Finding the Right Pain Point

Niamh De Búrca is the founder of SproutPlans, an early-stage startup that's building a new personal finance platform. Niamh recognized that young digital-first professionals rarely pay for in-person financial advisors. In February 2021, Niamh decided that she needed to conduct discovery research with her target audience to understand their pain points, motivations and behaviour when it comes to personal finance. The findings of this research would inform everything from the SproutPlans' product roadmap to their core value proposition and positioning. Getting this first step right would be a defining decision for Niamh — the biggest reason that startups fail is that they don't address a real customer need.

But SproutPlans quickly faced a common problem; they needed to conduct discovery research but as a young startup they didn't have the luxury of spending weeks carrying out the usual process of interviewing tens of people and manually analyzing all the data. Niamh understood that entering into user interviews without any idea of what mattered most to people would leave her with a wide research scope. For this approach, Niamh would need a large volume of participants to take part in lengthy interviews just to surface insights on the biggest pains and unmet needs before she started to dig deeper into further research. Time was ticking...

Catalyzing Discovery with OpinionX

Niamh decided to run an OpinionX social survey before jumping into customer discovery interviews. OpinionX would enable Niamh to learn new things about her target users by collecting user opinions at scale just like a traditional open-ended survey. At the same time, by letting respondents vote on each other's answers, Niamh could also understand how much these opinions represented the whole group's perspective.

These insights would then give Niamh the ability to dig deeper into the issues that her target users felt were most important to them in user interviews rather than starting off from a much broader position and needing much more time for this research. A couple of weeks saved makes a huge difference in the life of a startup!

Niamh set up her OpinionX survey to explore what is most important to young professional's about personal finance and their financial focuses over the next three years. Niamh added a handful of sample statements to test her existing hypotheses and to inspire participants to share their own opinions.

Interested in discovering what is most important to your users? OpinionX is a free research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities, helping you make better decisions with real data.

Surfacing the Most Important Insights

As a result of the survey, Niamh found that the biggest concern for her OpinionX survey participants was their inability to find trustworthy financial advice. This participant-generated statement was voted as most important by participants, validating SproutPlans' original hypothesis about young professional's unmet need.

Participants unanimously agreed that they would like to have access to good value advice, voting this as the second most important statement in the survey. The use of the words ‘in my best interest’ further validated the importance of trust among participants.

Additionally, high-ranking statements added by participants showed that young professionals are goal-orientated in their savings plans and that they worry about the quality of their investment decisions.

The Road to Product-Market Fit

With these new insights, Niamh was able to jump into user interviews with the knowledge that trust was the primary differentiating factor for her target customers. This saved Niamh months of research by enabling her to focus on clear priorities during interviews and achieve deeper discovery research in a fraction of the time. By using OpinionX at the very beginning of discovery research, companies like SproutPlans can drastically reduce the time needed for discovery research.

"OpinionX has saved me months in research and building time, along with thousands in costs. I am blown away by the outcome. The OpinionX approach to customer discovery is essential in uncovering true and uninfluenced pain points when searching for product-market fit."

- Niamh De Búrca, Founder of SproutPlans

Want to learn more about how you can find product-market fit faster with OpinionX? Prepare your questions and book a free call with one of our product researchers.