Understanding what makes users tick — An interview with Useristics Co-Founders Tina Nayak and Paul Harwood
Founding a startup can feel like an uphill climb — that’s why founders sometimes hold on too tight to their ideas to bring them higher. But according to our inspiring go-to-market strategy coaches Tina Nayak and Paul Harwood, that’s when they lose sight of their most potent driving force to the top: Listening and understanding their users first.
As Applied Data Incubator startups from Cohort 2 keep growing their data-driven solutions with Tina and Paul’s guidance to deliver insight-driven user experiences, we didn’t miss the opportunity to catch up with them. We are thrilled to share this interview covering their journey, approach, methods, and anecdotes that will leave you with a smile after reading!
1. Please briefly explain your roles and your company.
In a rush to build and to be scrappy, it is easy to forget that users are people. The user experience that a startup is building is a human experience. That’s why understanding what makes people tick is a critical prerequisite to building user-centered products.
We founded Useristics with the simple goal of helping founders and their teams to understand better what makes their users tick. To understand who their users and nonusers are- their user characteristics. Hence, our name is Useristics.
We both feel that understanding users is crucial for startup success and continued sustainable growth. Paul always says, “It’s not what you build; it’s who you build it for and how they apply it that counts.”
In order to build user-centered products, startups must first understand their users. For this very reason, we place the word “useristics” within brackets in our logo. Because, just as in math, you first have to solve what’s within the brackets. And for startups, to build a user-centered product, you need first to understand user characteristics.
As for our roles, we both love what we do, and like any co-founders, we each wear many hats.
2. How did you both come to specialize in your field?
We both have taken very different career paths, but we share a passion for the user’s voice.
Tina’s background is in marketing and international growth. She has over 15 years of experience scaling businesses and teams based on proven marketing and execution frameworks in India and the EU, most notably Germany. She’s worked in senior marketing and growth roles at Babbel and Preply in the EU and Twitter and Rentomojo in India. Most recently, she co-founded and became the CEO of Volument, — a startup that aims to revolutionize website analytics. Tina is a startup person at heart and enjoys mentoring other founders at Techstars, Berlin, and Berlin Founders Fund.
As for Paul, he began in academia as a Professor, teaching public opinion and research methods, among other things. And then, he made a move to the commercial world, joining Facebook as their first User Sentiment Researcher, and then later Twitter, where he was their Market Research Lead. In the last ten years, he has worked with 15 tech unicorns.
3. At Applied Data Incubator, Useristics provides insights into Idea Validation and User Centric Products — what do you enjoy most about coaching in this area?
We love understanding what makes users tick, but coaching is also immediately actionable. We’re not providing “how-to” skills for a task a founder may need one day. We’re providing “how-to” coaching for tasks founders are currently grappling with today. It’s a lot of fun seeing the diversity of founders’ ideas and the different types of users (and customers) startups have.
4. How important is it for startups to understand their users at an early-stage?
It is important not just to help inform the products early-stage startups build but also to instill a user-centered culture early in the startup’s life.
Founders and the startup team must always remember that users are people. It’s such a simple fact, but with everything going on in the early stage, it’s easy to lose sight of that very basic fact. The user experience is a human experience driven by peoples’ attitudes, behaviors, and the context (e.g., socio-cultural factors) in which they live.
Therefore, it is so essential that early-stage startups understand what makes people -their users and nonusers- tick.
5. You specialize in helping startups to deliver an insight driven user experience — where do you start with a process such as this?
We help startups to deliver insight-driven user experiences in 3 ways: through strategy, education, and research.
Each is an equally applicable place to start. With strategy, we work closely with founders on building user-centered growth strategies. It begins with us interviewing the founder or co-founders to understand what the user problem is they are trying to solve, what they currently know, and need to know about their users and non-users to best realize and grow their startup idea.
When it comes to education, we provide online, in-person, and very hands-on workshops to allow teams to understand the importance of users and equip themselves with the necessary skills to talk and, more importantly, listen to users.
Listening is so critical for any stage of startup or enterprise. However, it is common when early-stage founders get in front of a user; they try to sell or pitch their idea. That’s how they miss out on just listening to how a user lives their day and understanding the person’s experience of the user problem the startup’s product seeks to address. Through our workshops, we teach the startup team to resist the pitch and focus on listening to the person’s experiences.
Listening is the core component of the research we conduct. We begin our process by working with the team to understand exactly “who” the early-stage team wants to talk with and why. Many teams find this an incredibly valuable task in itself as it gets everyone thinking and honing in on who exactly is going to benefit from the product and whether different types of people may have different benefits. This allows hypotheses to form around the user problem the startup is seeking to address. From there, we move on to formulating a research design and then the research itself.
6. Useristics also specializes in research — what role should quality research play when building startups?
Well, what is “quality research”? It means different things to different disciplines. For early-stage startups, quality research is integrated into the startup’s overall product and growth roadmap. It has methodological rigor, doesn’t overreach conclusions, and provides actionable insights that are understood and shared broadly throughout the team to inform user-centered product design and development.
7. If you were hosting a dinner party, who would be your dream guests and why?
We didn’t get very far in answering this question, as this is how our conversation went down when we initially read this question over Zoom together.
“Oh, definitely Richard Gere,” Tina exclaimed with a dreamy smile.
“Richard Gere? Why?” Paul asked in surprise, bordering on disgust.
“Because of his salt ‘n pepper looks,” Tina responded, laughing.
“Well, then, my first guest is your husband. Nothing like a good dinner and a show!”
We may not be the best to arrange a dinner party, but we always have a lot of fun working with each other!
