Our Founders: Brody Nelson

Brody, tell us a bit about you and your background

My background has been in software and entrepreneurship with a focus on solving real-world problems and creating consumer facing products. I’m particularly interested in SaaS tools that are easy to use and improve people’s lives. Apart from Stickybeak, I have co-founded Parkable, a car parking management tool for enterprise businesses to manage employee car parking and Daylight a digital creative agency that specialises in building digital products that drive user engagement.‍

‍‍

Why did you decide to start Stickybeak?

‍I was working with David Brain at the time through Parkable and he told me I had to meet this amazing researcher called David Talbot who had designs to democratise research. When I took the meeting, the problem statement fascinated me. Quantitative research is being relied on to make a lot of decisions but it was fundamentally broken in that it is too expensive and too slow to be fit for purpose for a lot of decisions. It was a bit of an open secret in the research industry that the ability to target niche audiences was becoming very questionable and panels were often filled with ‘professional respondents’  and perhaps don't always reflect the views of the target audience.

So the opportunity to reimagine a research tool that leveraged social media targeting to quickly and effectively deliver insights really appealed. I was also really impressed by the founding team, often technologists make the mistake of solving problems in a domain space without the neccessary domain expertise. In David Talbot, Andrea Kan and the UMR team we were backed with fantastic research credentials and in David Brain we had great insights in the marketing, PR, comms agency world.

‍

‍And what are you most excited about for the future?‍

One of the disruptive forces in the market research industry is the rise and accessibility of large natural language models like GPT. I am excited to see the next generation of automated tools that can analyse and summerise qualitative data sets at the same speed and accuracy that we are used to seeing in quantitive research. I also think we might see a hybrid model where the qualitative questions can be asked dynamically making Stickybeak even more conversational and engaging.

Outside of research, I love seeing the IoT solutions finally being deployed at scale and being incorporated into software products. At Parkable it has been awesome to see the worlds of EV chargers, access gates and ANPR cameras all collide through cheaper and more reliable IoT solutions.