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5 things you need to win your first customer
A startup is a beautiful thing. It’s the tangible outcome of an idea birthed in a garage or on the back of a napkin. But ask any founder what really proves their startup has taken off, and they will almost instantly say it’s when they win their first customer.
That’s easier said than done, though, because winning that first customer will take a lot more than an Ivy-educated founder and/or a celebrity investor pool.
To begin with, you’ll have to craft a strong ideal customer profile to know your customer’s pain points, while developing a competitive SWOT analysis to scope out alternatives your customers can go to.
Your target customer will pick a solution that will help them achieve their goals. In other words, your goals should align with your customer’s goals.
You’ll also need to create a shortlist of influencers who have your customer’s trust, identify their decision-makers who make the call to buy (or not), and create a mapped list of goals that align your customer’s goals to yours.
Understanding and executing on these things can guarantee you that first customer win, provided you do them well and with sincerity. Your investors will also see the fruits of your labor and be comforted knowing their dollars are at good work.
Let’s see how:
1. Craft the ideal customer profile (ICP)
The ICP is a great framework for figuring out who your target customer is, how big they are, where they operate, and why they exist. As you write up your ICP, you will soon see the pain points you assumed about them start to become more real.
To create an ICP, you will need to have a strong articulation of the problem you are trying to solve and the customers that experience this problem the most. This will be your baseline hypothesis. Then, as you develop your ICP, keep testing your baseline hypothesis to weed out inaccurate assumptions.
Getting crystal clear here will set you up with the proper launchpad. No shortcuts.
Here’s how to get started:
- Develop an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) framework.
- Identify three target customers that fit your defined ICP.
- Write a problem statement for each identified target customer.
- Prioritize the problem statement that resonates with your product the most.
- Lock on the target customer of the prioritized problem statement.
Practice use case:
You are the co-founder at an upcoming SaaS startup focused on simplifying the shopping experience in car showrooms so buyers enjoy the process. What would your ICP look like?
2. Develop the SWOT
The SWOT framework cannot be overrated. This is a great structure to articulate who your competitors are and how you show up against them. Note that your competitors can be direct or indirect (as an alternative), and it’s important to categorize these buckets correctly.
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5 UX design research mistakes you can stop making today
Jason Buhle is a professor in the online Master of Science in the Applied Psychology program at the University of Southern California and Director of UX Strategy at AnswerLab, the largest independent consultancy exclusively focused on UX research.
A recent article in Entrepreneur magazine listed “inadequate testing” as the top reason why startups fail. Inadequate testing essentially means inadequate or sub-par user research that leads to poor UX design which, not surprisingly, usually ends in failure. While working with startups and tech companies, I have also seen how even when people know how important user research is, they may not necessarily know how to conduct it in optimal ways.
Let’s look, then, at some of the biggest UX research mistakes companies make and what I wish I had known when I first started.
Conduct UX research early and throughout product development
When considering any potential product or service, it’s best to get certain questions answered as soon as possible. Is it actually going to be something useful and feasible for the target users and their organizations? Are your initial; assumptions correct? Ideas that seem good at first may not seem so great after research, and many commonly criticized failures were likely results of insufficient research. This is why it’s vital to begin user research early before product development has even begun.
While it is important to conduct foundational research early on, you also want to make sure to conduct evaluative research by continuously testing your product as you build or upgrade it. One of the reasons why Google products product like Gmail or YouTube are relatively easy to use for most people is that Google has teams continuously testing their products, making sure that their users know where to find what they’re looking for.
Don’t do all of the user research yourself
One of the mistakes I see many startups and entrepreneurs make (and that I myself made early on) is doing all of the UX research themselves. In some ways, books like “Lean Startup” have bolstered this tendency by stressing the need to “get out of the building” and get to know your users. In itself this isn’t a bad idea—it’s good to know who your users are and to build empathy for their experiences. Likewise, this isn’t to say that you should not do any research yourselves.
However, you also want to be sure to complement that by having professional, third party UX researchers do research for you as well. When you are heavily invested in your research, as you invariably would be if it is your own product, it is difficult to conduct it in an unbiased way. And when your research participants know that you are asking them about your own project, they are not likely to provide you with good signal that can actually help you improve your product.
