UserTesting sold a simple, humbling experience: watching a stranger get lost on your website. Companies posted a task, and real people recorded their screens and voices as they tried it. Designers heard exactly where they got stuck. More than half of the world's 100 most valuable brands used it by 2021. UserTesting went public that November, and its stock barely moved on day one. Fourteen months later, it was private again.

Video First

Darrell Benatar co-founded UserTesting in California in June 2007. It launched a platform for large companies in 2012, though it put real money behind that push only later. The bet was that video of real people would settle arguments inside a company faster than charts. The platform added machine learning to find the key moments in each video. By September 2021 it had more than 2,100 customers, each paying about $67,000 a year on average.

Fourteen Months on the NYSE

UserTesting priced at $14 a share on November 16, 2021, and began trading on the NYSE under the ticker USER. The stock ended its first day almost exactly where it started. Software stocks fell hard in 2022. In October 2022 Thoma Bravo agreed to buy the company for $7.50 a share in cash. The deal closed on January 12, 2023, and UserTesting left the stock market.

Cover: Woman Reading at Table While Man and Woman Listen In, Egbert van Heemskerk, the elder. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for people looking over a reader's shoulder (watching real users).