng, who also pointed out that User Interviews doesn't provide an online interface to conduct these interviews. Companies conduct the majority of remote interviews, he said, through Google Hangouts or Skype.
The company may request a specific profile for its audience to interview. "For a social media product, they may be looking for Millennials or people with certain behaviors, like people who use social media on their phones a lot," Meng pointed out. So far, User Interviews connect companies with a database of 40,000 potential participants based in the U.S. The database was built thanks to social media and digital advertising, according to Meng.
In its basic package, User Interviews charges $20 per recruited participant. Currently, the company works with a remote team of four people - three co-founders and one employee - and it said it's actively hiring engineers and sales marketing professionals.
"The next step for us is [...] to continue building up features that make the process of conducting user research a lot more painless," Meng concluded.
