Building Got Easy. This Startup Solves What to Build | Alfred Wahlforss, Listen Labs
Show notes
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 Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.com Flex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com 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 Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
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