Cool Companies You Should Know - User Interviews

User Interviews has raised over $16MM to help companies like Spotify, Adobe, and Amazon get lightning fast insights to drive their businesses. With 60K+ studies under their belt, User Interviews believes fast access to quality participants is the key. Join Bob Goodwin from Career Club and Basel Fakhoury, CEO of User Interviews, to learn more about what makes their solutions unique, the company culture they are building, and the kind of talent they are actively recruiting for.

Transcript

Bob Goodwin (00:14):

Hey everybody. This is Bob Goodwin, founder of career club. And welcome to another episode of cool companies. You should know at career club we're are really excited to be introducing clients, to companies are getting funding companies that have a lot of momentum and maybe most importantly, companies that are hiring. And the goal with this series is to help. You get to know the executives of some of the cool companies that we've discovered out there. And today is no exception with me today is Basel Fakhoury. Basel is the CEO and founder of User Interviews. And if we could get Basel on screen would love to get everybody introduced. So Basel welcome.

Basel Fakhoury (00:56):

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Bob Goodwin (00:58):

No, it's great to have you. So as I was mentioning, , core of the thesis of career and why we started doing this series on cool companies is highlighting companies are getting funding because the idea is, , you've got investors and the reason they invested in your company was they believe in what you're doing, but they also wanna see you scale and grow and very, , core to that is you need people and you to continue to grow your team. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so maybe we could just sort of start off bale love, just to learn a little bit more about your background, and then we can kind of move into how it was that User Interviews came into being.

Basel Fakhoury (01:38):

Yeah, definitely. So I grew up in North Carolina, stayed close for college, went to duke. It's when I forgot my first kind of touch into tech and startups, I interned at a startup in Durham called Evo app when I was a, a summer between junior and senior year. Then in the senior year, after that, I went like, like everyone else from from duke, we went and joined a consulting firm. So I joined the strategy consulting firm and Boston. It focused specifically on tech and telecom companies great first job at school. And then I actually went to law school. So I went to Harvard for law school, but my first year there, me and one of my best friends from from, from my consulting firm we're hanging out, throwing our out startup ideas. And we actually came up with an idea and started working on that. So while I was in law school started my first company. And that I can tell you a little bit about that and how that pivoted to User Interviews as well.

Bob Goodwin (02:34):

No, that's great. I didn't realize that you had gone to a Harvard law school. So did you, or did you, did you did you pivot out of that to go do your first startup?

Basel Fakhoury (02:44):

I did complete it, but I was , primary really working on the startup while I was in law

Bob Goodwin (02:49):

School. So just that's super cool. So no, I'd love to hear sort of the the one before, what did you guys end up starting?

Basel Fakhoury (02:55):

Yeah, so same co-founders I have now. So Dennis is one of my co-founders. We worked together at that consulting firm. Then Bob is my other co-founder. And he he's our CTO. So the three of us were working on this other idea. It was called mobile suites. It was a bad idea. It was a mobile app for hotel services. So you could order basically like room service through a mobile app. And we, we we kind of grinded away on it for a while. Weren't getting the traction we wanted. We, we kind of realized it was because, , we came up with this idea cuz mobile was big on demand, was big and hotels were big and we tried to smash 'em together, which is not how you come up with the company idea. So after after grinding away on it for, or a bit we learned about doing user research.

Basel Fakhoury (03:42):

So we, we read the lean startup. We started reaching out to customers. We started talking to them. We talked to, , some of the few users we had, we talked to people, our network who were travelers, and eventually we tapped out everyone. We could talk to so then our hack, we would buy basically refundable jet blue tickets, going to the airport at Boston, go past security. Once we got past security, we'd call and refund the tickets and then we'd just go kind of a cost people at the gate to give us feedback on on the app. And that was that was really our first taste of user research. And , the first thing we learned was, okay, this is a core value problem. This isn't gonna get fixed by UX or features. So we decided, Hey, we need to figure out what else to do.

Basel Fakhoury (04:28):

So we started looking into other, other ideas initially in the travel space, it got a little bit further, but at this time we were pretty hooked on this user research concept. So we would always do like some experimentation and we went to a bunch of ideas and we'd also do like a level of user research. And that's when we kind of had the aha moment that this user research is really valuable. We're really passionate about it. Maybe there's a business here. And the biggest pain point for us was finding users. And that's kind of when we had the idea for User Interviews and eventually did some meta research and then did some experiments and realized that was a company we wanted to build.