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SAP continues to build out customer experience business with Emarsys acquisition
SAP seemed to be all in on customer experience when it acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion in 2018. It continued on that journey today when it announced it was acquiring Austrian cloud marketing company Emarsys for an undisclosed amount of money.
Emarsys, which raised over $55 million according to PitchBook data, gives SAP customer personalization technology. If you spoke to any marketing automation vendor over the last several years, the focus has been on using a variety of data and touch points to understand the customer better, and deliver more meaningful online experiences.
With the pandemic closing or limiting access to brick and mortar stores, personalization has taken a new urgency as customers are increasingly shopping online and companies need to meet them where they are.
With Emarsys, the company is getting an omnichannel marketing solution that they say is designed to deliver messages to customers wherever they are, including e-mail, mobile, social, SMS and the web, and deliver that at scale.
When SAP announced it was spinning out Qualtrics a couple of months ago, just 20 months after buying it, it left some question about whether SAP was fully committed to the customer experience business.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that the acquisition shows that SAP is still very much in the game. “This illustrates that SAP is serious about CX and competing in a highly competitive space. Emarsys adds industry-specific customer engagement capabilities that should help SAP CX customers accelerate their efforts to provide their customers with the experiences they expect as their needs change over time,” Leary told TechCrunch.
As an ERP company at its core, SAP has traditionally focused on back-office kinds of operations. But Bob Stutz, president, SAP Customer Experience, sees this acquisition as a way to continue bringing back-office and front-office operations together.
“With Emarsys technology, SAP Customer Experience solutions can link commerce signals with the back office and activate the preferred channel of the customer with a relevant and consistently personalized message, allowing customers the freedom to choose their own engagement,” Stutz said in a statement.
The company, which is based in Austria, was founded back in 2000, when marketing was a very different world. It has built a customer base of 1,500 companies with 800 employees in 13 offices across the globe. All of this will become part of SAP, of course, and come under Stutz’s purview.
As with all transactions of this type it will be subject to regulatory approval, but the deal is expected to close this quarter.
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Why is SAP spinning Qualtrics out via an IPO?
Over the weekend, software giant SAP announced that it will take Qualtrics public, with the German software company retaining a majority stake in the Utah-based “experience management” firm after its forthcoming debut.
SAP paid $8 billion in cash for Qualtrics back in 2018, right before the smaller firm was set to go public. Chatting with the CEOs of both companies around the time of the deal, they were pretty pumped about the combination. Since then, SAP has swapped CEOs.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
At the time, the deal not only made waves within the business realm, it also helped put Utah’s startup scene on the map. (An $8 billion deal makes an impact.)
Current commentary on the spin-out idea seems to rotate on the idea of unlocking value: That if SAP can float a good chunk of Qualtrics’ shares, the market may give that equity a good price. Then, the value of Qualtrics that SAP will retain will gain implicit value, perhaps boosting the value of its own shares. Making the point, CNBC quoted analysts from Bernstein Research, which said it believes “many SAP investors do not fully understand Qualtrics,” and that the spin-out might “help at least as it relates to better understanding its value.”
What is Qualtrics worth? If we can understand that, we’ll know if the current commentary regarding the spin-out makes sense. So this morning, let’s remind ourselves how big Qualtrics was heading into its IPO, what it might have been worth, how much it has have grown since and what that might be worth at today’s super-high software valuations.
Did SAP overpay? Did it get a deal? Let’s find out what Qualtrics might look like in 2020.
2018
Before SAP stole it from the public markets, Qualtrics was looking for $18 to $21 per share on the public markets, valuing the company at around $3.9 billion to $4.5 billion. SAP had to pay up for Qualtrics stock, obviously, to get the deal done given how hot the Utah-based firm was at the time.
Qualtrics had growth and profits, two things that combine to create lots and lots of market value. Here are some key Qualtrics numbers from the time:
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T4 wants to transform market research data with a combination of AI and humans
When T4 co-founder and CEO Maks Khurgin was working at Bain and Company, he ran into a common problem for analysts looking for market data. He spent way too much time searching for it and felt there had to be a better way. He decided to build a centralized market data platform himself, and T4 was born. This week the company competes in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield.
