Harri Thomas

I grew up on a sheep farm in Australia, but pretty soon after graduating found myself working as a Brand and Strategy consulting in New York, working with companies like Johnson & Johnson and American Express helping them launch new products to market. Faced with challenges in recruiting quality research participants, I co-founded Respondent; a b2b marketplace connecting companies with research participants. From handing out flyers to get our first users we grew the business to 30+ employees, eight digits in annual GMV, raised over $6m in venture capital, and serving clients like IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Uber, and Airbnb. After four years, in 2020, I sold the business to a private equity firm. After my time at Respondent, I took on the role of interim Head of Research & Strategy at Picnic. There, I helped the team secure a seed funding round and set up their research practice. Following my stint at Picnic, I moved to Facebook as a Senior UX Researcher. Later, I left to start my second venture, Elephants, a social goals app - who's most notable achievements include raising a pre-seed round and achieving over 100,000 installs, with a steady 30% month-over-month growth. Despite this, we shut Elephants down in January 2024 as we couldn't crack retention - its hard! I'm now at Great Question, an all-in-one UX research tool. Outside of work I’m an advisor Hakkawise, an e-commerce consumer goods aggregation company. I also like to write, and have had articles published in The Guardian, Hackernoon, Maddyness, UX Collective and The Startup.

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  Advice on funding

  I've had experience raising four rounds of Venture Capital; three as a Co-Founder and one as Head of Research & Strategy. I'd be happy to share my funding philosophy, why we decided to fundraise after years bootstrapping, and things to look out for as you begin the journey to accelerate your companies growth.

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  Bootstrapping

  As non technical co-founders of an online marketplace, my colleague and I found ways to: - string together off-the-shelf products to test hypotheses - find low cost resources to fill gaps while we focused on sales - prioritize and strip back all non-essentials I'd be happy to share my bootstrapping journey and provide some ideas about ways you can do more with less.

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  Growth marketing

  Data, data, data. It's all growth comes down to. Focusing on collecting information from customers and potential customers, and prioritizing BI tools early in your companies trajectory will help you avoid some of the early pitfalls I've encountered!

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  Product market fit

  My background is in market research and marketing strategy. This stood me in good stead to take an insights driven approach to finding product market fit. I'm of the strong opinion there's no better way to find product market fit than to speak with customers and potential customers. To get the most out of these conversations, a solid research plan is needed. This is where I can help!

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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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  Information Technology

  Co-Founder of Elephants App; a social goals app that's looking to make it easy to team up with friends on personal goals. Venture backed, and co-founded in 2022.