Meet the co-founders of Bolt Insight
Founded in 2020 by a team of professionals navigating the market research space for 10+ years, Bolt Insight addresses all the problems typically associated with traditional methods including for example the expense and time of quantitative market research and the ineffectiveness of panels and cold calls given a global society’s ever-changing needs and agenda.
Bolt Insight was founded by a team of professionals who have been navigating the market research space for 12+ years:
Co-Founder Kerem Turgay leads the technology for Bolt Insight. He is a Harvard Engineering Post-Grad with more than12 years of experience
Co-Founder Ester Marchetti has more than 15 years in the insight arena, from both client and agency side, including leadership roles in Insight and Innovation at Unilever for 6.5 years
Co-Founder and Head of Market Research Melek Ozsoy has more than 14 years of market research experience, having led several research projects for multinationals
What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?
Bolt Insight’s success is based on two key market dynamics: the fact that 9 out of 10 products and services fail within the first two years post-launch and that consumer expectations and preferences are changing quickly, markets are fragmenting, and companies need to understand their customers better and faster.
The UK market, a key hub both in terms of company headquarters and market research innovation, was crucial in finding early adopters of our disruptive methodology in what has been a largely traditional area: market research. Companies go to great lengths to understand their customers. Consumer-centricity and empathy are a must for any organisation willing to thrive amidst uncertainty.
Bolt Insight’s vision is to give companies a virtual seat next to their consumers, so that they can co-create, based on real insight and data.
What does your business offer its target audience?
Bolt Insight is an end-to-end consumer insight platform, focused on delivering high quality consumer insight, in real time more than 120 countries in a matter of hours.
We provide real-time consumer insight using our survey recruitment technology and insight dashboard. Using social media and app network-enabled surveys, brands can collect consumer opinions in 120+ countries in a matter of hours.
Our solutions allow companies and brands to test innovation (ideas or concepts), measure brand perceptions, understand new market trends, and evaluate communications campaigns.
Bolt’s advanced insight solutions help brands and companies stay ahead of the competition. Our services combine disruptive behavioural consumer targeting to help companies big and small connect with their customers even when they are very niche by engaging them on social media.
Data is transformed into insights through custom research, advanced analytics, and best-of-breed technology, enabling smart decision-making to improve business performance that affects the bottom line.
What’s the most common problem your customers approach you with?
Companies go to great lengths to understand their customers. Some leverage traditional research panels, some others directly connect with consumers to ask for feedback, whereas some make deductions from customers’ interaction data with their digital devices, on various web-based platforms.
Quantitative marketing research is expensive, and it can take weeks to collect data, analyse results, and put together a report. From the moment of brief to report delivery, insights are already outdated.
What’s more, companies with less resources are significantly disadvantaged as they’re not able to invest what the giants invest to reach, understand, and influence consumers.
Brand marketers are being bombarded with data every second – how do you make sense of it? How do you identify what is valuable for your brand and consumers?
How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?
Traditional market research offline panels and cold calls are hardly effective in the ever-changing needs and agenda of the global society. Sure, there are some overarching themes that pop up no matter the product or geography, yet it’s hard to integrate such traditional, less agile steps into product development these days.
Our easy-to-build, easy-to-integrate surveys help companies big and small reach their customers when they are on social media. Scrolling through the feed, users come across products and services they’d really care about, and voluntarily enter a brief survey that helps them become a co-creator or a co-definer of requirements for the product they are likely to become champions for.
On the other hand, companies get to learn about their customers in a lightning-fast manner, with results pouring in real-time in minutes. Bolt Insight’s technology enables not only the big fish, but also the smaller players to access people in no time, collecting consumer opinions in 120+ countries in a matter of hours.
What plans do you have for Bolt Insight over the next two years?
We are excited to share that we have just received a €1.5m seed investment from the leading venture capital company 212, to accelerate our plans to become the fastest growing market research-tech business.
This investment will enable us to develop new products for new and existing customers, employ new staff in research and commercial teams, and support market expansion plans, all of which will help achieve Bolt’s vision of reaching new heights through innovation and technology.
Any new product launches we should know about?
We have been working for a while with our innovation team on another sector disrupting new qualitative research product called Bolt Talk. It is planned to be released end of Q3, to contribute further to our growth.
Bolt Talk will connect marketing professionals instantly with consumers worldwide so they can chat, video call consumers, and access even deeper insights. All this will be automatically moderated, transcripted, and converted into insights-leveraging AI.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?
KEREM: Always test your assumptions and ideas with prototypes and different personas before starting to code them. Don’t quit after a first failure, keep your vision, but change your strategy, and keep trying to find our what works as soon as possible.
ESTER: We have been ruthlessly customer-centric from the start. For every plan, initiative, or product idea, we have started from our clients’ feedback and thoughts, to create products that would really make a difference in their lives and make them think ‘how did I do without it before?’. It’s also key to hire great people as soon as the funds are there: a fantastic employee can directly contribute to the business success, especially when the team is very small. We are really proud of our stellar team and cannot wait to add more into the mix!
MELEK: I’ll mention about 3 keys behind our success.
First of all, the most important thing is the TEAM and the harmony between members. At the very beginning, determining the main pillars about the work to be done and structure the business around these pillars will derive the business success. At Bolt, we have 3 pillars, which are Research, Technology & Marketing, and each pillar owned by a Co-founder with a great expertise in that area.
2nd is having a customer-centric approach. Going beyond the customer needs & expectations will help you to have a good retention rates. From the very beginning, we’ve been trying to think 2 or 3 steps forward in terms of their expectations while testing our limits. That’s why our clients love our mindset, data crunching, unlocking insights and solutions.
Thirdly, enhancing solutions with Technology. At Bolt, we blend the power of technology with a great team experience.
What routines have you got in place to ensure that you don’t ignore your mental health?
KEREM: Wake up early every morning. Meditational silent walk first thing in the morning, then sun salutation Yoga excercise. Also keep meetings at 45 minutes and leave 15 minutes to refresh in between back-to-back meetings.
ESTER: It’s hard to juggle everything, but to me always remembering what my key values are really helps. In every choice, ask yourself whether it’s contributing to the life you want to have. For me, that means having time for my family every day, working on building Bolt with passion and heart, and 45 mins-1h for a workout and meditation preferably in the morning to take the day in my stride.
MELEK: My secret is liking what I do. I love working, generating insights, and going beyond my boundaries. I’m living my dream 😊
How do you believe the evolution of tech will impact your industry over the next 10 years?
The Market Research Society estimates that the UK research insight and analytics industry is worth £7billion and, according to ESOMAR, the data and analytics segment has doubled in the last 10 years, growing 8% per year with a third of this spending driven by market research in the FMCG sector. The increasing importance of data transformation is evidenced by the rise in the position of CDO (Chief Data Officer) and in Europe 26% of organisations now have one, especially in sectors like insurance, banking and media & entertainment (Source: PWC).
The enormous potential in the UK market for Bolt is partly a result of the COVID-19 pandemic as e-commerce changed the consumer landscape to a purely digital one and consumer behaviours shifted. According to McKinsey, between March and August 2020, one in five consumers switched brands, and seven in ten tried new digital shopping channels. The retail sector experienced ten years of growth in digital penetration in a matter of months.
We believe that this growth will be mostly driven by companies like us, combining research expertise with technology in their products and services.
How is digitisation empowering your business?
We are on a mission to develop Bolt into a next generation on-demand consumer insights engine and all our products and services are based on new-age digital targeting technologies. Our most important resource to accomplish this goal is our high-skilled team and our own-developed digital solutions.
Bolt Insight team’s ability driven to dramatically transform the quantitative market research space.