What he created with the help of his long-time friend and CTO, Yev Spektor, was built on a couple of key components. The first is an industry classification system, a taxonomy, that organizes markets by industries and sub-industries. Using search and aggregation tools powered by artificial intelligence, it scours the web looking for information sources that match their taxonomy labels.
As they researched the tool, the founders realized that the AI could only get them so far. There were always pieces that it missed. So they built a second part to provide a way for human indexers to fill in those missing parts to offer as comprehensive a list of sources as possible.
“AI alone cannot solve this problem. If we bring people into this and avoid the last mile delivery problem, then you can actually start organizing this information in a much better way than anyone else had ever done,” Khurgin explained.
It seems simple enough, but it’s a problem that well-heeled companies like Bain have been trying to solve for years, and there was a lot of skepticism when Khurgin told his superiors he was leaving to build a product to solve this problem. “I had a partner at Bain and Company actually tell me, “You know, every consulting firm has tried to do something like this — and they failed. Why do you think you can do this?””
He knew that figuring out the nature of the problem and why the other attempts had failed was the key to solving the puzzle. He decided to take the challenge, and on his 30th birthday, he quit his job at Bain and started T4 the next day — without a product yet, mind you.
This was not the first time he had left a high-paying job to try something unconventional. “Last time I left a high paying job, actually after undergrad, I was a commodities derivatives trader for a financial [services company]. I left that to pursue a lifelong dream of being in the Marine Corps,” Khurgin said.
T4 was probably a less risky proposition, but it still took a leap of faith that only a startup founder can understand, who believes in his idea. “I felt the problem first-hand, and the the big kind of realization that I had was that there is actually a finite amount of information out there. Market research is created by humans, and you don’t necessarily have to take a pure AI approach,” he said.
The product searches for all of the related information on a topic, finds all of the data related to a category and places it in an index. Users can search by topic and find all of the free and paid reports related to that search. The product shows which reports are free and which will cost you money, and like Google, you get a title and a brief summary.
The company is just getting started with five main market categories so far, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking, data centers and eSports. The founders plan to add additional categories over time, and have a bold goal for the future.
“Our long-term vision is that we become your one-stop shop to find market research in the same way that if you need to buy something, you go to Amazon, or you need financial data, you go on Bloomberg or Thomson. If you need market research, our vision is that T4 is the place that you go,” Khurgin said.
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Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt is coming to TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise to discuss customer experience management
There are few topics as hot right now in the enterprise as customer experience management, that ability to collect detailed data about your customers, then deliver customized experiences based on what you have learned about them. To help understand the challenges companies face building this kind of experience, we are bringing Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt to TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise on September 5 in San Francisco (p.s. early-bird sales end this Friday, August 9).
At the root of customer experience management is data — tons and tons of data. It may come from the customer journey through a website or app, basic information you know about the customer or the customer’s transaction history. It’s hundreds of signals and collecting that data in order to build the experience where Reinhardt’s company comes in.
Segment wants to provide the infrastructure to collect and understand all of that data. Once you have that in place, you can build data models and then develop applications that make use of the data to drive a better experience.
Reinhardt, and a panel that includes Qualtrics’ Julie Larson-Green and Adobe’s Amit Ahuja, will discuss with TechCrunch editors the difficulties companies face collecting all of that data to build a picture of the customer, then using it to deliver more meaningful experiences for them. See the full agenda here.
Segment was born in the proverbial dorm room at MIT when Reinhardt and his co-founders were students there. They have raised more than $280 million since inception. Customers include Atlassian, Bonobos, Instacart, Levis and Intuit .
Early-bird tickets to see Peter and our lineup of enterprise influencers at TC Sessions: Enterprise are on sale for just $249 when you book here; but hurry, prices go up by $100 after this Friday!
Are you an early-stage startup in the enterprise-tech space? Book a demo table for $2,000 and get in front of TechCrunch editors and future customers/investors. Each demo table comes with four tickets to enjoy the show.
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Mobile messaging financial advisory service Stackin’ adds banking features and raises cash
When Stackin’ initially pitched itself as part of the Techstars Los Angeles accelerator program two years ago, the company was a video platform for financial advice targeting a millennial audience too savvy for traditional advisory services.
Now, nearly two years later, the company has pivoted from video to text-based financial advice for its millennial audience and is offering a new spin on lead generation for digital banks.
