behavioural research
Behavioural Research Built for YC Batch Companies Moving Fast
You have weeks to prove retention, not months to run research. OpenScouter delivers structured behavioural data from real users so your team can fix the friction points that kill activation and expansion before your next board update.
YC Founders Need Evidence, Not Opinions
You are post-launch, pre-Series A, and every sprint decision carries weight. Your co-founders have strong instincts about the product. Your investors want to see NRR trending up. Your design lead is confident the onboarding flow is clear. But confident is not the same as correct, and instinct is not the same as evidence.
The problem is not that your team lacks opinions. The problem is that when a stakeholder pushes back on a proposed change, you have no behavioural data to settle the argument. Heatmaps show where users clicked. They do not show why a user stopped, what they said under their breath, or what their face did when they hit a confusing step in your activation sequence.
OpenScouter captures interaction signals, voice, and facial expression in parallel across the same session. The result is a correlated picture of where your product creates friction, not a single-channel guess. For a YC batch company, that means you walk into your next design review with structured evidence rather than a slide full of competing opinions.
Our approach
Three Streams, One Correlated Report
Every session captures clicks, scrolls, and rage clicks alongside a think-aloud voice track and locally processed facial expression signals. An AI pipeline correlates the three streams. A human researcher confirms the findings before the report leaves our platform. You receive structured, actionable output, not raw footage to interpret yourself.
Neurodivergent Testers as a Higher-Signal Panel
Our panel includes people with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, low vision, and other cognitive differences. They surface usability issues that neurotypical users overlook or tolerate silently. For a product in early growth, that means you find the friction that is quietly suppressing activation and expansion before it shows up in your churn numbers.
Remote and Fast, Without Sacrificing Rigour
Sessions run remotely. Recruitment, capture, and report delivery happen in days, not months. That cadence fits a YC batch sprint cycle. You can test a new onboarding variant, a pricing page, or a key workflow step and have findings in hand before the next weekly review.
What you receive
- A structured usability report covering the activation journey, key workflow steps, and any friction points identified across all three behavioural streams
- Timestamped session highlights showing the specific moments where users hesitated, raged-clicked, or expressed confusion
- A prioritised list of friction points mapped to your product funnel, from first login through to the actions that drive expansion revenue
- Voice transcript excerpts correlated with interaction events, so you can hear exactly what a user said at the moment they encountered a problem
- A human-confirmed summary written for a non-technical stakeholder, suitable for sharing with investors or a board update without further editing
Product-led growth SaaS companies grow 50 percent faster than sales-led peers when measured on net revenue retention
The OpenView Partners Product-Led Growth Index 2024 is directly relevant to YC batch companies because most YC-backed SaaS products are built on a product-led motion from day one. The finding about NRR advantage for PLG companies matters here because NRR is the metric your Series A investors will scrutinise most closely. If your product creates friction at activation or at the point where users should be expanding their usage, that friction suppresses the very metric that defines your fundraising trajectory. Behavioural research is one of the few tools that lets you identify and fix that friction before it compounds across your user base.
Frequently asked
- We already use Hotjar and Mixpanel. Why do we need this?
- Hotjar and Mixpanel tell you what users did. They do not tell you what users were thinking or feeling at the moment they did it. OpenScouter adds voice and facial expression to the interaction signal, so you can understand the why behind the behaviour. The two approaches are complementary, not competing.
- Our team is small. How much time does this take on our side?
- You provide a brief covering the flows you want tested and the questions you need answered. We handle recruitment, session facilitation, capture, AI correlation, and human review. The report arrives ready to act on. Most founding teams spend under two hours on their side across the full engagement.
- Who are the testers and how are they recruited?
- Our panel is made up of neurodivergent participants including people with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and low vision. They are recruited and consented through our platform. Because they notice friction that neurotypical users often tolerate, they function as a higher-signal usability panel, not just an accessibility panel.
- Is this relevant before we have significant user numbers?
- Yes. Behavioural research is most valuable before you have scaled a broken experience to thousands of users. Testing your activation flow, your first-run experience, or your expansion trigger with a small structured panel gives you directional evidence at a stage when quantitative analytics alone cannot tell you what to fix.
- How does OpenScouter handle privacy and data processing?
- Facial expression analysis runs on-device using local computer vision. Raw facial data is not transmitted to our servers. Voice and interaction data are handled under our data processing terms. We are a UK-based platform founded at Imperial College Business School in 2025 and we operate under applicable UK data protection law.
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Tell us about the vertical, the journey, and the evidence you need. We will scope a pilot in days, not weeks.