User Interviews, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator-backed company that has built a CRM for product developers to get user feedback, has closed on a $10 million Series A round. The financing was led by Teamworthy Ventures, with participation from Las Olas, Accomplice, FJ Labs, ERA, Trestle Partners and ValueStream.

The company, cofounded by Basel Fakhoury, was created out of failure, in some ways. Originally, the User Interviews team started with a project called Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do more user research before determining their next product.

In trying to collect that research, they stumbled upon a huge problem. It often takes companies weeks, if not months, to conduct a study around user research. The company decided to build out a platform that would procure subjects for research quickly and effectively, using an algorithm to pair qualified, engaged testers with the client.

The product became Recruit, and ran on an a la carte model. To complement Recruit, the team also launched Research Hub, which is a CRM tool for all the testing methodologies used with actual users. To be clear, User Interviews doesn’t run the surveys or A/B tests themselves, but rather helps companies manage the frequency and data of those tests, not unlike what Salesforce does for sales people.

Recently, User Interviews added a subscription layer to its product, allowing companies to purchase access to the software (Read more...)