Effective User Research Process for a Fintech Startup
The client
Fundid is a startup with ambitious plans: a Business Building Card in future, and in the meantime a tool that makes finding business grants straightforward for underfunded companies.
Its founder saw at first hand what happens to a business turning over less than $1M a year when it goes looking for growth capital — and that most of those businesses are owned by women. Female entrepreneurs have a harder time reaching funding and the financial instruments that would help them grow, and Fundid exists to change that.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
As a new fintech, the company needed to take the right next step — and to verify there was demand for the product at all, without a method, a process or the tools to do it.
Challenge 01A hypothesis to test
The client needed help verifying whether their product was needed, and a clear understanding of what affects their audience.
Challenge 02Consultancy at every step
Support was wanted from recruiting research participants through to producing the final report.
Challenge 03A team to build afterwards
The client intends to build an in-house user research function, so research becomes an ongoing part of product development rather than an occasional exercise.
What we did
Research that also taught them how to do it
Netguru helped in three areas: validating the hypothesis, discovering needs among female entrepreneurs in the US that nobody had established, and advising on research practice.
Training by doing
A series of workshops on in-depth interviews explained the methodology in detail and backed the theory with practical exercises.
Assumptions checked
In-depth interviews tested the business assumptions, with discussion encouraged and the applicable solutions analysed.
What the research showed
The client verified that women are often discriminated against in business, and that existing US business banking is perceived as outdated in that regard — so women in business genuinely lack easy access to capital.
Personas and an early adopter
The final report carried user personas alongside a profile of the early adopter — what she expects, needs and wants — plus a clear picture of how women think about running a business and about money.
Client testimonial
Because small business owners are massively overlooked and underserved, we see it as critical to our product to have a clear process around how we collect data and gain insights from the business owners we are looking to serve.
We’re grateful that Netguru was able to teach us a process to understand these business owners thinking about risk, cash-flow, business growth and access to capital and has guided every aspect of our product.
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What’s next