We are big believers in product-led growth and think for many companies it is a superior go-to-market because it incentivizes companies to invest in building a product that delights users above all else. Many of the fastest-growing technology companies today – from Slack to Zoom to Figma – are all product-led, and we meet more and more companies every day who are putting the customer voice first.
This shift into a product-led world has ushered in several key changes to how companies build and operate. First, product and user research are some of the fastest growing teams in an organization (and the role itself is one of the top 15 emerging jobs in the U.S.), as they often serve as the internal champions for the customer. Secondly, it means that many more stakeholders in an organization need to listen to the customer in order to deliver against their needs. Customers often dictate their own user journey and control how and when they want to engage with the product, so everyone from sales to design to marketing needs to stay close to the customer to drive the best experience.
We’ve written extensively about the market for user research and how it goes hand in hand with product design because there is no such thing as a “finished” product. Continuous collection of user feedback is critical to iterating on and improving a product. However, tools to help product leaders understand customer needs are still fragmented and insufficient, leading to long research cycles and scattered insights across an org – and taking up time that product managers and user researchers could be spending actually speaking with customers.
And staying connected to customers becomes especially important because while analytics tools exist to help quantitatively measure how a product is performing, there are currently no modern products that measure qualitatively how customers feel, why they take a specific action, and what they want to see in the future. The answers to those questions are often far more nuanced and important in driving company decisions, and to be a product-led company, it’s critical for teams to know the why behind user behavior to best serve their customers.
That’s why we were so excited to meet Ryan and learn about what he was building at Sprig. Sprig provides a seamless way to embed in-app surveys into a product, and uses an event-based architecture to trigger relevant questions in context with user actions. It then leverages natural language processing to aggregate quantitative and qualitative responses at scale.
We were wowed the first time we saw Sprig’s product and believe it’s a vital tool for any customer-first business. With such a clear value proposition and strong product, it’s no wonder that companies like Loom, Dropbox, Square, and Opendoor are already using Sprig to drive core company and product decisions, from measuring customer satisfaction to soliciting product requests and optimizing the user onboarding experience.
And while product and user research teams currently utilize Sprig most often, Sprig is accessible to anyone in an organization for whom user feedback is important. There are marketing teams using Sprig to tailor landing pages, design teams using it to test prototypes, and more teams regularly discovering new use cases that work for them every day. This is incredibly exciting to see because it means Sprig is democratizing user research across an organization and allowing anyone to keep a pulse on the customer.
As part of our diligence process, we chatted with dozens of customers, each of whom said Sprig was an integral part of how they made strategic decisions as a business. Even more importantly, every single customer sang Ryan’s praises. And as we’ve gotten to know Ryan over the past year, it’s easy to see why. Given his years as a product manager before starting Sprig, Ryan has first-hand experience with the pain points that many PMs feel and solutions required to deliver for product-first companies. He also has a keen sense of where the industry is headed and how Sprig will power the future for product-led companies. This combination of experience and vision translates in his interactions with his customers – many of whom went out of their way to characterize Ryan as a uniquely visionary founder whom they felt proud to partner with.
We’re thrilled to lead Sprig’s Series B and help support the team’s vision to democratize continuous user research. If you’re a company who cares about customer love, you should start using Sprig today!
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