Isn't user research something we do later, once we've got more users or funding?

It's more useful earlier than most founders assume, because the cost of skipping it is highest when you have the least room to absorb a wrong bet. A week of interviews before you build is far cheaper than three months of engineering time spent on the wrong feature. It's not that research doesn't matter later — it's that early is when getting it wrong costs you the most relative to what you have.

What's the difference between user research and UX research?

User research tells you whether the problem you're solving is real and worth solving. UX research tells you whether what you've built actually solves it. Most founders need user research before building and UX research once something exists to test.

Why not just talk to users ourselves instead of hiring an agency?

You can, and you should be talking to customers regardless. Where an outside researcher tends to add the most value is in avoiding leading questions, catching things you're too close to the product to notice, and being able to run this alongside everything else you're already juggling, rather than it becoming the thing that keeps slipping.

How fast can this run before we ship or pitch to investors?

Depends on scope, but a focused round — interviews or usability testing plus a short synthesis — can typically run over one to two weeks rather than months. We'll give you a specific timeline once we know what decision it needs to inform and by when.

Do you only deliver research, or help us act on it?

Both, if you want. Because research sits alongside our wider work rather than in a separate part of the business, we can take findings directly into product, content or positioning decisions instead of handing over a report for you to interpret and action with limited time of your own.

SEO & AIO User & UX Research Insights Contact

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User & UX Research Agency: Reduce the Risk of Building the Wrong Thing

If you're building fast — and at pre-seed or seed stage, you generally have to — the biggest risk usually isn't moving too slowly. It's spending months of runway building the wrong feature, targeting the wrong customer, or shipping something the market doesn't actually want, because nobody checked before you committed engineering time to it. That's what user research and UX research are for: not a governance step for later, but a way to catch a wrong bet while it still only costs you a week, rather than a quarter.

What we mean by user research and UX research

The two terms overlap and get used interchangeably, but for a founder deciding what to spend time on, the distinction is genuinely useful — they de-risk different decisions.

User research — is this a problem worth solving?

Before you build anything, user research tells you whether the problem you think you're solving is one your target customers actually have, how they currently deal with it, and what would make them switch from whatever they're doing now — a competitor, a spreadsheet, doing nothing at all. Skipping this is the single most expensive mistake we see early-stage founders make, and it's rarely a build-quality problem. It's finding out, after the fact, that you built something well for a problem nobody was paying to have solved.

UX research — does what you've built actually solve it?

Once something exists — a prototype, an MVP, a live product — UX research tells you whether it actually works for the people using it: where they get stuck, what they misunderstand, what makes them drop off before converting. This is what tells the difference between "nobody's signing up because the product is wrong" and "nobody's signing up because step three of onboarding doesn't make sense" — two very different problems, with very different fixes and very different amounts of rebuilding required.

This page covers that open-ended research — building understanding rather than answering one fixed question. If you already have a live product and want a structured, one-off review of what's not working, our UX Audit is the better starting point. If you want an ongoing relationship or a single usability testing session, see UX Consultancy & Usability Testing.

Why founders skip research — and what it actually costs

Research has a reputation for being slow and expensive — something you do once you've got funding and headcount to spare, not something that fits a two-person founding team with eight months of runway. That reputation is mostly earned by agencies running the same process regardless of company size: a six-week engagement ending in a forty-page report nobody has time to act on.

The actual cost isn't the research. It's skipping it, and finding out three months and a meaningful chunk of runway later that you built the wrong thing, or that customers can't get past onboarding — and now you're rebuilding it anyway, just later, more expensively, and with less runway to recover from it.

How this fits around a startup, not the other way round

We size engagements to the decision, not to a standard package. That might mean a week of interviews before you commit engineering time to a feature, or a short round of usability testing before a launch or a fundraising demo — not a multi-month research programme built for a company with a research team of its own.

Because research isn't handed off to a separate part of the business, findings go straight into what you're actually deciding — what to build next, what to fix before launch, how to describe your customer accurately in the next pitch deck — rather than sitting in a report while you make the call anyway because you were out of runway to wait for it.

	Typical research agency process	Glisk Studio
Engagement length	Multi-week, fixed programme	Sized to the decision, days to a couple of weeks
Report format	Forty-page report	Short, focused findings you can act on
Who it's sized for	A company with a research team of its own	A two-person founding team with limited runway
Time from insight to decision	Sits in a report while you decide anyway	Goes straight into what you're deciding

What's included

User interviews — the fastest way to find out if the problem you're building for is real, before you spend engineering time on it.
Surveys — validating a theme at a scale interviews alone can't reach, useful when a decision needs more than one founder's gut feeling behind it.
Usability testing — run before a launch or a fundraising demo, so you're not finding out about a broken flow from a user, or worse, from an investor.
Card sorting and tree testing — useful once there's enough in the product for navigation and structure to genuinely matter.
Comparative and competitor research — how you actually compare to what your target customers are already using, not just your pitch deck's competitor slide.
Synthesis and reporting — short and focused, written for a founder deciding what to do next, not written to justify the research budget.

How we work

Scoping

Agreeing what decision this needs to inform, before agreeing the method, so you're not paying for a generic package regardless of the question.

Fieldwork

Interviews, testing or surveys, run by researchers rather than handed to junior staff following a script — sized to run in days or a couple of weeks, not months.

Synthesis

Findings pulled into clear, prioritised themes you can act on, not a transcript-by-transcript summary.

Embedding

Findings handed directly into the decision they affect, with our team involved in making the change where useful, not just recommending it and moving on.

Who this is for

This tends to work best for founders about to commit real time or money based on an assumption — before building a new feature, before a launch, before a fundraising round, before a pivot you can't easily walk back. If getting that decision wrong would cost you more runway than the research itself, that's usually the clearest sign it's worth doing.

Case Study

Tom, CD Unity

Modernising an ecommerce product's information architecture to match how customers actually shop.

Challenge

CD Unity's ecommerce product had grown organically over the years, with features and pages added on an as-needed basis. The result was an information architecture and page layout that no longer matched what customers expected from a modern shopping experience.

Approach

We ran card sorting exercises with prospects and existing customers to understand how they naturally grouped and expected to find products, then validated the resulting structure through task-based usability testing.

"Glisk Studio understood our needs and reached our prospect customers, delivering clear insight that changed how efficient our site was for users and increased our add to cart rate by 17%."
Tom, CD Unity

User & UX Research Agency: Reduce the Risk of Building the Wrong Thing

User & UX Research Agency: Reduce the Risk of Building the Wrong Thing

What we mean by user research and UX research

User research — is this a problem worth solving?

UX research — does what you've built actually solve it?

Why founders skip research — and what it actually costs

How this fits around a startup, not the other way round

What's included

How we work

Scoping

Fieldwork

Synthesis

Embedding

Who this is for

Tom, CD Unity

Challenge

Approach

Frequently asked questions