How UserPeek CEO Tina Banerjee grew to $440K revenue with a 4 person team in 2025.

userpeak.com she started coding as a side project in 2019 on the back were very successful Consulting business which she consults on growth userpeak.com is aimed at being an earlier sort of further Downstream product to user testing and user Zoom so lower pricing but still same quality product hoping to get pricing live here shortly and their first customer she's worked with 40 bet users so far working on building building out their user testing pool so their pool of available testers for all the new projects from companies that sign up hey folks my guest today is Tina Banerjee she is a managing General partner of brainpath.de and co-founder of userpeak.com she advises startups on growth with user Peak she has founded a new company that Amos revolutionized the user testing space do you know you ready to take us to the top absolutely thanks all right user test user testing is tough there was a multi-billion dollar in the space recently with user zoom and user testing and others how do you build a wedge to steal market share from these folks uh well we know usual testing we now use a zoom and all the competitors in the market and we think that their needs another solution for a small and medium-sized Enterprises and for uh one only Freelancers because you're testing you can only like go into a few really big budget so this is why we established user Peak so what's the starting price if your thesis is you're going to win because you're going to be better pricing for one man or one woman shops um you always have a deep understanding of current pricing in the market so so what is the starting point right now at your competitors users and user testing and where do you plan to launch pricing well you cannot really say um with users testing and I don't know which the new pricing will be for um uh the new user Zoom user testing but you cannot tell it's like rumors like um on in communities uh that's a six-figure number and but you honestly cannot say because you're only in a sales funnel and you need to tell exactly what you need and the base uh the pricing is based on that um exactly but what we figured out from ourselves from our own work is that you actually want to have a pricing a clear and transparent pricing and that's what we offer um where you have like a subscription and you can say Okay um just pay as you go package just 10 user testings um each and then you're fine or you know you're like a researcher product manager marketer that really constantly and habit testing uh so to say uh you um you would probably take the subscription which is a good pricing for that yep you mentioned before they'll show that you're in stealth that means you're you're pretty Revenue today right no customers yet right so this is a very very detailed pricing page for somebody that has no customers to like learn from so so how did you what informed how you structure this current pricing page I mean you've got detail down to you know AI speech to text transcripts annotation and tagging clips and highlight reels I mean how do you know these are things people care about if you don't have customers yet or first of all I'm testing Solutions ourselves the last like 15 years um in our own career and we know exactly what we are actually looking for in user testing so that's why we actually create the user testing solution um first of all second of all um although insta Health mode um we're having better testers already so we're like in communication with various customers um we're testing we're getting feedback and of course if you are providing a really good user testing solution you need to provide also a test panel so um a pool of at least a specific number of testers that you can actually serve customers to test on your platform so this is what we're actually doing uh right now aggregating A really a very very qualitative tester panel um and after that if also everybody on the beta test side is really satisfied we're like launching and going public oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview Tina how do you convince you're building this testing pool how do you convince someone to sign up to test on user Peak you know you might say Hey you can make a hundred bucks a month going through you know flows that businesses submit to user Peak but they're going to then say Tina why should I dedicate time to this you have no you have no customers yet so how do you solve the chicken and egg problem here a good question or first of all uh we um we say how much we pay our testers so this is on the market as well a good a very good survey in our opinion so what do you pay them well um right now it's uh ten dollars per 20 minutes okay and but you're not but you're not committing to that right they're not full-time employees of user Peak no they're actually gestures and um like I guess or Freelancers so self-employed and in this case yes so when you say you're building a tester panel I guess what does that mean I mean why why are they what are they signing or what what how do you know they're committed isn't the best measurement for commitment to actually start like get one job in the door and see how quickly your group of user testers like deliver the test well everybody needs to apply um so they go through a testing sequence um they're manually one by one tested and viewed if they have the ability to be a good tester first of all second of all um uh if we have customers and we're doing tests our own they get like a rating every customer is supposed to rate each video after providing or got provided from the testers so they're going to be uh there's gonna be a quality review in this case as well so and the more a good ratings the tests or the participants get the more tests they will get so they have first of all the need to deliver very good videos and very good feedback and various feedback and second of all we only also provide guides manuals um uh workshops to actually develop those testers to be an more and more an expert but you also see that there are different kinds of participants so we need to focus on that as well understood when you mention you have beta users right now how many have launched at least one beta sort of user test through the platform uh you mean as a customer