Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss
Alfred Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO of Listen Labs, is building an AI agent that interviews your customers at a scale no focus group ever could—thousands of voice conversations at once, drawn from an audience of 30 million people. A year after launch, Listen serves hundreds of Fortune 100s to Startups including Microsoft, Google, NBC Universal, P&G, Anthropic, Cursor, and Cognition. Alfred explains the counterintuitive finding underneath it all: people are often more honest with an AI than a human interviewer, opening up to a non-judgmental entity that costs less and never makes them feel rushed. He walks through why interview transcripts—not credit card data or behavioral logs—turn out to be the richest fuel for predicting how customers will behave, how Listen back-tests its simulations to know which questions it can and can't answer, and why 80% of the company's engineering goes into building the right audience. As AGI makes building trivial, Alfred argues the scarce resource becomes knowing what to build. That's the loop Listen wants to own.
Building Got Easy. This Startup Solves What to Build | Alfred Wahlforss, Listen Labs
Alfred Wallforss is the Co-founder of Listen Labs, the AI customer research company.
Companies like Microsoft use Listen to run AI-powered customer interviews, and Alfred talks about how they first landed them as a customer at a pitch competition.
We talk why startups should pursue enterprise customers early on, why 85% of survey answers are random clicks, how AI is changing the $140B market research industry, leveraging VC’s for customer intros, how to stand out when recruiting as a startup, and hiring for obsession.
Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode
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Timestamps:
(0:14) Listen: AI customer research tool
(7:30) Fraud is a big problem in customer research
(9:06) The $140B customer survey industry
(12:08) Why running customer surveys is so hard
(16:03) AGI will never replace humans
(18:25) Surveys vs interviews
(21:13) Importance of emotion in data collection
(22:54) Using AI interviews to get product feedback
(26:15) Building digital twins creates better data
(32:22) Outperforming generic AI tools
(34:17) Sweetgreen’s Max Protein Bowl
(36:09) Jevon’s Paradox in customer research
(40:37) Quantitative vs qualitative
(42:38) Landing Microsoft as an early customer
(44:50) Targeting enterprise customers from day 1
(48:05) Building a VC customer intro leaderboard
(51:53) Recruiting with billboard games
(57:20) Hiring for obsession
(1:02:07) Alfred’s favorite movies
(1:03:53) Listen’s custom agent harness
(1:06:24) Velocity Fellowship for Swedes moving to SF
(1:08:34) Growing up with entrepreneurial older brother
(1:09:46) No shoes in the office
Referenced
Try Listen: https://listenlabs.ai/
Careers at Listen: https://listenlabs.ai/careers
Sweetgreen protein bowls: https://listenlabs.ai/case-studies/sweetgreen
Toni Erdmann: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4048272/
Episode with Erik @ Modal: https://www.thespl.it/p/building-ai-native-infrastructure
Follow Alfred
Twitter: https://x.com/itsalfredw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wahlforss
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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