Launch HN: Great Question (YC W21) – Customer research tools for software teams

I’m Ned and along with my co-founder PJ (pjmurraynz) we’re building Great Question (https://greatquestion.co) to make it easy to do customer research as part of every sprint or product release.

The maxim of Y Combinator is “talk to customers, build something people want” yet relatively few software teams regularly engage in customer research. This was definitely the case for us in our last startup, and even when we sold that business to a place with a well resourced research team we were largely on our own. Without any real tools or processes to do customer research we ended up muddling through, but it was always ad hoc - and often skipped so we could just get a release out the door. Bad news.

By talking to lots of customers (meta!) we learned that one of the biggest challenges teams face is in the logistics of research: finding customers to talk to, scheduling calls & paying incentives. The research community calls this Research Operations. We’re setting out to fix these problems by building tools that make it easy for small teams to do what companies like Facebook and Google do with massive teams of research coordinators.

We help you do better customer research, more often in four ways:

First, we help you build an on-demand pool of research subjects. These are customers who opt in to be notified about customer interview requests and surveys, or find out about beta product releases. They could also be customers you find in other forums or communities, through content marketing or direct outreach.

Second, we let you book time with a customer in a couple of clicks, or send out a survey or prototype test. We give you templates to save you creating these things from scratch every time, but also to keep you following best practice. Templates like Product Market Fit surveys are live now with more advanced ones like Van Westendorp pricing surveys coming soon (email me for early access).

Third, we handle all the messaging on platform to protect the privacy and consent of your users but also to manage what's called "participant fatigue", and handle any incentives to make sure you get the responses you need.

Finally, we make it easy to share what you’re learning with your team. Store your notes, observations, video files and transcripts in one place. Post it to Slack, get an email digest of learnings & upcoming interviews, and find previous research reports in one central place.

All of this is to say we’re building the tool we wish we had while building product at our last startup, and also in the belly of the beast after we got acquired. The tool that helps you go from having some big gnarly question to start getting answers in minutes, and which brings your team along for the journey. We use the tool religiously in-house and it's had a massive impact on not only our own product development process, but our first engineering hire (ex Twitch) has noted how much more connected he feels with our customers and the product he's building.

What do you all think? We’d love your feedback on the product and our approach. In particular we’d love to know how customer research works at your company and the challenges you face making it happen!