you said that um quote you have beta testers right now what does it what does that mean what are they doing uh well um we're getting this moderated feedback a platform and I'm asking so doing it um like for um I think like a 30 to 40 um better testers right now so we'll have a good good a pretty good overview of what we can expect from the platform and what is still in question does mean that it doesn't work but it's meant that how we're going to prioritize on our coming up roadmap because I guess if people or customers want to get on to use a peak and see well it's everything is great cool pricing cool service cool everything and trustworthy they don't know what um they are going to expect from maybe previous solutions that they might use so this is um on our opinion and from the feedback the customers give um sorry your Genius is like how do you get 30 to 40 very busy people to commit their time to you to get on a zoom and go through the platform and let you ask them questions right how do you do that that's not easy uh right um with a good argumentation and sales pitch so that's what I'm asking for what what is the sales pitch pitch me to be one of your 30 to 40 beta testers what would that sound like well uh we're actually asking if you're doing user testing right now if they say yes then we ask uh uh okay yes Tina I'm doing I'm doing user testing and I'm trying to test my onboarding flow at founderpath.com yes and we would say have you uh which tool did you use to test we're currently using a combination of really cheap labor on Fiverr uh people that say that you do user testing and we've tested an Enterprise package at usertesting.com but we don't want to pay that rate anymore okay then you probably um won't uh use fuser Peak because uh or you haven't optimized it yet the feedback because there's some uh still some problems we see on uh for database I'm not following you my question is I'm trying to teach people listening right now how do you as a new founder and stealth startup convince very busy people to spend time on Zoom with you to give you feedback on your pre-launch product laughs maybe I don't get your question if you're a Founder you want to get feedback from our customers pretty pretty really easy and fast and I know but Tina how do you do that you've convinced 40 people you said you have 40 beta testers how have you convinced 40 beta testers to give they give you their time knowing your pre-revenue product how do you convince them to do that well um because of our Network so uh we have connections to Founders and startup owners and Enterprise product managers and we have that before so we're asking them directly on email by your phone the first time we've started this new product and we would like to have your feedback because I gave feedback before to them we offered um okay so it's now Network rates all right when when did you like the first we're running out of time here so quick questions here when'd you guys launch when did you write the first line of code uh would be 2019. Tina how have you you've you started this four years ago and you're still pre-revenue what is taking so long to customers because it's a side project you started as a side project things are also bootstrap so we're dealt with the time in between the pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis so this all comes together how's the Ukrainian crisis affect you are your engineers there are you based there yeah the whole economic um situation in Europe and I probably in as well game right now so everybody is like um going back and doing no risk at all so um developers as well as we try to um try to find a solution for that and that's maybe the situation um one and another has also to deal with that's what we did with well Tina sorry just to be clear there's a the whole world is going through all the problems that you just discussed right now there are plenty of user testing tools that are driving sales uh you know just because you're bootstrapped and just because there's you know like a war going on in macroeconomic conditions that shouldn't be an excuse to not be able to like build the thing but what's really happening here is you've got a very profitable side thing where you're doing advising and Consulting and it's not worth you haven't given that up yet to go all in on user Peak that's sort of what I'm hearing that's right yes yeah so don't you have to pick one I mean isn't user Peak going to continue to be sort of like this side project that sort of just sort of sits I mean don't you I don't know what your your personality is like but but shouldn't you cut all your safety nets and go all in on the startup I could um but I think uh people uh we're working right now uh together is um a more experienced one than um me and myself and I so um I know that uh where my strengths are and I think that um dividing it into both ones is still enough and right now um uh I cannot promise what the future brings but it has really much potential and um yeah okay well Tina we're out of time here let's wrap up with a famous five one word answers if you can number one favorite book uh Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman number two is there a CEO you're following or studying and no number three what's your favorite online tool to build for building user Peak besides your own um probably the Google apps number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh seven okay and which was a situation married single kiddos uh not married okay and can I ask how old you are 38. okay last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. a little bit more courageous more courage guys are having userpeak.com she started coding as a side project in 2019 on the back we're very successful Consulting business which she consults on growth userpeak.com is aimed at being an earlier sort of further Downstream product to user testing and user Zoom so lower pricing but still same quality product hoping to get pricing life here shortly on their first customer she's worked with 40 beters so far working on building building out their user testing pool so they're pool of available testers for all the new projects from companies that sign up Tina we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss 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