The company has launched a new, no-fee, checking and savings account feature in partnership with Radius Bank, which offers users a 1% annual percentage yield on deposits.
And Stackin’ has raised $4 million in new cash from Experian Ventures, Dig Ventures and Cherry Tree Investments, along with supplemental commitments from new and previous investors including Social Leverage, Wavemaker Partners and Mucker Capital.
“Stackin’ has a unique and highly effective approach to connect and communicate with an entire generation of younger consumers around finance,” said Ty Taylor, group president of Global Consumer Services at Experian, in a statement.
Founded two years ago by Scott Grimes, the former founder of Uproxx Media, and Kyle Arbaugh, who served as a senior vice president at Uproxx, Stackin’ initially billed itself as the Uproxx of personal finance.
It turns out that consumers didn’t want another video platform.
“Stackin’ is fundamentally changing the shape and context of what a financial relationship means by creating a fun, inclusive and judgement free environment that empowers our users to learn and take action through messaging,” said Scott Grimes, CEO and co-founder of Stackin’, in a statement. “This funding allows us to build out new features around banking and investing that will enhance the relationship with our customers.”
Later this fall the company said it would launch a new investment feature that will encourage Stackin’ users to participate in the stock market. It’s likely that this feature will look something like the Acorns model, which encourages users to invest in diversified financial vehicles to get them acquainted with the stock market before enabling individual trades on stocks.
According to Grimes, the company made the switch from video to text in March 2018 and built a custom messaging platform on Twilio to service the company’s 500,000 users.
“In a short time, we have built a large customer base with a demographic that is typically hard to reach. Having financial institutions like Experian come on board as an investor is a testament that this model is working,” Grimes wrote in an email.
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Qualtrics’ Julie Larson-Green will talk experience management at TC Sessions: Enterprise
We’re less than two months out from our first TC Sessions: Enterprise event, which is happening in San Francisco on September 5, and did you know our buy-one-get-one-free sale ends today too! Among the many enterprise and startup executives that’ll join us for the event is Qualtrics’ Julie Larson-Green. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s most likely because you remember her from her 25 years at Microsoft. After a successful career in Redmond, Larson-Green left Microsoft in 2017 to become the chief experience officer at SAP’s Qualtrics .
In that role, she’s perfect for our panel about — you guessed it — experience management.
Larson-Green joined Microsoft as a program manager for Visual C++ back in 1993. After moving up the ladder inside the company, she oversaw the launch of Windows 7 and became the co-lead of Microsoft’s hardware, games, music and entertainment division in 2013. At the time, she was seen as a potential replacement for then-CEO Steve Ballmer .
Later, during a period of reshuffling at the company in the wake of the Nokia acquisition, she became the chief experience officer of Microsoft’s Applications and Services group.
Larson-Green joined Qualtrics before it was acquired by SAP for $8 billion in cash. Qualtrics offers a number of products that range from customer experience tools to brand tracking and ad testing services, as well as employee research products for gathering feedback about managers, for example. At the core of its product is an analytics engine that helps businesses make sense of their employee and customer data, which in turn should help them optimize their customer experience scores and reduce employee attrition rates.
Our buy-one-get-one-free ticket deal ends today! Book a ticket for just $249 and you can bring a buddy for free. Book here before this deal ends.
We’re still selling startup demo tables, and each package comes with four tickets. Learn more here.
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Focaldata thinks it has some answers for campaigners in the age of Trump and Brexit
Political parties, campaigns and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes of our age.
But one thing is clear: All the players want faster, cheaper, more accurate and a more granular understanding of consumers and voters. In the age of AI, survey predictions are influenced as much as so many other machine-learning technology products.
Focaldata is a U.K. startup that thinks it has some of the answers to these quandaries. Their integrated consumer analytics and survey workflow application claims to give customers a more accurate and granular picture of consumers than traditional polling using machine learning. At the same time, they say their workflow software cuts down on the cost and time that market research takes.
The idea is that they employ a new machine learning-based technique (MRP) to generate survey “results.” This new methodology can use more information (such as old survey data or public statistics) than conventional methods, which lets them get accurate predictions in small geographic areas from the same sample sizes.
