Customer Lens AI & Customer Discovery
Earlier this fall, Innovate Marquette hosted a Customer Discovery demo highlighting Customer Lens AI, a platform that helps startups reach product-market fit by automating customer discovery. Founder Tomasz Cwik travelled to Marquette to present his software to community members and inform other business owners how this platform can be beneficial for them and their businesses.
So what is customer discovery? Customer discovery is the process of gathering information about potential customers, their needs, and the problems they face in order to validate the assumption about a product or service.
Tomasz is no stranger to the business world, having worked in product commercialization and customer discovery for over a decade. As part of his role as a Mentor-In-Residence at Michigan State University, he works with others to help get their own projects off the ground. Earlier this year, while doing customer discovery for one of these such projects, he began to question whether there might be a piece of software to help automate business hypothesis validation and analyze customer interviews. After exploring the preexisting options, Tomasz found that nothing on the market did exactly that task. Looking for a solution that would perform in the way that he intended, Tomasz saw an opportunity to utilize AI to develop a tool that he and others in this field could benefit from.
Creating A Tool Of His Own
To start, he began with creating simple personas, imaginary yet detailed profiles of potential customers in a company’s target audience, including demographics and behaviors. This soon expanded to include question generation for these personas and utilizing existing real-world client interviews to formulate responses.
To avoid running into the same issue as the other software platforms that he had tried, Tomasz knew from the beginning that he wanted to keep the scope of the software completely open to development as potential user needs change. While this remains a focus, it made it more difficult to hone in on what specific problem he was wanting the software to solve. However, after learning more about his own market and their needs, he was able to utilize AI technology to make quick and efficient changes to the software, present the new version to sample customers, and gain even more feedback for possible improvements. “Finally, my customer discovery started converging on the problems customers have experienced and possible solutions,” said Tomasz.
Once things started clicking in the product development process, Tomasz was able to make progress quickly. Within three months of his own customer discovery, he had about seventy percent of today’s functionality. While this amount of progress was encouraging, he still wanted to hear from his customers about what their needs were and what improvements they could see being made to the software. Repeatedly, from varying client perspectives, he heard that while the content of the platform and its abilities were extremely helpful, the overall usability of it was a bit overwhelming. Determined to make Customer Lens the best it could be, Tomasz has dedicated the last six months to simplifying the user experience, making it more accessible. By gaining user feedback and listening to the needs of his customers, he has begun to receive praise for the changes made. “What was extremely rewarding was starting to hear excellent feedback regarding the user interface and confirmation that the solution was desired,” Tomasz shared. Soon after this, he began to see his first sales and these early users started recommending the platform to other business accelerators, resulting in even more users for the platform.
Moving Forward
While still in the relatively early stages, Customer Lens continues to grow and aims to be a user-friendly platform that yields invaluable results for its customers by taking out guesswork and replacing it with timely, data-driven answers regarding the product’s fit in a diverse market. “Our current mission is to enable anyone, with any background, to be able to conduct great interviews and use the system to obtain guidance on how to proceed with their startup.”
If you have a business idea of your own, and would like to connect with resources like this one through Innovate Marquette, submit an idea!
