Hi, my name is Nitzan Shaer. I’m the CEO of WEVO. WEVO is a user research platform that delivers reliable insights in a fraction of the time of traditional tools. We leverage human augmented AI to do the heavy lifting of user research enabling our customers to get customer feedback rapidly. We work with leading global brands and agencies to help them create the best possible customer experiences. Bottom line - WEVO takes a process that is typically 50 hours and enables users to do it in about 30 minutes. This is the 4th startup that I’m either joining as a co-founder or joining early on. Somehow I find myself going back time and again to this incredible startup ride. I’ve always been fascinated by what drives people to make decisions. And WEVO is exactly in that space of helping people understand what is working and what isn’t working in an experience and how to deliver a better customer experience.
What inspired you to start your own company?
Back when I was at Skype, we were serving a very wide range of customers from 150 countries and territories around the world. Understanding how they would respond and what would be the best for each was almost impossible for us to understand. We did the best we could, but we knew we were missing a lot. I also fell in love with the idea that for some products, if you drop the cost enough, demand goes through the roof. At Skype, for example, we took $5 a minute for international calls and dropped it down to $0.02 or free. Once I understood the magnitude of the issue that was facing user experience professionals, product managers, and even marketers around the world, the scenario of trying to understand what their customers will like, what they want, and how they can deliver a better experience for them. And understanding that there was a path to deliver it to them in a fraction of the time it takes them today to do it, I really wanted to take that opportunity on and create a company that delivers those reliable customer insights effortlessly.
What is your long-term vision for WEVO?
Today, most decisions regarding customer experience design and content are taken based on judgment calls, intuition, and gut feelings. Few of them are based on hard data or an understanding of how customers will respond. Many professionals have a customer-centric approach, but getting that feedback is usually cumbersome and takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, and takes professionals that have the time and the capacity to do it. We envision a world with WEVO where every customer experience is created on the base of reliable human insights; not some but all customer experiences are based on reliable customer insights. An analogy that many find helpful is spell check. Imagine a world where you have to invest 10 hours to spell-check an email. Ten hours of paging through dictionaries and grammar books to get the email just right. How many of us would do that? Well, that’s the current state of user experience research, literally. It takes close to 50 hours of professional time to do the analysis and put together the insights; even then, the results are typically anecdotal based on 8 to 10 customer feedbacks. WEVO cuts those 50 hours down to 30 minutes of effort and provides statistically significant insights that you can rely on.
What advice would you go back in time and give yourself when starting your own company?
First off, I would say triple any time estimate that I had. Whatever we’re planning seems to take longer and cost more than we initially planned for. It’s that ability to see inevitable hiccups along the way and detours that you take. I would say the second piece of advice is over-communicating the vision and plan to get there to investors, team members, and customers. I often have a vision of where I want us to get; I have great conversations with our advisors, our customers, and our incredible team to help refine that vision and improve that vision and get a better plan. Still, once we are locked on that - over-communicating that to make sure everybody is on the same page is something that’s not trivial just needs a lot of time.
