Cut Research Time by 88% – and They'll Buy

01 /The Concept

Rally calls itself a "modern" CRM for product user research – which turns out to be a more useful framing than it first appears.

User research – surveys, interviews, usability sessions – is foundational to building products people actually want. The problem is that in most companies it happens in silos. Different teams run their own studies using spreadsheets and email threads. The results are scattered, insights get lost, and the same users end up being contacted for overlapping studies they didn't ask to be part of.

Rally centralizes the entire process and makes it visible across the organization.

Starting a new study takes minutes: set the criteria for which users should participate, schedule the sessions, and define what participants will receive in return – gift cards, product credits, branded merchandise, or anything else. Rally automatically selects qualifying users, sends invitations, and tracks responses on a dedicated study page.

Each user has a profile inside Rally – like any real CRM – that logs the full history of when they were invited, whether they participated, and how responsive they've been. Rally uses this data to assign statuses ("highly responsive," "rarely responds") that inform future selection. Minimum cooldown periods can be set per user to avoid over-contacting people.

One important design choice: multiple team members from different departments can collaborate on a single study – influencing the question set, the incentives, and the selection criteria – which reduces duplication and creates a shared view of research outputs across the company.

The result is measurable: one client reported cutting time spent on user research by 88%.

Two pricing tiers are available, differing by the maximum number of research participants (up to 10,000 or up to 1 million contacts). Pricing isn't published; contact Rally directly.

Founded in 2021, Rally has signed up clients including HelloFresh, GitLab, OpenTable, and Sonos. The company has just raised its first outside funding: $8.85M.

02 /Why It Matters

Some product teams are obsessed with studying people who haven't bought yet – running endless surveys asking "would you buy this?" That approach optimizes for an audience that may never convert.

The better instinct is to study actual users: the people already relying on the product, the ones worth retaining.

The size of the market for this kind of tooling is evidenced by Sprig – [covered previously](/review/dumaete-im-vsjo-ponjatno) in summer 2022 – which has raised $88M. Sprig takes a complementary approach that could be called "micro-research": instead of scheduled sessions, it embeds lightweight questions into the product in real time, triggered by user behavior. If a user stares at a chart for 30 seconds, the platform might ask "is everything on this graph clear?" If someone gets stuck on a page, it might ask "do you know what to do next?"

Rally is designed for more deliberate, structured research that takes longer to set up. The ability to cut that setup time by 80% is a genuinely compelling hook for teams already running regular studies – or for teams that want to but are deterred by the operational overhead.

What's slightly surprising is that Rally doesn't lead with that concrete promise. "Cut your research time by 80%" is a sharp, testable claim. "Modern CRM for research" is much softer. That said, the "CRM" framing is having a moment.

The term has expanded beyond its original meaning (Customer Relationship Management) to describe any platform that structures and manages ongoing relationships with a defined group of people. A [related review](/review/mnogo-mest-dlja-vtykanija) covered Crew – a "CRM for recruiting" – which applies the same pipeline logic to hiring: structured candidate tracking, shared visibility across teams, and a unified funnel. Crew raised $3.4M.

03 /Opportunities

One clear opportunity: new platforms that help product teams research their users. The tools don't have to be surveys or interviews. In many cases, the most informative signal comes from changing something in the product and watching how users respond – but it matters that such experiments are carefully scoped and targeted at specific user segments rather than rolled out broadly.

Lancey, a Y Combinator graduate [covered here](/review/na-kazhdom-zarabotat), built exactly that kind of experimentation platform.

The market is real, the use cases are varied, and the demand from product teams that genuinely care about their users is reliable. There's room to do a lot here, including taking direct inspiration from the startups mentioned in this review.

There's also a broader play: applying CRM logic to relationships that aren't with customers. Rally built a "CRM" for research participants. Crew built one for job candidates.

Who else has a relationship worth managing with that kind of structure – and could benefit from the same organizing principles? There's a good chance that space is both underserved and on-trend.