Bob Goodwin (05:03):

So I think that's really interesting because the, to your earlier point, this idea was let's try and take these sort of things and smash 'em together and see if there's a good idea here turned out to not be your best idea. It sounds like, but your idea be, was born out of a genuine need that you guys were experiencing, right. To get user feedback on what it was that you were trying to do in the other thing, right?

Basel Fakhoury (05:28):

Yeah. A hundred percent. It was very much a pain point we had. So we, and at least knew there were three people in the world who thought this was a big pain point. So that's what we were starting for.

Bob Goodwin (05:37):

So I've got, I've got another friend who's got his own company and he actually wrote a book on innovation, the first chapter. And I'll always remember, this is find something that sucks and fix it. Yeah. For you guys, you guys are struggling with something and like, okay, how can we get more clever and do this in a scalable way? Because it sounds like find jet blue tickets, wasn't a scalable idea by itself either. So

Basel Fakhoury (05:59):

Yeah, exactly. It was a, it was a good hack and a good story, but you definitely you kind of hit a ceiling with that as a strategy.

Bob Goodwin (06:06):

So, so you guys were struggling with the problem. How did you guys figure out this was a, a problem that, , enough people out there were struggling with that it was an idea of worth getting behind?

Basel Fakhoury (06:18):

Yeah. So we did, , the kind of meta User Interviews, right? We did User Interviews with user researchers about how they do User Interviews now. So we, , tapped, our networks did some cold outreach to user researchers or product people generally and, and companies. And we asked them, , we, we basically set up an experiment and it was look, we're gonna talk to, I forgot how many we talked to call it 10, 15 people. And we were just wanted to ask them, like, if, when you're doing research, what are your top three pain points? And we said, look, maybe if like 60% of them said, I forgot what the exact number was. Let's say 60%. We said, if 60% of them put recruitment there, like, there's probably, , this is a big pain point. So very basic, , not really scientific experiment, but a goal at least.

Basel Fakhoury (07:05):

So that's the first thing we did. And pretty much everyone just said, yeah, when we do research, recruitment is the hardest part. So we said, okay, like this resonates with people at least. And so we sort of asking how do they do this now? And we found there, there weren't all lot of good options. And one option people were doing was really posting on Craigslist which there's kind of a old startup kind of idea. That's basically, if you want a good company idea, you can go see what's big on Craigslist because it's completely unoptimized, but it shows there's a market there. So we saw all these people posting like, Hey, join a focus group, Hey, join a user research session Craiglist. So what we would do is we would just go down the different cities, reach out to everyone who posted one of these and said, Hey, we'll do this for you.

Basel Fakhoury (07:47):

If you pay us, , X dollars is very cheap the time. And we got some big companies like large tech companies, large non-tech companies say like, oh yeah, we'd love for you to do this. Like we told 'em we we're just gonna repost your post on Craigslist, but we just handled the scheduling and the reaching out and the incentives, we didn't have a website at the time. We didn't have a product, but we were able to get clients just doing this basically as a service. So that was our initial, , we set goals every week. Like, Hey, we want get our first client this week. We want get, , we wanna triple next week and they start small. But as those goals compound, you end up proving out the market. And at the same time we're building up the product around it. So it went from using a Google form and a spreadsheet and us sending manual calendar invites to the product. Bob was kind of, our CTO was building the product while Dennis and I were trying to do the sales and the operations at the time.

Bob Goodwin (08:39):

So I actually come from market research and used to, , do focus groups and stuff. So yet the recruiting of respondents is not easy. And obviously the niche year, the respondent is, and you have more of the needle in the haystack kind of respondent. You have the trickier that it is. So were you guys finding that Craigslist was like your main competition for this? Or did you guys figure out, Hey, there is sort of a big player here that we've got to take on.

