How UserPeek Is Building a Lower-Cost User Testing Platform with 40 Beta Users (Interview with CEO Tina Banerjee)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Userpeak.com. She started coding as a side project in 2019 on the back of a 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 beta users so far working on building building out their user testing pool. So their

00:22pool 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 cofounder of userpeek.com. She advises startups on growth. With userpeek, she has founded a new company that aims to revolutionize the user testing space. Tina, you ready to take us to the top?

Tina Banerjee

00:41>> Absolutely. Thanks.

Competing with UserTesting and UserZoom

Nathan Latka

00:42User test user testing is tough. There was a multibillion dollar in the space recently with user Zoom and user testing and others. How how do you build a wedge to steal market share from these folks?

Target Market: SMEs and Freelancers

Tina Banerjee

00:55>> Well, we know user testing. We know user Zoom and all the competitors in the market, and we think that there needs another solution for small and medium sized enterprises and for one only freelancers because you're testing, you can only go into a few really big budget. So this is why we established userpeek.

Nathan Latka

01:21So what's the starting price? If if your thesis is you're gonna win because you're gonna be better pricing for one man or one woman shops, you obviously have a deep understanding of current pricing in the market. So what is the starting point right now at your competitors, users and user testing, and where do you plan to launch pricing?

Tina Banerjee

01:38>> Well, you cannot really say with users testing, and I don't know what the new pricing will be for the new user, Zoom, user testing, but you cannot tell. It's like rumors, like on in communities, that's a 6 figure number, 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 the pricing is based on that exactly. But what we figured out from ourselves, our

Pricing Model: Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription

Tina Banerjee

02:13>> own work, is that you actually want to have a pricing, a clear and transparent pricing, and that's what we offer. We have a subscription, and you can say, okay, just pay as you go package, just 10 user testings each, and then you're fine, or you're like a researcher, product manager, marketer that really constantly on habit testing, so to say, you you would probably take the subscription, which is good pricing for that.

Building in Stealth with Beta Users

Nathan Latka

02:46Yep. You mentioned before the 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. Mean, how do you

03:08know these are things people care about if you don't have customers yet?

Tina Banerjee

03:12>> Well, first of all, we're using testering solutions ourselves the last, like, fifteen years 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. First of all, second of all, although in stealth mode, we're having better testers already, so we're like in communication with various customers, we're testing, we're getting feedback, and of course, if you are providing a very good user

03:48>> testing solution, you need to provide also a tester panel, so a pool of at least specific number of testers that you can actually serve customers to test on your platform. So this is what we're actually doing right now, aggregating a really very, very qualitative tester panel, and after that, if also everybody on the beta tester side is really satisfied, we're launching and going public.

Nathan Latka

04:22Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS 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 it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:45your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:09get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here, Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

05:31not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22 of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired, the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

05:57going out right now and you're raising your seed round. Well, go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if

06:19you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/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. Alright. Let's jump back into the

Tester Pay and Freelancer Model

Nathan Latka

06:45interview. Tina, how do you convince you're building this testing pool. How do you convince someone to sign up to test on userpeek? You know, you might say, hey. You can make a $100 a month going through, you know, flows that businesses submit to userpeek, but they're gonna then say, Tina, why should I dedicate time to this? You have no customers yet. So how do you solve the chicken and egg problem here? Good question.

Tina Banerjee

07:06>> Well, first of all, we

07:09>> say how much we pay our test test, but this is on the market as well, a good a very good salary in our opinion.

Nathan Latka

07:18What do pay them?

Tina Banerjee

07:20>> Well, at right now, it's $10 per twenty minutes.

Nathan Latka

07:24Okay. And But you're not but you're not committing to that. Right? They're not full time employees of userpeek?

Tina Banerjee

07:29>> No. They're actually testers and, like, I guess, freelancers. So self employed in in this case. Yes.

Nathan Latka

07:37Mhmm. 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 what how do you know they're committed? Isn't the best measurement for commitment to actually start get, like, get one job in the door and see how quickly your group of user testers, like, deliver the test?

Tester Vetting and Quality Control

Tina Banerjee

07:55>> Well, everybody needs to apply, so they go through a testing sequence. 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, 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 there's gonna be a quality review in this case as well. So

08:32>> the more 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. Second of all, we only also provide guides, manuals,

08:56>> workshops to actually develop those testers to be 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.

Nathan Latka

09:09Understood. When you mentioned you have beta users right now, how many have launched at least one beta sort of user test through the platform?

Tina Banerjee

09:18>> You mean as a customer?

Nathan Latka

09:21You said that, quote, you have beta testers right now. What does it what does that mean? What are they doing?

