Corha goes live!

Today Corha goes live, which is a genuinely strange sentence to type after this long.

For the past few months I've been writing a series called The Field Guide, about the ways teams get their customers wrong. Personas that die in the document that created them, the average customer who turns out not to exist, that kind of thing. I wasn't only writing to make a point... I suppose I was describing, week by week, the problem I'd been building something to fix.

I've spent about ten years in early-stage startups, mostly on the product and UX side, and for a good chunk of that I ran a studio helping other founders build. The same thing kept happening. A team would do the interviews properly and write the persona up, and then it would go in a folder. In most cases nobody went back to it.

The bit that always bothered me is that the evidence never actually went anywhere. The call recordings were usually still there, and so were the support emails, but nobody had looked at them side by side. That's a fixable problem, in the end, and it's the one Corha is for.

What Corha does

Corha takes the customer data you already have (calls, tickets, surveys, old research) and builds living personas out of it. Living in the sense that they don't sit still. As new calls and tickets come in, the personas update, so your picture of the customer stays up to date instead of going stale the way a document does. You can ask them questions, more or less the way you'd ask a colleague who had read everything. And every trait traces back to the evidence it came from, so when Corha tells you something about your customers you can see exactly which calls or tickets it came from. It's your customers talking, not a character we made up.

Who I built it for

Small teams and startups, specifically. That's who I've spent the last decade working with. It's also where this bites hardest. A five-person team doesn't have a research function and isn't going to get one, but it's still making decisions every week that depend on understanding its customers. Bigger companies can absorb a year of being wrong about who they're for, and a startup usually can't.

Where it's at

It's early, and I'd rather say that than pretend otherwise. This is a first version. Some of it is rougher than I'd like, and there will be things it gets wrong or doesn't do yet. I'd genuinely rather find that out from people using it than sit on it for another six months polishing. So if you run a small team and you've got a pile of calls and tickets you've never properly looked at, I'd love you to try it and tell me where it falls short. That's more useful to me right now than anything else.

Thank you to everyone who's been reading the Field Guide these past few months. Writing about the problem every week, while building the thing to solve it, turned out to be a useful way of keeping myself honest.

It's live now at corha.app.