The research platform where everything is built in and nothing is bolted on - recruit, test and analyze user research in one place, with AI doing the busywork.
There is a familiar shape to software startups, and it goes like this: raise a seed round, raise a Series A, spend the money buying customers faster than you can serve them, and hope the whole thing outruns the burn. PlaybookUX did approximately none of that. Founded in 2018 by Lindsey Allard and Kristen Giovanniello, the company sells user-experience research software - the kind of tool that lets a product team watch a real person get confused by their checkout flow - and it built the business the boring way. It charged customers money. It kept them. It reinvested. By 2024 that boring way had produced roughly $6.5 million in annual revenue, up from about $3.2 million the year before, and more than 300 customers, without any meaningful venture capital.
This is worth pausing on, because the market PlaybookUX competes in is not a quiet one. UserTesting, the incumbent, sells annual contracts that reportedly start around $30,000 and average closer to $50,000. Maze raised piles of venture money to make prototype testing fast and lightweight. There are at least a dozen well-funded tools with names like Userlytics, Optimal Workshop, Dovetail and dscout, all fighting over the same design teams. Into that crowd walked a bootstrapped New York company whose pitch was, roughly, "what if you didn't have to buy five tools, and what if it didn't cost $30,000?"
The "everything built in" part is the actual product thesis. UX research, done properly, is a chain of annoying steps: figure out who to talk to, find those people, schedule them, pay them, run the session, record it, transcribe it, tag the interesting moments, and then write up something a stakeholder will read. Most tools do one or two links of that chain and leave you to stitch the rest together with spreadsheets and calendar invites. PlaybookUX tried to own the whole chain. It maintains a panel of vetted testers numbering in the millions, handles the recruiting and the incentive payments, provides the video conferencing for live interviews, and then hands you transcripts, highlight reels, heat maps and a searchable repository at the other end.
The clever move - and the timing was good - was putting AI on top of the analysis. The platform will transcribe your sessions, gauge sentiment, summarize each task, draft an executive report with suggested next steps, and even generate synthetic personas. The point is not that the machine replaces the researcher. The point is that it fires the note-taker. The tedious middle of research, the part where a human watches eight hours of footage and types quotes into a doc, is exactly the part software is good at. What is left for the humans is deciding what any of it means, which is the part worth paying people for.
The reason teams consolidate onto PlaybookUX is mundane and powerful: when every method lives in the same place, you run richer studies because the friction to start one disappears.
Participants complete tasks on your site, app or prototype while thinking aloud - recorded for you to review later.
Built-in video conferencing with recording, scheduling and incentives for live one-on-one sessions.
Millions of vetted testers, in-product intercepts and a participant CRM to reach your exact target users.
Open, closed and hybrid card sorts plus tree testing to validate information architecture and navigation.
Logic-driven surveys, first-click testing, five-second tests and preference testing for fast signal.
Behavioral recordings of real sessions with AI-generated summaries and heat maps.
Transcription, tagging, sentiment, highlight reels, AI executive reports and a searchable insights repository.
Test prototypes and gather analytics right where designers already work.
Approximate figures, per public reporting (Starter Story, GetLatka). Bootstrapped - no significant venture funding.
Went from product manager to founder, and was part of the first graduating class of the Quantic MBA program. She has been outspoken about the funding gap women founders face - and built a company that didn't need the funding to prove the point.
Co-launched PlaybookUX in New York in 2018, helping shape a platform built around a simple frustration: user research had too many disconnected tools and not enough time left for actual insight.
Product managers, designers, researchers and marketers - from startups to enterprises. Publicly referenced customers include:
What makes that list interesting is not the logos themselves but what they imply. Enterprises do not adopt research tools casually - they demand SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR compliance, SAML single sign-on and airtight consent handling. PlaybookUX carries all of it despite running lean, which is the quiet, unglamorous work that turns a scrappy startup into something a Fortune 500 procurement team will actually sign off on. Security isn't a feature here so much as the ticket into the room.