Basel Fakhoury (09:12):

So initially we were going after kind of the low another market. So there was basically, the market was, there were a lot of service firm firms, so not big tech players, different agencies, consulting firms that were kind of more full service. So they would do the recruitment for you. , sometimes they'd have a physical location, sometimes do the research itself. So that was kind of one segment of competitors. There was kind of the do it yourself. So people using TaskRabbit or Craigslist or Facebook groups. So that's who we were initially going after. And then there were some bigger companies that were somewhat competitors, they for specific types of research. So obviously it was like survey monkey if you're doing a survey, but they wouldn't really help you with a one-on-one interview or a focus group. So initially when we didn't have a product, let alone a good product, we were going after the lowest bar. Right. And then as we got smarter and as the product got better, then we could level up over time.

Bob Goodwin (10:04):

So, so what year are we in right now when, when all of this is sort of happening, ish

Basel Fakhoury (10:11):

, I think either 20, I think 2015 is when we started like doing the pivot 20, we really land

Bob Goodwin (10:17):

On. Right. So fast forward a little bit, you guys have raised 16 million, right. And your most recent raise was 10 if I remember correctly. Yeah. And so how did you guys then kind of build a business plan and, and what was the scalable idea that you took to the investment community?

Basel Fakhoury (10:36):

Yeah, definitely. So, , a lot of those nuggets with how we started the company, we've, we've tried to hold within us as we scaled. So there's this level of experimentation, right? There's this level of like looking at data setting goals and then talking to users and being very user focused. Right. We, we do dog Futo product. We use our product. We we think it's really important to be user focus. So a lot of our initial decision making was based on we just had a lot of demand and we needed to make sure we could fulfill that. So we, we wanted to go out, make sure we could find the right users, make sure we could automate a lot of the manual processes, get more efficient and we bootstrapped it for a little bit. And then , after a bit of time we went, we went in for unders and really, I think the thing that sold the initial investors was, Hey, these guys, , barely have product at the time and look at this logo list. Like there's, there's real demand here. So that was kind of the initial well, and, and then after that, as we built the team, then you, you get into more your, more of your traditional SA metrics.

Bob Goodwin (11:36):

Yeah. I was gonna say, so has the business model model significantly evolved just in terms of like the revenue model and stuff, or is it kind of basically the same thing just at scale?

Basel Fakhoury (11:45):

Yeah, a hundred percent. So we, we used to be purely transactional, so people would pay us per completed session per project. We are now almost, or we are now primarily a subscription based business and, and that's been great. I think both for us and for our clients, it's just added a lot of visibility. It's allowed us to be more cost effective because we have that visibility for our clients and it's, it's just made the business a lot strong.

Bob Goodwin (12:09):

Okay. That's awesome. So you've, you said you've got a couple part mm-hmm <affirmative> , I, I know that listeners are always really interested to kind of hear about leadership style leadership philosophy, and then relatedly the, the culture that you guys are building. So we'd love for you to kind of riff on that for a few minutes.

Basel Fakhoury (12:28):

Yeah, definitely. I love our culture. I think, , I think our team does we, we try to measure, we do engagement surveys, , we have higher employee retention overall, and I think it's because we have a, a strong culture. I would describe our culture as not cool lady. We're not we're not WeWork which probably I will say on the downside, probably our highs aren't as high, but I also think our lows on is lows. We're, we're built for a marathon. Not first sprint is what, one of my VPs likes to say, which I which I appreciate some of the things we value a lot are we, we like to say we like prioritize relationships over transactions. So that's both with our that's with our clients, that's with the participants, that's with each other, with the team that we're trying to build long-term relationships. We're not trying to optimize all of these things we assume best intent. We have kind of related to that we've been remote from the beginning even before the pandemic. So we had to be really intentional about that culture from, from the beginning. Yeah, we, we have a number of values I'm happy to, to walk through. I

Bob Goodwin (13:32):

I'd, I'd love to hear 'em please.

Basel Fakhoury (13:34):

Right. Cool. So so that's one prioritizing relationships over transactions. The second is we, we really like to welcome people as they are, we have a very diverse team. People are welcome to build our authentic selves. And that's something that when we kind of survey the company, we're, we're a hundred people. We just had our, we just had our, or we just became a hundred people today. So this is, oh,

Bob Goodwin (13:54):

That's awesome. Congratulations. Very cool.

