Outset

TL;DR - Getting answers to tough, qualitative questions from your users is extremely costly (in time and money). Outset provides an AI-interviewer that conducts and synthesizes research interviews autonomously. Researchers get large-scale, in-depth data (almost) instantly.

Our asks

• Early startups: Give us feedback! Sign up here, and get 50 AI interviews for free.
• Larger teams: Book a demo! Researchers or product/design leaders at mid-market or enterprise companies are our sweet spot. Whether you have researchers on your team or have research-oriented friends, we’d love to meet them! Book a demo here.

Problem

We’re Aaron and Michael, co-founders of Outset (YC S23).

Today, user and market researchers face an unfortunate tradeoff: do you want FAST insights (surveys) or do you want DEEP insights (interviews)?

We’ve felt this struggle. As a strategy consultant at Deloitte, Aaron facilitated dozens of research projects for Fortune 500 companies. He and his team would spend hundreds of hours on each project just to schedule and moderate a few dozen interviews. And both of us have seen first-hand the need for even faster, deeper user insights at growing software companies.

Solution

Outset gets you both — fast and deep insights — with AI-moderated research.

Imagine if you could ask hundreds of people a complex, qualitative question (like ‘What motivates you in your career?’) and get back an actionable synthesis of the answers? Now imagine if you could do that in less than a day…

Our AI-moderated research platform uses GPT-4 to autonomously lead in-depth interviews with participants and analyze results. Designed for high-impact research teams at larger companies, Outset gathers valuable, large-scale qualitative data (almost) instantly, turning weeks of work into hours.

Outset users load up an interview guide, share a link with their participants, and watch AI conduct hundreds of interviews at once. AI follows up with participants to clarify, probes on answers, and creates a conversational rapport where responses get deep.

For every question, AI generates themes, tallies up counts, and highlights powerful quotes to uncover the story. What used to be days of dedicated transcript analysis work is now almost instant.

Customer case study

With Outset, WeightWatchers put together an interview guide, shared it out, and conducted and synthesized over 100 in-depth interviews in under 24 hours, saving them over a week of work. The results are now being used to propose a new internal framework for user segmentation.

“The speed and quality of the responses were both outstanding. I expect Outset will afford my team the opportunity to significantly increase the speed of delivery and the volume of data they are able to collect.” - Wilson Readinger, Head of UX Research @ WeightWatchers