Disrupting The Qualitative Research Industry with Solid Customer Discovery
This is Batukhan here, the founder of Uservision. We are trying to disrupt the market research industry by leveraging technology. We are part of an experimental incubator that gives startups and entrepreneurs funding in exchange for testing and sharing lean startup hypotheses. adamberk helped me run this experiment.
Let me give a brief introduction. Our endeavor started perhaps 2.5 years ago. We wanted to provide remote usability testing services for web and mobile applications. After conducting a brief secondary market research we thought there was a good product-market fit with Uservision and an ecosystem where “digital transformation” and “customer experience” were the hot topics. We went lean and without an actual product we made our first sales. We made 4 to be precise. It took us half a year to actually discover the needs of the ecosystem and ways to sell the product. Whilst working on sales, we realized however, that our customers (enterprise clients) were looking for end to end solutions; they were not willing to use our product as frequently as we had expected; and were not fond of learning new technologies/products/services; ergo we realized that we had to pivot!
Circa 8 months ago, we compiled all of our learnings: What was our core competencies, our weaknesses etc. Long story short, we realized that we were not in the “usability testing” industry, but were in “qualitative research” market. After deep diving into the industry and discovering the needs and ways we can complement our core product with; we found value in remote user research.
Right now we are in the phase of customer discovery and finding a beachhead market for our platform. Recently we thought local research agencies could be our beachhead market, where we could sell our products as SaaS.
Experiment
In this experiment we had the chance to talk with 4 qualitative research experts/founders of qualitative research agencies in Turkey over their needs, current solutions and their willingness to buy our solution. Our hypothesis was that each of them would buy USD 400 worth of software, for being more agile and gathering deeper insights.
We sent mails to 8 research agencies and 4 of them accepted our meeting request immediately. We arranged meetings with them the following week. 2 of the agency founders mentioned that they were not in Istanbul, thus we had to postpone our meetings to two weeks ahead. 6 out of 8 cold mails succeeded to arrange a meeting!
Results
Sadly 0 out of 4 agencies have bought the product.
Of the 4 research agencies maybe all of them acknowledged the fact that they are falling behind, technology wise and there is a lot to improve while gathering insights. One of the most surprising learnings that we have acquired was, what we thought was a MVP was not a MVP. A MVP should be able to solve a problem of the end-user. In our case we need to make some modifications so that the end user can utilize the product. In this sense, we will design a UI and a better UX, so that our end users can actually use the product.
We have secured 3 follow up meetings, two for next week and one at the end of the month, to deep dive their needs and adjust the interface in an agile manner.
Another important learning was that there were more immediate and frequent needs than our current solution.What we were selling is used lets say x times in a year. We have learned about two different problems that our platform could solve, which are more urgent and could potentially be used 10x times in a year. We have to research more on this topic, but those insights were incredibly valuable.
2 out of 4 agencies that we have talked are willing to collaborate if we make an exclusive deal. This is a dealbreaker on our end, thus we have to find a way to overcome this problem. Hopefully we can explain them the SaaS model and how they can benefit it by being an early adopter.
When I was talking with a mentor about this experiment, he mentioned that research agencies are not our beachhead market, but a totally different customer segment, thus this move may cannibalize our future operations. We always aim to sell our solutions to enterprise companies, thus there is a lot to think about on this matter.
Ultimately we have taken a positive step to validate our assumption that qualitative research industry could greatly benefit from technology and there is a need in the market to make this industry more nimble and accurate.
Next Steps
- Co-create a UI and understand the needs of research agencies to make an actual MVP
- Understand the fears and needs of research agencies and how can we support them without making exclusive partnerships and cannibalizing future operations
- After creating a better UI, check with brands if they could use your product as a SaaS service
Questions
What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would try to sell a SaaS product to research agencies for quick wins? Or would you go directly to the enterprise market?
Also if you have any further questions on the experiment I would love to answer.
