We started User Interviews because companies need to understand their users, and the best way to understand users is to talk to them.
This seems obvious, but it took us a while to realize how powerful this fact was, and to realize how unnecessarily hard it could be to connect with users. Indeed, we started a whole different company without ever talking to users, and it flopped!
But once we understood how valuable user insights were, we were hooked.
We weren’t the only ones. YC and Paul Graham constantly promote talking to customers, and it was a core tenet of Lean Startup and Steve Blank. And it wasn’t just startups or folks in tech. The top CEOs in all sorts of industries were talking about the importance of getting close to their customers. You can find quotes from leaders at companies as diverse as Amazon, Dollar General, and Harley Davidson talking about how their success was largely built on listening to customers.
At the same time, we noticed that companies were starting to build up their in-house user research teams—and these teams were growing fast. But even with this widespread agreement that user insights were key to business growth—and the emergence of dedicated UX research teams focused on discovering and sharing user insights—it still seemed like companies were making a lot of decisions without talking to users. Why? What was the disconnect?
After doing a lot of “meta” research, we realized it came down to speed. For qualitative insights to be valuable, companies need to be able to discover and process them quickly. If it takes too long to get those insights, they’re useless—companies will make their decisions in the interim without them.They’ll guess. Many times, they’ll guess wrong.
We believe (and more importantly, users have told us) that fast access to quality participants has been the biggest hurdle preventing companies from doing critical user research. So our focus has always been on helping companies quickly find quality participants. That focus has allowed us to work with the most innovative companies in the world as they build user-centric products for billions of people.
It has also allowed us to reach a new milestone for User Interviews, and today I’m excited to announce that we have raised $10M Series A led by Teamworthy Ventures, with participation from Las Olas, Accomplice, FJ Labs, ERA, Trestle Partners and ValueStream!
These funds are going to help us focus on our core experience—our participant panel, the Recruit & Research Hub user experience, enterprise features—as well as expanded use cases, like new integrations with complementary tools in the research workflow. As we continue to grow and to build, we’ll stay focused on removing all the friction around talking to users so companies can make better, user-centric, decisions.
We couldn’t have made it this far without the support and insight of our amazing customers, investors, and team.
Thank you! Onward.
Get the full scoop:
- Read more about our Series A on TechCrunch.
- To find out more about how we got here, read our (newly updated) origin story on the blog.
- Want to join this rocketship? We’re hiring—and there’s lots of work to be done!