Founder Justin Ibbett had done MRP manually on his laptop a few times for some existing market research firms and realized how fiddly it was. “I felt a dedicated software application would reduce the complexity whilst making the results more accessible and useful — our early incarnations just delivered a spreadsheet!” he told me.
Much of Focaldata’s business has been in politics. They have worked with the pro-Remain group Best for Britain and the anti-Racism charity Hope not Hate on combating Far Right sentiment. However, most demand is now from large brand owners, such as ABInBev, a recent client.
They now have more than 10 paying clients, including big brands like M&C Saatchi.
Competitors include YouGov, Survation, Dalia Research (a Balderton-backed company) and standard market research agencies like Kantar and Ipsos Mori.
But against traditional agencies, Ibbett says their ML-based data processing engine sets them apart, allowing them to go very granular and get more accurate over time.
The market research market is £5 billion in the U.K. alone (PwC report, 2016) and global market research is a $40 billion market.
The startup has raised a £1.1 million seed round from notable U.K. angels, including Alex Chesterman, founder of Zoopla and Martin Bolland, founder of Alchemy Partners. Previously they raised a small pre-seed round from three other angels, including Xen Lategan (backer of Magic Pony and ex-Google, former CTO of News International).
CTO and co-founder Calvin Dudek was at Google for five years as a product manager, and ran Data Science Innovation at the DWP. Chief Data Scientist Takao Noguchi is a cognitive scientist.
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Senator Warner calls on Zuckerberg to support market research consent rules
In response to TechCrunch’s investigation of Facebook paying teens and adults to install a VPN that lets it analyze all their phone’s traffic, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. It admonishes Facebook for not spelling out exactly which data the Facebook Research app was collecting or giving users adequate information necessary to determine if they should accept payment in exchange for selling their privacy. Following our report, Apple banned Facebook’s Research app from iOS and shut down its internal employee-only workplace apps too as punishment, causing mayhem in Facebook’s office.
Warner wrote to Zuckerberg, “In both the case of Onavo and the Facebook Research project, I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook’s data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection. Facebook’s apparent lack of full transparency with users – particularly in the context of ‘research’ efforts – has been a source of frustration for me.”
Warner is working on writing new laws to govern data collection initiatives like Facebook Research. He asks Zuckerberg, “Will you commit to supporting legislation requiring individualized, informed consent in all instances of behavioral and market research conducted by large platforms on users?”
Senator Blumenthal’s fierce statement
Meanwhile, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) provided TechCrunch with a fiery statement regarding our investigation. He calls Facebook anti-competitive, which could fuel calls to regulate or break up Facebook, says the FTC must address the issue and that he’s planning to work with congress to safeguard teens’ privacy:
“Wiretapping teens is not research, and it should never be permissible. This is yet another astonishing example of Facebook’s complete disregard for data privacy and eagerness to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Instead of learning its lesson when it was caught spying on consumers using the supposedly ‘private’ Onavo VPN app, Facebook rebranded the intrusive app and circumvented Apple’s attempts to protect iPhone users. Facebook continues to demonstrate its eagerness to look over everyone’s shoulder and watch everything they do in order to make money.
Mark Zuckerberg’s empty promises are not enough. The FTC needs to step up to the plate, and the Onavo app should be part of its investigation. I will also be writing to Apple and Google on Facebook’s egregious behavior, and working in Congress to make sure that teens are protected from Big Tech’s privacy intrusions.”
Senator Markey says stop surveiling teens
And finally, Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA) requests that Facebook stop recruiting teens for its Research program, and notes he’ll push his “Do Not Track Kids” act in Congress:
“It is inherently manipulative to offer teens money in exchange for their personal information when younger users don’t have a clear understanding how much data they’re handing over and how sensitive it is. I strongly urge Facebook to immediately cease its recruitment of teens for its Research Program and explicitly prohibit minors from participating. Congress also needs to pass legislation that updates children’s online privacy rules for the 21st century. I will be reintroducing my ‘Do Not Track Kids Act’ to update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by instituting key privacy safeguards for teens.
But my concerns also extend to adult users. I am alarmed by reports that Facebook is not providing participants with complete information about the extent of the information that the company can access through this program. Consumers deserve simple and clear explanations of what data is being collected and how it being used.”
