What’s your elevator pitch?Alpha’s platform enables management teams to make data-driven decisions about users, products, and markets. By streamlining the workflow to source a target audience, design interactive prototypes, and run experiments, Alpha’s end-to-end platform lets you go from plain-English question to on-demand user insights in two days. We like to call this ‘agile research’ where we enable innovation you see in R&D throughout the entire company. It’s basically magic. Our customers call it their “secret weapon.”Video: https://alphahq.wistia.com/medias/4211i5qwfn

How did your first pitch deck look like? (Can you share it?)Our goal is and has always been to shorten iteration cycles for digital product development, making it possible for the largest organizations in the world to innovate at the speed of startups. At first, we focused on enabling individual product managers to validate product ideas. Since then, we’ve broadened our platform so that anyone within an organization can substantiate assumptions and present findings internally and externally, while also giving executives a dashboard into how their teams are performing. Our original pitch deck was nothing special – it wasn’t even a pitch deck. It was a single sheet of paper with text on it. The problem we were solving was so significant that we only needed a sheet of paper to get to more than $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

What is the essential problem you’re solving?Making data-driven decisions is really difficult, especially in large, complex organizations in heavily regulated environments. There’s a lot of red tape that prevents employees from generating actionable feedback from users and customers. Our platform streamlines that entire process for decision makers, giving them the data they need when they need it. We’ve taken a three month research process and accelerated it into just two days so that it can be seamlessly integrated into sprint cycles. Any manager can submit a plain-English question about optimizing usability, competitors, user preferences, feature prioritization, or even just a napkin sketch of a new product concept. Within two days, they’ll get back an interactive prototype along with videos, charts, and open-ended responses from hundreds of people in their target audience. Often, this is the first time a manager has gotten this type of robust data so quickly, so they have to change their entire workflow around it, especially if they want to iterate. We have clients who run 10 tests like this per month, generating insights from 1,000+ users they didn’t have access to until we streamlined, automated, and optimized this capability.

How did you get initial traction?We built a number of the industry’s most popular educational resources and communities, like our podcast This is Product Management and our newsletter Product Management Insider . Thanks to that and our sales leaders, we’re fortunate to have more than 25% of the Fortune 100 as clients, including Prudential, Citi, PwC, and Aetna, helping each to move at the speed of startups.

What is your unfair competitive advantage?We’re ruthlessly focused on shortening iteration cycles by driving rapid experimentation, which is one of the hardest problems in business to solve. It requires a lot of change management and business case building. We’re not focused on vanity metrics or visually-appealing challenges. We’re only focused on helping our clients go from question to answer in as little time as possible.

What’s missing in the conversation around product and design?It goes back to the notion of iteration. People think there’s a single answer to a question and that’s not the case. Time passes, platforms evolve, standards change. We founded Alpha to provide the ability to run an experiment, collect data, run it again and validate those results. This is a huge piece that’s missing from product development -- taking the time to test everything and not settle for “good enough.”

How many employees in your company?Alpha is a mighty team of 35 people with a highly experienced leadership team who are masters at digital transformation and experimentation at scale. Our leaders have experience in streamlining programmatic advertising, translation services, and market research. They are applying the same techniques to streamlining and automating the archaic processes that managers use to make product decisions. I’m the CEO and Founder. Before Alpha, I was a studio CTO at Zynga and co-founded and sold Rally Health to UnitedHealth.

What is the most valuable lesson you learned?That data doesn’t drive decisions – people drive decisions. You could give someone all the data and insights in the world, but if they can’t rally people behind an argument, they will never be able to make the right decision. As a software vendor, our job is to help our users be successful. We’ve learned that we need to give them the tools not just to generate data, but to tell a story, present that narrative internally, collaborate with others, and do all the things necessary to get their jobs done effectively.

What is the best decision you have ever made and why?We don’t love the idea of praising any decision, because the decision-making process is ultimately far more important and indicative of success. We think we’re successful any time we sacrifice ourselves in the short-term for the customer in the long-term. There are a lot of things we could have done in the past to temporarily increase revenue or chase opportunities, but we stayed singularly focused on driving faster experiments, and now the industry is investing more significantly in exactly that.

What is your biggest achievement so far?We’re very proud that we’ve enabled a quarter of the Fortune 100 to run more than 5,000experiments on our platform within just three years. We can’t wait to work with the rest of the Fortune 100 (and eventually Fortune 500)!

Thor Ernstsson is the CEO and Founder of Alpha, a platform for global organizations to run product experiments. Previously, Thor co-founded and was the CTO of Audax Health, a patient engagement company that was later rebranded as Rally Health after a 10-figure acquisition byUnitedHealth.

How this startup is helping the Fortune 100 innovate at the speed of startups

By Tomas Laurinavicius