Building a community has become a table-stakes requirement for startups today. 88% of founders say that ‘community is critical to their company mission’ and there are over 1 million Google search results that will try to convince you that ‘community is the new moat’. In this essay, I explain why…

A practical 7-step guide to building actionable, data-driven segments with clearly identified unmet needs for your startup. — Every founder, investor and startup ‘expert’ talks about the importance of picking a target customer segment and solving a burning unmet need, but beyond telling you to “Go talk to your customers,” they offer no practical advice on how to actually do this. In university we’re told that ‘finding an…

This post originally appeared on the OpinionX blog. 80% of product and features are rarely or never used. Why? Because they’re building solutions for problems customers don’t care enough about. I spent over a year on 100+ customer discovery interviews only to follow the wrong user need. I’ve also spent…

As tech companies integrate user research as a standalone function, they are quickly rewriting the rules of the research industry as we know it. — 87% of companies say that the market today is more crowded than ever. With lower barriers to entry and more access to consumers online, the importance of delivering an incredible user experience has gone through the roof. …

About a month into the job, I was told that if I kept eating ice cream at this rate, I’d be lactose intolerant by the end of the year. …

This case study originally appeared on the OpinionX blog. The Challenge Feed the Heroes (FTH) is a nonprofit that launched as a rapid response from leaders within Ireland’s startup community to support frontline workers during the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. …

The fastest growing startups in the world are Product Led. These are the investors that realise that. Companies like Slack, Dropbox and Calendly are all driven by the same strategy. It’s called Product Led Growth (PLG) and it’s going to be the defining startup trend of the 2020s. “The center…

This blog post originally appeared on the OpinionX blog. The way that companies think about user experience has changed. The end user now makes the initial purchase decision to solve their own pain, not an executive thinking of bottom line impact. This is called Product-Led Growth and it is creating…

This post originally appeared on the OpinionX blog. A wise old proverb once said that you are the average of the people whose tweets you spend the most time reading. Whoever said that was obviously pretty ahead of their time. …