Startups are nothing like big companies. Their approach to UX research is, and should be, very different from what at big companies do.

Startups live in the zero-to-one phase. Peter Thiel coined the term in his airport blockbuster book called —you guessed it— Zero-to-One. It defines the first phase in the life of a startup: from idea to live.

While the terminology varies, most UX research can be classified into two groups:

• Generative research
• Evaluative research

“Generative research (sometimes called foundational, exploratory, or (as in this Field Guide) discovery research) helps researchers gain a deep and highly detailed understanding of the target audience, the market, and even internal project goals. […] Evaluative research is used to evaluate people’s responses to a product or solution.” — User Interviews

Generative research is great at the start, to dive deep into user problems. Evaluative research is useful at getting feedback on existing prototypes or live products.

Big companies separate them and mostly focus on evaluative research. While that works for them, it’s not useful during the zero-to-one phase. I’ll tell you why.

You see, big companies get big, not because they dupe investors, but because they find a market and a way to make the stuff it wants, at a profit. They have product-market fit, and now that they’re big, their goal is to improve their existing products.

“Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together.” ― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

B2B startups, on the other hand, live in the zero-to-one zone. They have no market nor customer base. They haven’t found product-market fit. Once they do, their main concern becomes growth. Until then, their UX research should focus on deeply understanding user problems.

There’s a fallacy in the startup world of thinking that “oh, if it works for {insert big co. name} it’ll work for me!” — it might, but most likely it won’t. And it won’t work for a number of reasons.

One reason is that Big Co. already has a user base that’s familiar with their product. Incremental changes can be compared against a control group and improvements or degradations can be measured. Startups don’t usually have that baseline and, if they do, it’s hard to determine whether a change in some number is statistically significant or random.

Another reason is that Big Co. can deploy a team of researchers to carry out many customer conversations in parallel. A startup, however, usually has a single designer who has to book, conduct, summarize and share findings alone. Moreover, any time spent doing that is time away from other areas of design work.

Thirdly, and like I mentioned before, Big Co. is not worried about disruptive innovation. They care about dominating their space by ever increasing their market share. They do this by gradually tackling adjacent problems to their core product, not by moving into different markets.

Startups are small and scrappy. That’s a double-edge sword. While it’s true they don’t have the resources of larger companies, their tiny size makes them nimble and allows them to pivot really fast in the light of new knowledge.

Rather than building a convoluted infrastructure with many moving parts, I’m a big proponent of being practical. You probably already have all the tools you need to implement an effective strategic UX research process.

Rather than splitting generative and evaluative research, or focusing primarily on the evaluative part, it’s helpful to organically combine both types and to do it continuously.

By holding frequent check-ins with your customers, you build relationships that encourage them to share their challenges beyond mere product feedback. Identifying these challenges is key to strengthen your product’s value proposition.

Sharing your findings with the rest of the team can spark conversations on framing user challenges as opportunities. Even if you’re a solo designer, you shouldn’t work alone.

Simple goes a long way

Instead of investing in specialized tools that cost money and take time to learn, use Notion or Google Docs.

Once you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be in a better position to choose a specific tool to improve your workflow.

The approach I’ve been following for the past few years is simple:

1. Make a list and reach out to existing customers (Notion, email)
2. Have casual conversations, not interviews (generative + evaluative research)
3. Have recurring check-ins
4. Maintain a simple database with insights (Notion)
5. Share the knowledge with your team (Slack and team meetings)

A lot of guides focus on what so and so big company does to leverage research across a 2,000+ people product department. But like I mentioned, those processes don’t apply to the large majority of B2B startups.

Rather than getting paralyzed thinking you need some perfect process, start simple, with the tools you already have and tweak things as you go.