From Ice Cream Innovator to Startup Founder
About a month into the job, I was told that if I kept eating ice cream at this rate, I’d be lactose intolerant by the end of the year. That’s not a work hazard most people consider when taking a new job, but as Digital & Innovation Lead of Refreshments Category at Unilever UK, eating ice cream every day was just a part of the job.
Also part of the job was a new perspective on consumer research. It was early 2019, I was leading a small team working on a global priority innovation project and lending a hand on a number of other projects on the ice cream innovation team. Research was the foundation of our innovation work — whether it was observing focus groups and online discussion communities or creating surveys and interviewing consumers from their own kitchens, we always dove in head first hoping to learn something new.
Within a few weeks, I started to notice how our research outcomes were impacting delivery timelines for my main project, Freeze Blast. We would run a focus group, gather our new insights and turn them into a survey to validate what we had learned, but the survey would just end up contradicting the focus group insights. I was learning first hand how important but also problematic it is to match the qualitative ‘why’ with a quantitative ‘what’ in research.
Fast forward to today, I’m leading a team in Ireland that are blending qualitative research together with quantitative data to help product and UX teams understand what matters most to their customers without any hassle. We’ve built a next-generation survey tool called OpinionX that surfaces the most important statements to any group of people. We do this by letting participants vote on each other’s answers in a giant, evolving conversation that grows and learns with every new person that joins.
I met my co-founder Darragh shortly after leaving Unilever. At the time he was double jobbing as a software developer at a telecoms analytics company while also coding at a social enterprise startup called GiveBack.ie on the side. Within a few weeks, we confirmed a €15,000 grant and got to work building V0.1 of OpinionX. Leveraging our own networks, we got a paid pilot at our alma mater Dublin City University to help them understand how students were coping with the sudden move to remote learning. That paid pilot quickly turned into 4 more through word-of-mouth, helping us to close a pre-seed round which paid for our first two hires, Éamon and Eoin.
After almost a year of beta tests and private pilots, we crossed our fingers and pushed the big scary button that released OpinionX out into the world. Things were a bit quiet at first; we knew that OpinionX was a veeeery new concept and that we weren’t doing the best job of explaining why it would help people (nevermind what it was!). In Q4 of 2020 we dug deep and organised over 100 customer discovery calls with product, insights and user research leads around the world. This crash course in customer-led insights drove a wave of iterative improvements to our product marketing, onboarding and user acquisition strategies.
Since then, hundreds of researchers have engaged thousands of participants who have cast over 150,000 votes on OpinionX surveys to date (and that number is growing every week!). OpinionX is helping product and UX teams to understand their users’ biggest unmet needs, pains, motivations and values in a deeper and faster way than ever before. We believe that we’re pioneering the next chapter of online research, combining emerging areas like mixed methods research with social collaboration to create a hybrid tool unlike anything else available. And we’re just getting started 🚀
Daniel is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpinionX, a next-generation survey tool that helps product and UX teams understand what matters most to their users in just one click. He curates a newsletter on the future of user research called The Full-Stack Researcher and can be found shouting out into the internet void on Twitter and LinkedIn.
