[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) - Customer resear...
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Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) - Customer research tools for
software teams
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!
Author : nedwin
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-02-09 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| Interesting tool, I'm intrigued. We recently started using
| Dovetail as our research repository. It allows us to collect
| interview recordings, tag transcripts, surface insights and share
| findings within the company. It's been a good experience and
| we're pretty happy with it, but it doesn't handle the
| recruiting/participant management aspect.
|
| Is this a competitor to Dovetail, or a complement to Dovetail?
| You mention Great Question can store video files, notes, etc -
| does that include analysis tools? I could definitely see value in
| both, but since Dovetail is working well I'd love to see the
| research participant management side just get nailed -
| recruitment tools, participant management tools, incentive
| management, even follow up tools to close that feedback loop if
| possible. Even integration with tools like Dovetail, so I can
| keep all my user data here, and anonymize info in Dovetail so I
| can share insights, without broadcasting personal info.
|
| Also - and it looks like you know this - privacy tools and
| managing PII are super important here. I would love to see SSO
| capability at the Plus level.
| nedwin wrote:
| Dovetail is awesome, particularly if you have large volumes of
| research you need to run analysis on. They've been working at
| it for a while and finely tuned their repository product.
|
| We're focused heavily on the other end - the research ops part
| you mention and while we have a way to go I'd like to think
| we've nailed the use cases you mention. We have some analysis
| tools, and we're investing here but it's a big problem
| category.
|
| PII and data security are front and center in our product
| values, with SSO on our roadmap; really looking for that first
| customer who needs it to have this prioritized.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| Awesome, that's great to hear. I'm going to chat with our
| research team about the product, I'm not sure if it's a big
| enough pain point at the moment for us to pull the trigger,
| but I certainly see the value.
| ivanvanderbyl wrote:
| Hi Ned and PJ, I'm very excited to see this, was just beginning
| to do customer interviews for JTBD and started wondering about
| keeping it organised.
|
| Can't wait to give this a try.
| tannedNerd wrote:
| Interesting idea, but how do you guys get around the fact that if
| a user is willing to join this pool of testers, then they are
| most likely not an average user but someone who works or plays
| with technology more than the average person. This could lead to
| skewed results as your users believe that they are testing with
| the "average joe" when in reality it's other hacker news readers.
| nedwin wrote:
| You raise a good point, and it's a tricky thing to solve for.
|
| Currently you have a couple of options. You could use a user
| testing product like UserTesting.com, but here you'll find
| professional participants - mostly college students and stay at
| home parents who do research as a side hustle.
|
| The second option is to do no research at all, since it's hard
| to find a completely unbiased audience.
|
| Our approach helps you build a panel of folks who are at least
| your own customers - or lookalike customers. We've seen
| customers recruit runners, engineering managers, shift workers,
| entrepreneurs, and delivery drivers. It all depends on who your
| customer is and what you're looking to achieve.
|
| You will likely get a mix of folks participating, and each for
| different reasons. Some will do it for the incentive if there
| is one. Others are more intrinsically motivated - they're doing
| it because they either love the product a lot, or they really
| hate it and want it to improve.
|
| It's hard to find the "average joe" who is on the fence but is
| still somehow motivated to participate in your research.
|
| We provide tools to help you screen out folks based on
| different attributes (HN consumption could be screened out to
| some extent) to make the best of an imperfect world. Still
| better than professional participants doing it only for the
| money, and significantly better than no research.
| tlapinsk wrote:
| This is awesome, congrats on the launch. As I work mainly on
| internal data platforms, is there any support for building
| cohorts without the need to opt in? Essentially we'll just sync
| with our user tables or do LDAP lookups to create panels
| nedwin wrote:
| Yes, you can import your data (and synch in the near future),
| create cohorts and message them.
|
| We then manage user consent & permissions for further comms /
| participation.
