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OpinionX is a research tool that helps teams to discover and rank the most important problems, ideas or priorities according to any group of people. We help product, design and community teams to better understand the people that matter most to them so that they can make better informed decisions.
Tell us about yourself?
The co-founders of OpinionX are Daniel Kyne (CEO) and Darragh O’Flaherty (CTO). Daniel and Darragh met as undergraduates in DCU, where Daniel was studying Marketing, Innovation & Technology and Darragh was studying Computer Applications; Software Engineering. Both graduated in May 2020.
About Daniel:
I’m the Co-Founder & CEO of OpinionX. I’m from a small town called Kilcock in County Kildare. Prior to OpinionX, I was Digital & Innovation Lead at Unilever UK, Head of Speakers & Startups at Dublin Tech Summit, Global Facilitator at Techstars, Founding Member of the Digital Youth Council of Ireland, and a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum.
About Darragh:
Darragh is the Co-Founder & CTO of OpinionX. Born and raised in Clontarf, Darragh previously worked as a Software Engineer at Cellusys and startup GiveBack.ie, which was backed by Google.org. He was also a Deliberation Assistant at the Citizens’ Assembly of Ireland from 2016 to 2019.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I had experienced the challenge of understanding people’s needs at scale a bunch of times before founding OpinionX. I was Digital & Innovation Lead at Unilever UK, where I won a consumer research award and led multiple innovation and data strategy projects for some of the biggest consumer brands in the world.
I became a Global Facilitator with Techstars when I was 19, which led to me hosting entrepreneurship events and hackathons all across Europe for years. In this role with Techstars I ran customer discovery and idea validation workshops for well over 1,500 people.
As a founding member of The Digital Youth Council of Ireland, I worked on projects to understand the views of young people across Ireland towards STEM and education related issues. During each of these experiences (and more), I learned first-hand that the tools we have today just don’t enable you to understand what people need when you’re working at a large scale with huge groups.
This translated perfectly to OpinionX, where our product helps teams everywhere from Ivy League universities and big pharma companies to some of the most innovative web3 and technology startups around the world.
What is your magic sauce?
We’ve built a way to compare any list of opinions, whether that’s 10 or 1,000 statements, and understanding their importance by just asking participants to vote on 10 of them.
We’ve done this by building a unique data science methodology called Probabilistic Pairwise Comparison — a model that has never been done by any other group before. This unique model is what has enabled us to build a tool that’s unlike anything else out there.
Where do you see your company going in 5 years time?
In our first year, we’ve already powered better research for over 1,000 companies like Adidas, Canva and Instacart. Over the next 5 years, we’re planning to turn OpinionX from a tool you roll out for individual projects to a platform that continuously gathers and understands how people’s needs and priorities change over time.
This opens up a huge about of opportunities for us; from needs-based segmentation to trend analysis to priority analytics. We’re excited for all the possibilities this technology has!
What has been your biggest setback so far?
It was really difficult at first to explain what OpinionX was, how it worked and when people should use it. It took us about 6-months from launch to actually figure all this out and we’re still improving every day.
When you’re building something that’s completely new and unlike anything else out there, it’s tempting to invent a bunch of new words to describe what you do. Once we talked to our best customers and learned more about how they described OpinionX, that was what helped us to really nail the messaging we’ve been using ever since.
What is the next big challenge for your business?
Our next big challenge is raising investment! We’re in the process of raising a funding round right now and a bunch of the money committed so far has come from our own users and customers, which has been really exciting and encouraging to see.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
OpinionX is completely free to use! We have a paid version with extra features, but there’s nothing stopping you from jumping in and creating your first stack ranking survey in just a few minutes. Head over to www.opinionx.co to give it a go.
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