Tina Banerjee

09:28>> Well, we're getting this moderated feedback going through the platform and asking So doing it for, I think, 30 to 40 better testers right now, so we have a pretty good overview of what we can expect from the platform and what is still in question. It doesn't mean that it doesn't work, but it's meant that how we're gonna prioritize on our coming up roadmap, because I guess if people or customers want to get onto userpeek and see

How Beta Users Were Recruited

Tina Banerjee

10:03>> why everything is great, cool pricing, cool service, cool everything, and trustworthy, They don't know what they are going to expect from maybe previous solutions that they might use. So this is on our opinion and from the feedback the customers give. One of

Nathan Latka

10:23the Sorry. Tina, to cut you off. Sorry. Your your genius is like, how do you get 30 to 40 very busy people to commit their time to you to 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.

Tina Banerjee

10:36>> Right. With good argumentation and sales pitch.

Nathan Latka

10:41Well, 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?

Tina Banerjee

10:48>> Well, we're actually asking if you're doing user testing right now. If they say yes, then we ask

Nathan Latka

10:55Like a yes, Tina. I'm I'm doing I'm doing user testing, and I'm trying to test my onboarding flow at founderpath.com.

Tina Banerjee

11:02>> Yes. And we'd say, have you which tool did you use to test this?

Nathan Latka

11:06We're currently using a combination of really cheap labor on Fiverr, people that say that you do user testing, and we've tested an enterprise package @usertesting.com, but we don't wanna pay that rate anymore.

Tina Banerjee

11:18>> Okay. Then you probably won't use userpeek because or you haven't optimized it yet, the feedback, because there's some still some problems we see on her database.

Nathan Latka

11:38I'm not following you. My question is I'm trying to teach the 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 prelaunch product?

Tina Banerjee

11:53>> 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. Yes.

Nathan Latka

12:01That's we help 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?

Tina Banerjee

12:14>> Well, because of our network. So 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, via phone, if for time we have started this new product and we would like to have your feedback because I gave feedback before to them. I see.

Network as the Core Growth Channel

Nathan Latka

12:42Okay. So it's network.

Tina Banerjee

12:43>> It's network rate.

Nathan Latka

12:45Alright. When when did you like we're running out of time here, so quick questions here. When did you guys launch? When did write the first line of code?

Why Still Pre-Revenue After Four Years

Tina Banerjee

12:53>> It would be 2019.

Nathan Latka

12:57Tina, how have you you've you started this four years ago, and you're still pre revenue. Why what is taking so long to get customers?

Bootstrapped Side Project and Macro Challenges

Tina Banerjee

13:05>> Because it's a side project. It started as a side project, and it's also bootstrapped, so where dealt with a time in between the pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis, so this all comes together.

Nathan Latka

13:19How has the Ukrainian crisis affected you? Are your engineers there? Are you based there?

Tina Banerjee

13:23>> The whole economic

13:26>> situation in Europe and probably in The US as well is a little different game right now. So everybody is, like, going back and doing no risk at all. So developers as well, so we try to try to find a solution for that. And that's maybe the situation one in another helps also to deal with. That's what we did with.

Nathan Latka

13:53Well, 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. You know, just because you're bootstrapped and just because there's, you know, like, war going on in macroeconomic conditions, that shouldn't be an excuse to not be able to, like, build the thing. But what what's really happening here is you've got a very profitable

Consulting Business vs. Going All In

Nathan Latka

14:10side 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 userpeek. That's sort of what I'm hearing.

Tina Banerjee

14:18>> That's right. Yes.

Nathan Latka

14:19Yeah. So don't you have to pick one? I mean, isn't userpeek gonna 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 don't shouldn't you cut all your safety nets and go all in on the startup?

Tina Banerjee

14:33>> I could,

14:36>> but I think the people we're working right now together is a more experienced one than me and myself and I. So I know that where my strengths are, and I think that dividing it into both ones is still enough. And right now,

14:59>> I cannot promise what the future brings, but it has really much potential. And, yeah.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

15:07Okay. Well, Tina, we're out of time here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. One word answers if you can. Number one, favorite book?

Tina Banerjee

15:14>> Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman.

Nathan Latka

15:17Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Tina Banerjee

15:20>> No.

Nathan Latka

15:21Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building userpeek besides your own?

Tina Banerjee

15:26>> Probably the Google apps.

Nathan Latka

15:29Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Tina Banerjee

15:33>> Oh, seven.

Nathan Latka

15:35Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?

Tina Banerjee

15:39>> Not married.

Nathan Latka

15:40Okay. And can I ask how old you are?

Tina Banerjee

15:43>> Three eight.

Nathan Latka

15:44Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Tina Banerjee

15:48>> A little bit more courageous.

Nathan Latka

15:51More courage. Guys, we at userpeek.com. She started coding as a side project in 2019 on the back of a 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 beta users so far working on building building out their

16:13user testing pool. So their 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 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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

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