It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve.
User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs and ERA.
User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do far more user research before determining the next product.
In the process of talking to customers to understand their pain points, they realized just how difficult collecting user feedback could be.
That’s how User Interviews was born. The platform’s first product, called Recruit, offers a network of non-users that can be matched with companies to provide feedback. In fact, User Interviews’ first sales were made by simply responding to Craigslist ads posted by companies looking for non-users from which they could collect feedback.
With Recruit, User Interviews charges $30/person that it matches with a company for feedback. Research Hub costs starts at $150/month.
“Right now, our greatest challenge is that our clients are the best product people in the world, and we have a huge pipeline of amazing ideas that are very valuable and no one is doing yet that our clients would love,” said CEO and cofounder Basel Fakhoury. “But we have to build it fast enough.”
No mention of what those forthcoming products might be, but the current iteration sure seems attractive enough. User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | User Interviews, a platform for product feedback, raises million
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