Basel Fakhoury (13:56):

But that's something that, , really comes to the top of the list. When we say like, Hey, how do you describe User Interviews? It's just a very welcoming place. We're really big on open communication and transparency. So that means we don't sugarcoat a lot of stuff. We're very transparent with our goals. If we hit our goals, if we don't, we have, we is a lot of metrics and we share those companywide. We have different cadences for feedback. We try to be transparent with feedback 360 degrees. And I think people really feel comfortable. If something doesn't seem right, they feel very comfortable sharing it. That there's not a lot of like freezing up, which I think is both just on the business side or anything within the company, which I think is obviously super important. One of our values is stay curious.

Basel Fakhoury (14:42):

We're a very curious bunch. We ask why a lot, we do a lot of user research. We talk to our customers, people will dig into data. We have like very open data, different reports that are very open for everybody. Anyone can go in and create their own reports. Everyone has access to our customers to do user research with them. So we're constantly like looking for answers, trying to understand things better across the company. It doesn't have to be top down. Another one is fast beats. Perfect. We be, , like old startups, you kind of need to be fast. That's our main differentiator. So we like to prioritize speed. Like, don't worry about if it's not like a hundred percent buttoned up, as long as you're not betting the company, as long as you're not getting in the way of somebody else, just go out, do it, we'll learn something from it. And, , we try to cut away bureaucracy, try to expedite decision making all. And we try to decentralize decision making as well.

Bob Goodwin (15:35):

And then no, no, that's awesome. I'm curious with, with your co-founders, , different people bring the things right to the party mm-hmm <affirmative> and how do, how do you guys kind of mesh your leadership style in a way that actually becomes the user interview? , culture, not bales personality implied onto everybody.

Basel Fakhoury (15:58):

Yeah. I, I will say, I think as a co-founder group, we're probably from a personality standpoint, a little bit more similar. It's not like, , I think when you're drawing your start up box, you're like, okay, this person does X, Y, and this person does Z. I would say we'd probably have more overlap. That being said, I think our leadership team on the whole is more diverse. I think we've brought in people who supplement us in ways that, , we think we are lacking, but also there is a consistent vibe of this, , transparent. , we don't overreact people feel of comfortable talking up this kind of this, , no one's pulling rank and really data driven, kind of nerdy kind of <laugh> really, , focused on understanding and everyone's kind of like rowing the same direction. So I think there's definitely stuff us as a, the whole leadership team has in common and that's really the culture, but there is still we fill in each other's gaps for sure.

Bob Goodwin (16:55):

No, that that's, that's very cool. And, and I loved hearing you talk too about how the, you kinda that welcoming and that team is very diverse. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and, , from diversity you get, , a lot of different perspectives that maybe guys who grew up together, , didn't really have, right. But you start to learn from your, it sounds like it's sort of the nature of the business, but it sounds like you guys, as she's talked about like, , eating your own dog food and stuff, that there's very much just a listening culture.

Basel Fakhoury (17:24):

Yep. A hundred percent. And I think like one thing related to that is, , this sounds like not a big deal. I think it's really important for our culture is that people are very willing to change their mind. Like if, if , I come in with an opinion and someone else comes in with an opinion, if that person brings data or, , has a, a viewpoint or, , a logical approach, I didn't think about like, , I'll change my mind. And, and we see that across the company. And I think that that empowers people, cuz they'll see like, oh, , my manager, , listened to me because I had, I showed some data they didn't have and then, and that's causing these effects. So there, there definitely is that listening culture and also we process it and we'll go, , change our actions based on,

Bob Goodwin (18:05):

I, I would suggest that that kind of the derivative, maybe of that listening culture, the exact example you just gave is humility. Right?

Basel Fakhoury (18:14):

Yeah. I, I think it,

Bob Goodwin (18:16):

The, and I'm up for being wrong too. <Laugh>

Basel Fakhoury (18:19):

Yeah, definitely. I think part of it might be that, , me and my co-founders, , we weren't anointed successful. Right. We, we had to pivot out of a fail company. So once you're kind of staring into the Abys in all that matters, it's funny, the right

Bob Goodwin (18:31):

Answer mean duke undergrad, Harvard law school. I mean, there's not, , it's not the dummy classes, so , you, you can definitely see like, Hey, we're pretty smart. We've gotta figure it out. That's not, , what you guys are bringing to, to your team. And it sounds like you guys are definitely benefiting from that. Now that you've reached a hundred, I mean, a guess that maybe somebody's gotten promoted somewhere along the way. What are the kind of behaviors that would get somebody promoted at User Interviews?

