Brandon Andrews is ready to help businesses grow. Andrews is the co-founder and chief product officer of Gauge, an AI-powered mobile market research platform.
Recently, Andrews spoke to rolling out about the app while in Austin, Texas, for SXSW.
What is Gauge?
Gauge is an enterprise cultural navigator. We help our big clients connect with the communities most important to them, understanding the trends and testing new products, services and offerings before they go live.
How do you do that?
We’ve built these mobile apps and a web app with users, influencers, experts and people that have something to share.
They apply to share their feedback, and once they share their feedback, we take the quantitative feedback. We also take qualitative feedback, so the data plus text, video, and audio messages we put on an analytics dashboard for our clients to take a look at so they understand what the communities they’re targeting care about so the communities have a voice when new products and services are created, which is incredibly important as we think about equity and inclusion.
The bottom line is we think about making sure the products and services created are actually what people want.
What gave you the insight to create such a company?
Entrepreneurs were creating new products, and new services and they were getting feedback from everyday folks, but they weren’t getting feedback from people who really move the needle when we talk about culture and trends.
With Gauge, we were able to recruit those folks who are really moving culture, setting the trends and getting them to share their feedback as part of the production process for new products and services. It ensures the new products and services that are created, is not only what the company thinks is great, but also what the community is going to think is valuable.
What’s it like moving around at SXSW?
SXSW is a huge event taking over just about all of Austin, Texas. Whether you go north, south, east, west, this side of the river, the other side, there are events all over. I think the key is finding your tribe, and being intentional about building connections.
Not getting so caught up in trying to go to everything, every house and every event, but making sure that when you meet someone, you actually have a good conversation with them and explore opportunities to build friendship, or to build some kind of business relationship. Yes, you want to do as much as possible and see all the cool stuff, but don’t forget the human piece, the relationships, which are always the most important. Whether that’s [for your]personal life or business life.
How were you able to finance your business?
We were able to finance the business from our founders. We all put in something, and then we were very fortunate that we were able to go to market early.
We built a simple product we were able to get into the market, and then bootstrap[ped it]from there.
