Methinks, a qualitative market research application, acquires a $7 million funding from key market players. The company will reportedly use the capital for its expansion into the international market, as well as further development of its services.
Methinks’ investors include high-level investors such as KB Investment and Hyundai Investment. Sema Translink, an “investment company specialized in supporting Korean venture enterprises’ overseas advancement,” led the activity.
Bumsoo Kim, a managing partner of Sema Translink, said in an interview that the group founded their investment on their belief in methinks’ co-founders, Philip Yun and Wilson Li’s, expertise in gathering customer insight.
“The combination of developing a solution to a long-time business problem and finding founders with this kind of credibility is key to building winning solutions now and tomorrow. We believe Methinks can make a big impact on the multi-trillion-dollar R&D industry,” Bumsoo Kim stated.
Philip Yun and Wilson Li, along with their peers around the globe, first introduced the software application in 2016. They described it as a video-based market research platform that allows companies to observe the behavior of willing individuals, called “Thinkers”. It has since become a hit among startups and large companies for providing them an avenue to understand their customers better.
According to Yun, during his interview with VentureBeat, the idea for the application came when they tried to predict the reaction of their users in their previous company.
Before methinks, Yun previously owned the gaming company Xoo. During game development, they relied solely on their intuition to predict the behavior of their customers. However, this method proved unreliable hence forcing them to develop a program that will help them connect with their market.
“We found out that we had a lot of assumptions that consumers would like our games, and it turns out they didn’t really like them. By the third game, we said we had to verify our concept and ideas before going out and putting a lot of engineering resources on it. We looked for solutions and made our own platform,” Yun said.
“You could have coffee with a user, but the logistics take so much time it doesn’t make sense for a startup. And other research platforms are very expensive. So we had the idea of coming up with people [to interview] based on what kind of apps or games they are using on their phones every day. We identify them, connect to them, and, with their permission, do a video chat with them. We show them our prototypes and watch how they use them,” he continued.
The SaaS-based platform provides subscribers with a platform to conduct live interviews, qualitative surveys, and longitudinal studies. It can provide insights, such as basic product usability, and personal product usage, which were once achievable only through long-term researches. Methinks is used by internationally-recognized companies such as LG, Samsung, Machine Zone, Verizon, Hyundai, and more.
Featured image grabbed from Methinks website.
