Gousto is a UK-based meal kit delivery service and one of the UK's fastest-growing scale-ups. It offers fresh and personalized meals for home cooks across the United Kingdom. The meal-kit giant has gone through a rapid scaling journey over the past few years, having raised more than $675M in venture funding to fuel their growth towards their mission of becoming the country's most loved way to eat food.

The product teams at Gousto have two primary aims:

1. Sustaining the company's growth by continuing to acquire new customers.
2. Building experiences that their customers love so that existing customers remain.

To achieve these goals, the product organization at Gousto follows a version of the Spotify model. Growth product teams focus on either increasing the conversion rate of their website to grow customer acquisition or increasing retention by making it easier, more joyful, and more convenient to order subscription meal kits.

Lacked visibility over the user experience

To continue acquiring new customers and improve retention rates, the product teams at Gousto aim to develop a deep understanding of their users' needs and how their products support them in convenient and exciting home cooking. As with most growth product teams, this requires continuous communication with customers.

Initially, gathering customer feedback was primarily a manual process. The product teams collaborated with the marketing and customer support teams to send emails to their customer base, requesting feedback. However, this method did not scale well as their research needs grew. Response rates were low, and each research study required days of coordination and work to complete repeatedly.

Got generic feedback from research panels

Next, Gousto turned to panels and recruitment agencies to find participants for their user research and product discovery. However, after completing their first research projects with participants from different panels, they quickly faced some of the most common complaints about research panels:

• The panel participants were not real Gousto users and did not represent the user segments that Gousto was researching.
• Panel participants were often too well-versed in participating in testing and did not give realistic answers.

Using recruitment agencies proved to be equally challenging. The turnaround time from initiating a recruitment request to completing interviews or receiving a response from a participant was usually 14 days, greatly decreasing the efficiency of their research.

At worst, the feedback received from participants recruited from agencies and research panels could be misleading, leading to product decisions based on insights that did not accurately represent the true needs of their customers. This often resulted in teams shipping untested experiments that failed to increase their customer acquisition and retention rates.

"We often had a sense that we might be building the wrong thing and lacked clarity about where things were broken," says Sophie Bond, one of Gousto's product designers focused on acquisition experiments. "By not asking real users for feedback, we felt we couldn't understand the core problems our users had, which led us to build and design our experiments incorrectly."

The solution: Continuous product discovery with Wondering

In 2022, Gousto's product team enlisted the help of Wondering to facilitate their shift towards continuous product discovery and research. They also began gathering in-product user insights from actual Gousto customers throughout the product development lifecycle.

After integrating the Wondering AI-powered user insights platform into their website, Gousto's product teams could validate and test their product designs through prototype tests. They could collect real-time feedback through in-product studies and have in-depth conversations with real users through in-the-moment AI-powered user interviews, with the first responses usually arriving within 5 minutes after launching a study.

Instead of relying on non-customers from research panels, Gousto can now quickly bring the voice of their customers into every product decision with minimal notice. They use Wondering's built-in targeting and segmentation to prompt users across the sign-up funnel through to checkout for feedback and insights that help them prioritize their roadmap, improve their existing product journeys, and ship with confidence.

The impact: Increased the sign up conversion rate by 1% from a single experiment

Empowered to validate decisions with feedback from real users, Gousto has deployed in-product research studies across their core product journeys. These studies have been conducted in the sign-up funnel, checkout flow, menu browsing experience, and other areas. With response rates as high as 70% in key parts of their product journeys, the feedback they receive from users helps them:

• Understand the core value drivers behind why their customers choose Gousto
• Optimize their onboarding and ordering journeys
• Identify new product opportunities
• Prioritize their product roadmap
• Speed up their overall product development cycle by shortening their time-to-insight

An example of this is how user insights gathered in-product helped Sophie Bond and her product team at Gousto to increase their website conversion rate by 1% through a single product experiment. They ideated and prioritized this experiment based on feedback collected directly from an in-product AI-powered studies conducted through Wondering.

How you can identify friction points in your user journeys

In-context user research studies, such as in-product surveys, prototype tests, and user interviews, are great ways to collect targeted feedback and user insights from actual customers. They can help you:

1. Optimize your product journeys: Uncover pain points and areas for improvement in your core product journeys.
2. Validate new ideas and test your designs: Test your designs before you start building and quickly validate new ideas and concepts.
3. Prioritize your product roadmap: Make informed decisions on which features to build next based on a deeper understanding of your users.

Wondering helps companies, large and small, increase the success of their products with relevant user insights delivered in real-time from customers who use their products. Try out Wondering for free to start scaling your user insights programme.