Great Question Raises $2.5 Million In A Seed Round To Simplify Customer Research
Great Question raises $2.5 million in a seed round to simplify customer research
Customer research is critical for software companies, but it presents numerous challenges, such as identifying the appropriate group of people to survey. Great Question wants to make the process of creating and communicating with their own panels accessible to all businesses, regardless of size. The startup, which was a part of Y Combinator's winter 2021 program, announced today the completion of a $2.5 million seed round.
Great Question began operations in February 2021 and already counts Linktree, Honeybook, O'Reilly Media, and MainStreet among its clients. The platform has been used to conduct customer interviews about product ideas and strategy, to determine product-market fit, to conduct usability studies on user interface designs, and to determine the effectiveness of marketing landing pages. Funders Club, January Capital, Nomo VC, and Twenty-Two Ventures participated in Great Question's seed round. Warren Hogarth, co-founder of Empower Finance; Jon Williams, co-founder of Culture Amp and Pyn; Jason Smale, senior vice president of engineering at Zendesk; and Robbie Allan, former group product manager at Intercom, all participated as angel investors.
PJ Murray and Ned Dwyer founded Great Question after selling their previous startup, web developer marketplace Elto, to GoDaddy in 2015. Dwyer told TechCrunch via email that Elto conducted very little formal research. “We would speak with customers, but our conversations were not structured or consistent.”
Following their acquisition by GoDaddy, they became "significantly more rigorous in our approach to product development—we suddenly had a much larger audience, a larger team, and aggressive targets." Murray and Dwyer also benefited from collaboration with GoDaddy's user experience research team.
The two recognized an opportunity to improve product development teams' access to customer research. According to Dwyer, companies can outsource UX research to a large provider for as little as $40,000 per year. However, Great Question's freemium pricing model includes paid subscription plans starting at $49 and $199 per month.
Great Question combines nearly all of the tools required for customer research—smart survey templates, prototype tests, scheduling tools, and transcription—into a single platform, allowing teams to collaborate easily. Customer recruitment and filtering tools are two of its most critical features. Dwyer explained that many UX research firms sell access to pre-built panels. This means that clients frequently receive feedback from relatively homogeneous groups of people who are not their target customers—for example, college students or stay-at-home parents who signed up to take surveys in exchange for cash or gift cards.
Great Question creates customized landing pages where users can join panels, select the type of research in which they wish to participate, and specify the frequency with which they are willing to answer questions (for example, the platform automates rolling studies, sending questions to different groups of customers every two weeks). Great Question enables its clients to incorporate incentive programs such as Tremendous that reward participants with cash or gift cards. However, many of the people who participate in research through Great Question do so to have a say in products they already use or to be the first to learn about upcoming releases, Dwyer explained.
Once customer panels are created, Great Question creates intelligent templates for surveys and interviews and schedules their distribution automatically. This saves time for clients. For instance, MainStreet approached Great Question as it prepared to launch a new product that would alter its onboarding process. The startup, which assists small businesses in locating and claiming tax credits and economic incentives, did not have enough time prior to launch to conduct customer research. “Within 24 hours of signing up with Great Question, they'd scheduled eight customer interviews—this was over Christmas, by the way—and received the usability feedback they needed to iterate on the designs prior to going to production,” Dwyer explained.
In Conclusion
Funders Club co-founder and CEO Alix Mittal stated in a statement about the investment, "Even the best product and business teams understand that daily iteration, large pivots, and new launches can be hit or miss." We invested in Great Question because they provide the missing tool for seamlessly incorporating customers into product and business decisions and ensuring that they are never missed.”
