I’m incredibly excited to announce that User Interviews has raised a $27.5M Series B to help companies become more user centric by doing research, fast. The round was led by Sageview Capital, with participation from existing investors Teamworthy, Accomplice, Las Olas VC, Trestle Partners, ValueStream, ERA’s Remarkable Ventures, and FJ Labs.
How we got here
Dennis, Bob, and I started User Interviews after feeling the pain of launching a company without talking to users. The idea that you should talk to the people you are building for is so obvious that in retrospect, it’s embarrassing we would skip that step.
In our defense, we weren’t the only people skipping research. I’ve yet to meet a product team that doesn’t feel like they should be doing more to gather user insights. Most teams have the same reason for not doing more research—it just takes too long to find the right people to talk to. Teams move so fast now, and have to make decisions so quickly, that even though they want to do research, they often move forward without it. Unfortunately, skipping research leads to longer product cycles down the road, more failed products, and wasted resources.
So we made it our mission to remove the friction that was preventing people from doing the research they wanted to be doing. Namely, we set out to make it easy for teams to talk to the right users as fast as possible.
Recruit and Research Hub
Our first product, Recruit, offers participant recruitment that’s unbelievably fast and targeted. Through Recruit, we help researchers source participants from a pool of 2.4 million people, segmented by any demographic or behavioral criteria they choose, for any kind of research method. And we do it quickly—our median time to find a qualified participant is just 1 hour.
Our second product, Research Hub is powerful panel management and recruitment automation for teams that do research at scale. It is the first CRM built for research teams, allowing them to create and manage their own panels of users for customer research. Customizable enough to support the enterprise, yet simple enough for small teams to use out of the box, Research Hub now powers recruitment for many of the world’s most customer-centric organizations.
As we were building our company and launching these products, an amazing thing happened in parallel: User research took off. Companies went from outsourcing research, to building in-house Research teams, to democratizing research, to building out Research Ops teams to help the whole company gather and take advantage of research insights at scale.
Our vision
We believe in a world where Researchers, Research Ops teams, Product Managers, Designers, and entire organizations are all relying on user insight as part of their day-to-day decision making process, similar to how organizations now rely on data analytics to inform their decisions. To help with this vision, we’re very excited about two recent initiatives and product launches at User Interviews.
- We are solving for time, access, and friction in talking to participants. Others are solving for testing tools to gather insights. We want people who do research to use the tools they like best for testing and have recently launched a number of integrations, including Zoom, Google Meet, Lookback, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Loop11, Qualtrics, and Sprig. Let us know other tools you think we should integrate with next!
- We recently made a number of upgrades to Research Hub to help enterprises and Research Ops teams do research at scale. These upgrades include our new API, admin controls, and “smart flows” for unmoderated studies.
What's next for User Interviews
This latest round of funding will help us continue building targeted and thoughtful solutions for the variety of ways teams do research now. We want to empower everyone—whether they are having a customer conversation, running an unmoderated usability study, or conducting an in-depth, formal research interview—to have access to their users in a fast, compliant, cost-efficient way.
If you’re new to User Interviews, we encourage you to create a free account and start recruiting on your own today. Or, book a 15 minute discovery call with one of our research consultants—they can help you get started with the right product and plan for your needs.
