Effortless remote user research
You know that talking to your users is essential, but until now it has been painfully complex. PingPong takes care of all the hard stuff and saves you days of work. So you can be interviewing users in minutes!
Kevin William David interviewed Zsolt Kocsmarszky, CEO at PingPong to know more.
Hi Zsolt, Can you tell us about what you are working on?
PingPong is a user research platform to easily find and schedule people from all over the world for user interviews and testing.
PingPong takes the pain out of user research by sourcing, recruiting, screening, scheduling, and simplifying other time-consuming administrative tasks.
Tell me more about why you are building this?
I used to work on a very niche B2B product where we conducted a lot of user research. Finding the right people, screening them, scheduling sessions, recording the interviews, storing them, transcribing videos and paying users an incentive was a massively, time-consuming process. This is also a very tedious process that caused a lot of headaches.
I was really surprised that there was not an integrated solution for these problems already, so I started building a product that allowed me to conduct the same remote user research much faster and in a more streamlined way. That’s how PingPong started 2 years ago.
How is PingPong different from what already exists in the market?
Imagine that you’d like to talk to people who will not only use your product, but you want to talk to people from Singapore and Thailand and Germany. You can do that within minutes, or a few hours at most, with PingPong.
Our process in entirely automated and more streamlined than anything on the market.
PingPong also focuses on the entire user research process from end to end. Our tool doesn’t just provide one of either recruiting or screening or scheduling or video calling, we have everything covered in one easy to use place. PingPong also runs in web browser and we’re keeping it affordable, especially when we’re talking about international user research.
Who uses PingPong? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?
PingPong’s main audience is UX professionals with a strong focus on user research: UX researchers, UX designers, and Product Managers. We’re specifically working with these people since they are already familiar with moderated research (when you have to be on a call with the user and talk to them); they know first-hand the tremendous value that PingPong can provide.
How are your customers using PingPong? Could you share a few different use cases?
One very typical use case is a customer who already has a big product and which is already on the international market. PingPong provides quick and easy access to lots of foreign users, users from Asia, Europe and America, for example. PingPong just makes it convenient to talk to people from these regions and conduct user interviews and user tests.
Another use case I often see is that product managers want to introduce a more consistent and leaner user research: talking to users regularly is something many user-focused companies are looking to do, but so far, the manual, slow, and time-consuming process couldn’t justify doing it. PingPong offers an integrated solution for this, and product managers and Heads of Product have found us invaluable.
Have there been unique use cases for PingPong that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
I was a bit surprised when a student who was pursuing UX studies contacted me for a user research he was assigned. I was pleased to see how well PingPong fitted for this, too. If I think about it, it shouldn’t be super surprising, but when I created PingPong, I wasn’t thinking that students might use it :)
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
I’m quite crazy about user research and I’ve interviewed over 100 UX researchers, UX designers, and product managers to learn even more about the research process. Having an even deeper understanding of the topic, more than just my own frustrating experiences as a designer, has definitely helped us to build a product that’s filling a gap in the research process.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
Figuring out what features to build and how to build them is a constant challenge. With more customers and more feedback, we’re improving on this day by day and now we have a much clearer understanding of the needs of the UX community. But at the beginning, when you have just a few people using your product, it was definitely tricky.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?
Implementing TokBox for our video calling feature was probably the most challenging. Their product is amazing but when it comes to integrating it, there is still a lot for you to figure out and that’s just a rabbit hole :) On the other hand, it was also the most impactful integration for our product. Now that we can host the video calls, we have so many more opportunities to provide greater value for our customers: recording the videos is trivial, but offering automatic transcriptions on 110+ languages and dialects is a massive feature.
What are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
- Trello — We use Trello to drive our product development. What I really love about Trello is that it’s like an operating system: you have basic elements that you can use in the way you’d like to use them. This makes it really powerful and gives you just enough flexibility but also limitations, which, at the same time, you need.
- Postmark — Since transaction emails are a critical part of our communication, having a clear overview about what’s going can help in unexpected ways. Postmark provides 100% transparency about your email messages that can be extremely valuable.
- HubSpot — HubSpot for sales is like Trello for product management. I’m really in love with HubSpot design and UX and I think they got a lot of the details just right. They make handling sales and leads fun and easy.
- Intercom — Their in-app chat is massively useful to help prospects and customers with day-to-day questions about using PingPong. Again, super fun and easy.
- Revolut Business — Revolut Business offers a 21st century alternative for traditional banking. Their product is simply amazing and you don’t have to deal with outdated ways of traditional banks anymore, which is a massive time saver. We have our bank accounts here and we have been super happy since then.
Originally published at siftery.com.
