Harri Thomas

I'm a non-technical founder who's done this twice. Once well, once not. But both were great learning experiences, for different reasons. The first time around I co-founded Respondent, a B2B marketplace connecting companies with research participants. We started by handing out flyers to recruit our first users and ended up with 30+ employees, eight figures in annual GMV, $6m+ in venture capital, and customers like IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Uber and Airbnb. I sold my stake in the business to a private equity firm in 2020. The second time was Elephants, a social goals app. We raised a pre-seed round, hit 100k+ installs, and were growing 30% month-over-month. But we shut it down in January 2024 because we couldn't crack retention. Retention is hard! In between Respondent and Elephants I was a Senior UX Researcher at Meta leading integrations for Workplace, and interim Head of Research & Strategy at Picnic where I helped the team close a seed round and set up their research practice. Today I'm Chief of Staff at Great Question, an all-in-one UX research platform. My days are marketing and demand gen focused, but include BDR coaching, pipeline, campaigns, and the thousand small operator decisions that keep a Series A SaaS moving. Before all that I was a qualitative researcher and brand and strategy consultant in New York (working with clients like Johnson & Johnson, American Express). Outside work I advise Hakkawise, a consumer goods aggregator, and I write — my articles have been published in The Guardian, Hackernoon, Maddyness, UX Collective and The Startup. My strong prior, after all of this: the fastest way to product-market fit is structured conversations with real customers, done systematically. Not vibes, not frameworks. The founders I've seen win are the ones who talk to more people, better, than anyone else in their space and actually listen. If you're an early-stage founder and that resonates — especially if you're non-technical, bootstrapping, or trying to figure out whether to raise — I'd be happy to chat. Who I help most - Non-technical founders trying to get off zero - Early founders stuck in the PMF search - First-time fundraisers (pre-seed through Series A) - Bootstrappers trying to do more with less - Researchers thinking about founding (or founders considering hiring one) - B2B SaaS operators setting up their first GTM motion

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  Advice on funding

  I've raised or helped raise five rounds of venture capital — three as a co-founder (pre-seed through Series A), one as a Head of Research & Strategy, one as a Chief of Staff. I'll give you the founder's view: when to raise vs. keep bootstrapping, how to get investor intros that actually convert, what materials matter, and the red flags I wish I'd spotted earlier.

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  Bootstrapping

  Respondent was duct-taped together for the first 18 months, and 18 months later we cracked $2M in ARR. I'll walk you through how to string together off-the-shelf tools, find low-cost talent that punches above their weight, ruthlessly cut scope, and ship what actually moves the needle. Non-technical founders especially welcome — that's how I built.

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  Go to market strategy

  I'm hands-on with this right now — running demand gen campaigns, BDR cold-call coaching, HubSpot pipeline hygiene, weekly ops reviews, and attribution work at Great Question. If you're spinning up GTM at a seed–Series A B2B SaaS and want a sanity check on your first motion, I can help.

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  Product market fit

  PMF isn't a feeling, it's a set of signals. I'll help you design a customer research system that surfaces the truth — who your customer really is, what they'd actually pay for, and what to build next. I'd argue there's no faster path to PMF than structured conversations, done well. Most founders do it badly; I can help you do it properly.

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  User research

  I've done user research from every seat: market research at an insights agency on Madison Avenue in New York, Senior UX Researcher at Meta, Head of Research & Strategy at Picnic (where I set up the research practice from scratch), Co-founder of Respondent serving researchers, and now Chief of Staff at Great Question, which is also a research tooling business. Very few people have seen the discipline from as many angles.

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  Respondent

  11 years of experience

  I'm the Co-Founder. If you want to set up a repeatable customer discovery motion, understand the mechanics of the platform, or set yourself up for success in your next external participant recruit, I'm your guy.

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  Hubspot

  7 years of experience

  Day-to-day operator. Pipeline hygiene, deal stages, campaign attribution, lifecycle, reporting. If you're setting yours up for the first time, I can save you a quarter of rework.

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  LinkedIn

  11 years of experience

  We used LinkedIn to kick start both sides of our marketplace - recruiting research participants to fill study opportunities, and to find early customers willing to give our product a shot.

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  SaaS

  Current operator, 8+ years in the category. Experience includes being a 2x Founder, Chief of Staff in a high growth Series A company, and working at Facebook.