Scientific analysis of customer experiences

Management Center Innsbruck and Mohemian Ventures invest in the Innsbruck business startup ExperienceFellow

A good piece of news from Innsbruck and the Tyrol as a location for science and business: Management Center Innsbruck (MCI) and Mohemian Ventures (mohemian.com) have decided to invest in a young Innsbruck business startup by the name of ExperienceFellow. The company is offering an innovative digital system for recording and evaluating customer experiences. The focus is on authentic insights along the whole customer journey across all online and offline channels, generating new scope for the capture, analysis and optimization of customer experiences.

ExperienceFellow users can go to experiencefellow.com to set up and evaluate research projects. A free smartphone app is provided to consumers to enable them to keep a record of their experiences with a product or service. Emotional assessments, images, texts, videos and GPS positioning are additional sources of information. The organizer of such a research project can receive the data generated in real time and has a full range of tools available for the evaluation process.

The startup company was founded by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider as an academic spin-off in 2013. It is the product of an extensive research project that was set up at the MCI back in 2008. The focus of the MCI Mobile Ethnography project was to provide a qualitative assessment of customer experiences with the help of digital tools. A first software version was developed and tested in large-scale trial projects. The research items range from perceived experiences in the context of major events and tourism destinations to assessments of software, malls and flagship stores. The list can be extended almost infinitely; practically every sector stands to benefit from access to the perceptions and thoughts of customers and users.

“Our investment in ExperienceFellow is a reflection of our mission as an Entrepreneurial School®. We are excited about the promising development of this young company,” says Andreas Altmann, Rector of Management Center Innsbruck. The MCI’s early support for the innovative idea has been decisive for the progress made with ExperienceFellow. Another investor is the Innsbruck product development company Mohemian Ventures: “We are delighted to have Mohemian Ventures, a progressive tech company with international experience, on board,” adds Marc Stickdorn, CEO of ExperienceFellow.

The software recently progressed from the free beta test phase to a professional paid version and is currently in the initial growth phase on the market. While preparing for this step, the company benefited from the professional support available from CAST Center for Academic Spin-offs Tirol and pre-seed funding provided by AWS Austria Wirtschaftsservice.

In an agile development environment, the team is continually implementing and testing new features and functions, and always in close collaboration with the user base. This co-creative development approach also has a prominent role in the international bestseller “This is Service Design Thinking” written by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider in 2010. According to Stickdorn, the combination of work on the book and research at the MCI underscores the startup’s scientific commitment: “Qualitative research is not always based on professional data capture and documentation. That is our point of departure, in which we also fulfill our own practical needs.”

Innsbruck has repeatedly produced internationally successful tech startups. Now the exciting growth phase begins for ExperienceFellow in a highly mobile market: Will the concept be convincing enough for large-scale international dissemination? “The team is highly motivated and convinced of the merits of the product,” says Chief Designer Jakob Schneider, and he adds, “ExperienceFellow can do something no other software can. The demonstrable scientific background makes it almost impossible to copy.” We, too, are curious and also confident that the concept will take off!

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