Robinhood founder Baiju Bhatt on the importance of qualitative user research

What is the value of doing user research? There's a bunch of different ways of thinking about it. I think one that's really been formative for me is the difference between quantitative and qualitative. If you have, like, a prototype for something, right? And you're like, how does this work, right? Or, like, use this thing or do this thing, and you talk to five people, and they're like, well, I'm having a lot of problem with, like, this one part of it, right? Like, probably after, like, five or six people, you're like, yeah, we got it. We got to do something about this part of it. Like, people don't know how this thing works, right? If you just do quantitative stuff, you just gloss over stuff like that. You gloss over the questions you didn't ask and the questions you didn't ask. Some of those might be more important than the questions you did ask, right? And you have to ascertain that. And so another way of putting it is that in the sort of breakdown between qualitative research and quantitative research, the qualitative side is valuable for hypothesis generation. It's like, we talked to 10 people, and seven of them said this thing. We think that a lot of people might be experiencing this, right? And so let's try to solve this, because it might solve the problem for a bunch of people.