Idea time💡: UserTesting but for startups

I've used User Testing a lot for testing business ideas -- it's not great for b2b products a that require some kind of experience to understand the value prop, but it's great for testing messaging and clarity.

I've also used other similar products (I think it might have been usereyes, but forgot now) that will go and find your target customers. They tend to have a much higher price point (B/c of the work) which is the main reason I don't think this type of business works great at the early stage. $2K is not $30, and as a business you won't find specialized peeps at scale w/o a high price point, at which point it probably makes more $ense (as the buyer) to find the testing prospects yourself.

Places like GLG do something similar at $$$ so, again, you're targeting series A+, at which point you're basically enterprise + service.

That said if I was going after this -- I'd choose a niche category w/ high value customers and an easily identifiable reviewer (like software devs), and bill out at 200 to 600 per review.

<<< I know it's not coming from experience, but I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about this problem from a product marketing perspective.

I learned through a Facebook UX group that usertesting.com was getting acquired recently so your post in quite timely!

I'm building a product in the UX Research space called EnVsion but we're not focused on ResearchOps. From my conversation with UX Researchers it seems ResearchOps is a huge pain.

In some cases, UX teams outsource the participant recruitment process to platforms like UserTesting or external agencies. This tends to be quite costly and not so many small to mid-sized companies can afford this cost. So in many cases UX teams do the ResearchOps bit themselves...

I think building an equivalent to UserTesting for earlier stage companies will be tough because most will not be able to afford the cost of such a service, and some would not see value in doing this when they have so many other fires to put out.

One of the ways you could approach the problem is to target enterprise customers (but you probably need connections and an already mature product) who would see value and be willing to pay to outsource ResearchOps. Another could be for you to target a specific segment that is highly sought. You could build a community of people who would fit the participant profile these companies seek.

UX Research is a very interesting world, so I'm glad people like you are posting/talking about it :)

Yes, I have been working on a product focused on helping small startup's to medium-sized businesses with their testing.

Someone has made a bunch of money Roasting landing pages. Can't remember who but he definitely did well.

Sounds like an interesting idea. One thought that immediately comes to mind: You'd have to build a two-sided marketplace. You need high-quality testers as well as businesses who book your services.

There are a lot of examples who successfully build these kinds of intermediaries. Large ones like eBay, Alibaba, or AirBnb, but also lots of smaller ones. Ultimately, every job board is a two-sided marketplace. So it might be challenging, but def. not impossible.

You will have to think about how to scale supply and demand at the same time at roughly the same pace. You don't want demand from businesses you can't satisfy, but also don't wanna spend resources on acquiring testers who can only do one or two gigs per year because there's too much supply.

I see two possible solutions for this:

1. You start super niche. E.g. only SaaS businesses who target software developers (maybe just Python, ... developers) in small companies/teams. Facebook started just in Harvard. A lot of successful job boards are super niche, e.g. only focusing on dev jobs for remote companies. Uber started only in San Francisco.
2. Acquire supply only when needed. What I mean by this: Find communities of people you'd like as testers. Then when you get an order from a business for landing page review, reach out to people in these communities and see if they would be willing to take the gig. Delivery times to the customer will be longer but there's one main benefit: You can immediately offer testers money in return. So you don't have to sell the uncertain possibility of getting testing gigs through your site at some point in the future, but have an immediate opportunity. You can think about it as being similar to dropshipping in the e-commerce world. Dropshippers don't hold inventory, but they fulfill the orders directly from the factories.

I'm sure there is more to it and loads of helpful resources online, these were just some quick thoughts🙂