Basel Fakhoury (19:02):

Yeah, I, I think there there's a few things. I mean, we, we're trying to become a lot more, first of all, like very clear about this is what it takes. Like having very clear road, rubrics, very, very clear upward trajectories. When, when you're 10, 15 employees, it's just harder to do that. Cause you're like there might not be a manager, we're all opening as we move to a hundred, we have a lot more clarity and, and we've been, , investing in that as well. And, and we do really like promoting people from inside the company. So things that I think are important are one on, , doing your job, right? So when, when first you run a job, you, you have to do that. That's step one, doing that at a high level. As, , once you can kind of do that, the next thing is really being able to do it in such a way that your manager kind of trusts you. They don't feel like they're double checking the work, there's not errors. And then, , on what role you are,

Basel Fakhoury (19:54):

You might need different things, but it could be , showing a level of management before you're a manager, whether that's coaching, whether that is organizing , building out new processes, you might not be managing anyone, but those are the skills that like I'm manager would need. And being able to show that, Hey, I'm doing this in addition to doing my, , my basic job very well is, is a good way to do that. So it really depends what department you're in, what, what kind of level you are. But but that's the general idea. Like when you think about what the next level is, what are things you can do and your current role that helps show those skills in that aptitude?

Bob Goodwin (20:30):

Yeah. There there's some sane for that, but it's basically what you just said, which is if you want that role start acting like you're in that role. Yeah. And then working you in it. And then the, the promotion becomes a, a much easier thing to pull off. So I, I do wanna ask you one question, this is a little bit on the fly, but, but you, you, the original value you talked about was relationships over transactions and that that's really important. It without getting into any kind of crazy details, , could you give like a real world example of where that would come into play, where, where you could actually visualize and, and, and see that behavior, that belief.

Basel Fakhoury (21:12):

Yeah. I, I think it happens all the time with our, our third clients , we, we are helping our clients do their jobs or helping them build products that are more user centric, doing things that we think are really important. And, , you could imagine a time a client launches a project and it , it's hard to fill, it's not being done automatically or, or something like that. We're not. So, so just to give some definition, someone will launch a project on User Interviews saying, Hey, I wanna talk to 10 people who match these characteristics to do a user research study with them. We might go and put out ads, spend you, or do extra kind of manual stuff there to make sure that we fill that project for that person. Because even if that's not, , the best thing for our company at scale to do that, we think it's important to have that relationship cuz these people, , they came to us trusting that we could help them.

Basel Fakhoury (22:05):

And we've kind of implied that we can, so we'll go above and beyond there. And then I think, , from a, the teammate perspective, I think it's really about, , assuming good intent. If someone is, , being there to support teammates understanding that, , everyone has their own lives going on and , sometimes something might come up in your life that affects you, that we, and, and we have a big enough team now and , that we can actually really support them during that time. As opposed to saying, Hey, , it's not worth it for me to go outta my way for you in this specific interaction.

Bob Goodwin (22:42):

So okay. So awesome then I, I guess, , just to kind, kind of start to round this out a little bit, so we've learned, , about the value proposition mm-hmm <affirmative> and we, we've learned about kind of the leadership style, the culture that you guys are building mm-hmm <affirmative> so the last leg here would be, as you continue to grow the team, mm-hmm <affirmative>, , how big are you guys trying to get over the next couple of years? Just from an employee help size.

Basel Fakhoury (23:11):

Yeah, definitely. So by the end of this year, we're hoping to get to 140 people. So we're growing kind of across apartments, another 40 and we're still kind of working on the plan for next year, but it should be pretty significant growth. Okay.

Bob Goodwin (23:25):

And, and then

Basel Fakhoury (23:27):

We are planning on continuing the fundraise, so we, we do expect to,

Bob Goodwin (23:30):

Okay. Okay. Awesome. And based on everything you're saying, doesn't sound like that will be a, a big challenge. I think you're, you'll be spoiled for choice as you as you guys are thinking about the 40 roles, , to, to fill for the balance of the year kind of functionally, where, where are you guys, , looking to hire

Basel Fakhoury (23:50):

It it's really spread out across departments. So always hiring engineers our sales team scaling up, but we, those are probably the ones we're hiring the most in addition to our operations team. So those three and then, but I think we are hiring across every single department. So marketing analytics I mentioned sales ops, product and engineering our people ops team, our research team and yeah, our finance team as well, I think.

