Whether it is spices made with vitamins, at-home breast cancer diagnostics, information technology, or an apparel brand, all IDEA Center startups need to go through a rigorous market assessment.
As an idea, innovation or startup moves forward, the team begins working with Ben Hoggan, the center’s Director of De-Risking and a big advocate for UserTesting.
He said the teams conduct a mix of Live Conversations and unmoderated tests as they attempt to answer four questions:
- Does the product or service idea work?
- What is the problem they are solving?
- Does anyone want to buy it, and who?
- And are they going to love using it?
Hoggan said they love the benefits from highlight reels and transcriptions to learn and share what customers are saying about the business concepts, good or bad.
“But the thing that is most helpful is the variety of people in the UserTesting Participant Network and the depth of feedback that we get,” Hoggan said.
He said being able to target specific audiences for testing and get fast customer feedback in as little as two hours has been invaluable for the IDEA Center’s entrepreneurs, as well as for those organizations investing in these companies.
"UserTesting's Participant Network quality is always fantastic! It's significantly better than competitors,” he said. “Before we switched to UserTesting, I historically kept to in-person interviews because of the extreme specificity in criteria that we need for our interview targets.
“One of my very first tests was to see if I could find just one very hard-to-find participant with specific healthcare technology experience as lab techs that were performing exosome isolation and purification. Imagine my surprise when I found not one, but THREE in UserTesting's panel! Hard to beat that.”
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