The senators’ statements do go a bit overboard. Though Facebook Research was aggressively competitive and potentially misleading, Blumenthal calling it “anti-competitive” is a stretch. And Warner’s questioning on whether “any user reasonably understood that they were giving Facebook root device access through the enterprise certificate” or that it uses the data to track competitors oversteps the bounds. Surely some savvy technologists did, but the question is whether all the teens and everyone else understood.
Facebook isn’t the only one paying users to analyze all their phone data. TechCrunch found that Google had a similar program called Screenwise Meter. Though it was more upfront about it, Google also appears to have violated Apple’s employee-only Enterprise Certificate rules. We may be seeing the start to an industry-wide crack down on market research surveillance apps that dangle gift cards in front of users to get them to give up a massive amount of privacy.
Warner’s full letter to Zuckerberg can be found below:
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:
I write to express concerns about allegations of Facebook’s latest efforts to monitor user activity. On January 29th, TechCrunch revealed that under the auspices of partnerships with beta testing firms, Facebook had begun paying users aged 13 to 35 to install an enterprise certificate, allowing Facebook to intercept all internet traffic to and from user devices. According to subsequent reporting by TechCrunch, Facebook relied on intermediaries that often “did not disclose Facebook’s involvement until users had begun the signup process.” Moreover, the advertisements used to recruit participants and the “Project Disclosure” make no mention of Facebook or the commercial purposes to which this data was allegedly put.
This arrangement comes in the wake of revelations that Facebook had previously engaged in similar efforts through a virtual private network (VPN) app, Onavo, that it owned and operated. According to a series of articles by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook used Onavo to scout emerging competitors by monitoring user activity – acquiring competitors in order to neutralize them as competitive threats, and in cases when that did not work, monitor usage patterns to inform Facebook’s own efforts to copy the features and innovations driving adoption of competitors’ apps. In 2017, my staff contacted Facebook with questions about how Facebook was promoting Onavo through its Facebook app – in particular, framing the app as a VPN that would “protect” users while omitting any reference to the main purpose of the app: allowing Facebook to gather market data on competitors.
Revelations in 2017 and 2018 prompted Apple to remove Onavo from its App Store in 2018 after concluding that the app violated its terms of service prohibitions on monitoring activity of other apps on a user’s device, as well as a requirement to make clear what user data will be collected and how it will be used. In both the case of Onavo and the Facebook Research project, I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook’s data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection.
Facebook’s apparent lack of full transparency with users – particularly in the context of ‘research’ efforts – has been a source of frustration for me. As you recall, I wrote the Federal Trade Commission in 2014 in the wake of revelations that Facebook had undertaken a behavioral experiment on hundreds of thousands of users, without obtaining their informed consent. In submitted questions to your Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, I once again raised these concerns, asking if Facebook provided for “individualized, informed consent” in all research projects with human subjects – and whether users had the ability to opt out of such research. In response, we learned that Facebook does not rely on individualized, informed consent (noting that users consent under the terms of the general Data Policy) and that users have no opportunity to opt out of being enrolled in research studies of their activity. In large part for this reason, I am working on legislation to require individualized, informed consent in all instances of behavioral and market research conducted by large platforms on users.
Fair, robust competition serves as an impetus for innovation, product differentiation, and wider consumer choice. For these reasons, I request that you respond to the following questions:
1. Do you think any user reasonably understood that they were giving Facebook root device access through the enterprise certificate? What specific steps did you take to ensure that users were properly informed of this access?
2. Do you think any user reasonably understood that Facebook was using this data for commercial purposes, including to track competitors?
3. Will you release all participants from the confidentiality agreements Facebook made them sign?
4. As you know, I have begun working on legislation that would require large platforms such as Facebook to provide users, on a continual basis, with an estimate of the overall value of their data to the service provider. In this instance, Facebook seems to have developed valuations for at least some uses of the data that was collected (such as market research). This further emphasizes the need for users to understand fully what data is collected by Facebook, the full range of ways in which it is used, and how much it is worth to the company. Will you commit to supporting this legislation and exploring methods for valuing user data holistically?
5. Will you commit to supporting legislation requiring individualized, informed consent in all instances of behavioral and market research conducted by large platforms on users?
I look forward to receiving your responses within the next two weeks. If you should have any questions or concerns, please contact my office at 202-224-2023.
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