|
| Drop me a line at ned@greatquestion.co if you want to see if
| this might be a fit
| tlapinsk wrote:
| Thanks for the quick reply. I'll have a few other people on
| my team check it out and reach out if there is a solid fit.
| Good luck with everything! Definitely a promising product
| ramdaffe wrote:
| Hi Ned, congrats on the launch! This tool absolutely nails the
| pain points on operationalizing our UX research team. A couple of
| questions:
|
| 1) You did mention that the platform will handle the incentives
| part, can you elaborate more on how it works? My team works on
| multiple countries that might need different incentive form
| issued under different finance systems so we're curious on how to
| plug those into your platform.
|
| 2) Do you have plans to add more ways to engage with the panel?
| We have a sizable segment of users who are very comfortable to be
| contacted by, say, whatsapp business account rather than e-mails.
| nedwin wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| We handle incentives using Tremendous as our API. It's very
| good, covers the vast majority of countries, and lets us payout
| in cash cards, Amazon gift cards etc - we let the participants
| pick their preferred method.
|
| By plugging into the API and handling all the scheduling +
| interviews in the same place it means we can automatically
| payout folks who attend, generate reports on spending and help
| manage budgets without needing to skip between multiple tools.
|
| re: 2 Yes! Would love to hear more about your particular use
| case. Want to drop me a note at ned@greatquestion.co?
| austind90 wrote:
| Thanks for the shout out Ned! Congrats on the launch, excited
| to watch this partnership between Great Question and
| Tremendous.com grow!
| dyeje wrote:
| How are you different from the other products in this space like
| UserTesting, UserInterviews, UserZoom, etc?
| nedwin wrote:
| The main difference is we don't sell access to a panel, but
| instead create tools to help you build and manage your own.
|
| Some of the tools you mentioned have panel management tools,
| but generally as bolt ons to their panel offerings, and often
| charging you to communicate with your own customers.
|
| There's some funny incentives that come into play when you make
| your money by charging access to a panel.
| roldie wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| 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.
| nedwin wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I agree with you on making it inexpensive.
|
| We're still figuring out the pricing in all honesty. With the
| mission of democratizing research I think we have a way to go
| to make it accessible for the early stage folks and small
| teams.
|
| Customers use us over Google Sheets etc for a bunch of reasons.
| For starters those systems are generally pretty messy, and
| require manual updating to know who has been contacted,
| interviewed, paid (if you're doing incentives), and what was
| learned. They're also a security and GDPR nightmare - can
| anyone just download a list of your customers and share it
| around in a G Sheet?
|
| Our perspective on UserTesting etc is that they're great if you
| want to talk to general population, particularly college
| students or stay at home parents. It gets harder as you get
| more specific - like finding engineering managers with a
| learning & development budget (real use case).
|
| At the end of the day I'd prefer to talk to real or potential
| customers than professional participants.
|
| What do you think?
|
| Post-study: tools like Dovetail or EnjoyHQ are awesome. But
| they currently don't help you get to the insight itself, and
| that's incredibly painful for a lot of companies. By having all
| the data from the moment of contact with the customer we think
| we can create a richer experience that helps provide access to
| not only the insights, but the ability to generate new research
| easily based on those insights.
|
| Thanks for the kind words!
| tracyhenry wrote:
| How do you compare to Notion then? It's free/very cheap for a
| small team and has a community of contributors who can
| produce templates, e.g., https://uxdesign.cc/step-by-step-
| how-to-build-a-user-researc...
| londont wrote:
| Such a great idea! Congratulations Ned and team.
| nedwin wrote:
| Thanks Tomer!
| anaskar wrote:
| I was JUST talking about how I wish it was easier to collect
| customer insights and share them out more broadly in internal
| newsletters. Kudos. Nailed a serious serious pain point.
| nedwin wrote:
| Ha, awesome. It really is painful.
|
| We don't have a newsletter yet but we do include "voice of the
| customer" in our advisor updates.
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