Bob Goodwin (24:16):

Okay.

Basel Fakhoury (24:17):

So yeah, I think really across the board, we're, we're gonna be hiring.

Bob Goodwin (24:20):

So, so often, , when I'll tell a client is, , when, when companies are growing, like they're hiring across all functional, they need more of everything. So I think sometimes people think with tech companies, mm-hmm, <affirmative> that it's just software engineers and it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

Basel Fakhoury (24:38):

Well, you really start to realize is once you hire one person, , you hire some engineers that you need an analytics person to support them designer to support them. And then, , as you get more people, you need more people ops and then, so it's kind of a cycle as you hire more people, it leads them more hiring across the, across

Bob Goodwin (24:56):

The, and, and, and the other part, maybe you could talk about this for a second is, , what I tell folks is, , not only are they hiring, , kind of what I call scale scaling out, but sometimes they're also scaling up mm-hmm <affirmative> right. And we need, we need to kind of up our game in some things, and, bring in people that have got experience with companies, , or with a company at a certain scale level mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I'm curious if that, , mirrors yours experience.

Basel Fakhoury (25:26):

Yeah. I mean, I, I think we, you wanna mix, like, we really, I mentioned this earlier, wasn't just saying this, we really like having a culture where people can stay with us for a long time, or people can get promoted within User Interviews and grow with the company. And we think there's a lot of benefits to having that institutional knowledge. But that being said, , obviously people who have seen this next stage of growth will also be bringing in a level of knowledge that some of us may not have as well. So we definitely want that mix.

Bob Goodwin (25:54):

Yep. And then and this may tie back to values. So you kind of answered the question as you, as you wish, but, , there's the functional things that we're looking for, like finance and all the things you just articulated as you think about the qualities and like what you're looking for, some of the, maybe those softer skills, but the qualities that if you're interviewing somebody, what are you dialed into? What are you looking for?

Basel Fakhoury (26:18):

Yeah. there's a few things. So there's obviously, , functional skills, like you said for all, but I think we definitely want people who are curious people who are data to driven people who can be self-starters once again, we are a fully remote team. So showing that you can organize your day, that you can that you can share what you're working on in a way that might be a little bit harder being remote. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and , someone, , there's not gonna be someone over your shoulder the whole time, right. So you need to be able to to show that you can work at your own pace at the right cadence for the team, but yeah. Organization skills. And we really really focused on people being datadriven

Bob Goodwin (27:01):

If we think about guess how would you tease that out in an interview, but what would be examples of I'm a curious person.

Basel Fakhoury (27:10):

Yeah. and, , it's, it's more curious in a work sense for us, right? Like , do what you want time, how work, but I think people have taken initiative at their previous role. So have said, Hey, I noticed X and I went and, , learned this and that led to these outcomes or this was something that wasn't working great. And then, , I built this new process and that increased efficiency or, , other people started using this process. I think that's the best way to show that, , once again, you have your day, day job, you have to be excellent at that. But also showing that you've been able to take the initiative to, to push yourself or your department forward is really important

Bob Goodwin (27:53):

If this is a little bit of a false choice. So I'll let that before I ask the question, but, and then I know it'll be role dependent, some other stuff, but at a very high level, if you had to pick between this, person's got really proven functional skills experience, , so somebody who's been playing, , center at duke for five years, four years, or somebody's got the, this had the talent that, , that it's more of an aptitude, it's a talent draft versus a position draft. How, how would you sort of fall on that?

Basel Fakhoury (28:33):

Yeah. So kind of you're saying like aptitude versus experience. Yes.

Bob Goodwin (28:38):

Yeah.

Basel Fakhoury (28:39):

In some ways

Basel Fakhoury (28:42):

It really depends like role by role in person by send and how you compare those. I, I will say, I think there is more room for bias with aptitude than looking at what what's actually been accomplished. So I think we do like to, , make sure we're removing a lot of internal biases we might have. And I think, , but maybe showing talent, if there's still some outcomes that prove the talent, right? Like, Hey, this was maybe for instance, someone who may have sold or, , built for a different like we're not really big on like industry knowledge. Like if you've built for different departments over like research departments, that's totally fine for us. Like we, we choose aptitude over that kind of industry knowledge. But I do think when you just think about like pure aptitude without having any of those outcomes that does open yourself up to bias, that you wanna make sure that we wanna make sure we're avoiding

Bob Goodwin (29:35):

It, at least now that's such a great point. And you're the second person in this series just in the last week who has brought up the notion of really trying to dial bias out and recognizing that it exists and taking very concrete steps to, to dial that out. Yeah. And so that probably naturally, and, and, , positively circles back to the, that you guys been able to build onto your team. Yeah. But I,

Basel Fakhoury (30:05):

If you kinda like, , just to reiterate, if you kind of move that question from like functional versus aptitude to like, , maybe industry specific versus aptitude, like I would aptitude, , as long as you, you can like back it up and say, Hey, look, we're being objective here. Just because it was with a different industry or, , maybe a slightly different role. We're happy to bring those people in.

Bob Goodwin (30:25):

Yeah, no, I, I'm glad to hear that. And, and because I do think that that actually the industry is a kind of bias that people bring into it. Like if you haven't been doing this exact same thing at this exact same kind of company, then you're too risky for us. And in my view, it just narrows the aperture way too much and shutting out potentially really high talent over this very narrow view of, of what a fit might look like

Basel Fakhoury (30:56):

A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent, especially with us, like research is one of the awesome things about what we're building and the people we're building for is it's kind of a new department that's growing really fast, but mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I mean, it is new, right? So it's not like we're selling to sales departments and you have, , a hundred unicorns. You can <laugh> have salted that we're kinda forced to, to not put ourselves in a corner like that.

Bob Goodwin (31:17):

No, that's cool. So this has been great. I mean, again, I, I love how your company started one kind of from the ashes of something else, so that's cool. But it was born outta a real need and one that you guys felt and needed to go solve for your own account and figure it out. Holy crap, there's a real market for this. Love, , kind of the very quick option that you guys were able to get at and are getting. So that's phenomenal that you're getting confirmation from the investment community, that this is a big scalable idea, and you guys are seeing that. So that's very cool, the values, , relationships and transparency, being able to you kind of own your work, be autonomous, , that you don't need somebody looking over your shoulder all the time to make sure you're doing what you're doing is great. The, as you say, kind of this listening environment, , is phenomenal. And so if, if somebody wants to learn more about opportunities at User Interviews, what's the best way for them to do that.

Basel Fakhoury (32:23):

Yeah, definitely. And, and I will say one other thing, one value I didn't mention is that we have a value that is up and to the right. Like we, we are, we are a high growth startup. Like we're doubling every year. We, we do care about growing fast. So both the team and revenue and client base in the products. So we're definitely an environment. Like we're not a burnout environment by any means, but we definitely focused on scaling. So that, that's part of the, that's why we raise that money. So I just wanna make sure I, I throw that in there as well. But yeah, if you wanna find out more about opportunities we have a careers page, you can go to our website, User Interviews. Let me make sure I get the exact to write one. I'll tell people to go to the wrong one. But if you go to User Interviews.com/about, you can see stuff about our team, who's on the team and, and a lot of our values in our culture and different people on my team, kinda in their own words, as well as some of the benefits we offer. And there's a link to all of our current job, open things there as well.

Bob Goodwin (33:20):

That's phenomenal. Well, bale, thank you so much. Like I, I love learning about your, your company. I love hearing your story. Thank you, Heather, for putting that in the little note there so we can see it. So thank you so much. Congratulations on the amazing company you guys have already built and definitely is a cool company. So well done and look forward to seeing the next round get, because it's just gonna be more gasoline in the engine to drive your growth. So, but I really appreciate bale. Thank you so much.

Basel Fakhoury (33:52):

All right. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It was it was a lot of fun.

Bob Goodwin (33:55):

No, very cool. Thanks so much. Bye-Bye

Speaker 3 (34:01):

<Silence>.