FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.
How is this different from Dovetail, User Interviews, or just using Grain?
Those are research tools — Dovetail stores and tags interviews, User Interviews recruits participants for a fee. Tycoon is the research team that runs the program: recruits from your existing customer base (free, higher-fit than purchased panels), schedules, transcribes, synthesizes, and distributes insights. Dovetail is where the transcripts live; Tycoon runs the workflow that ends in insights on the roadmap. Many teams use both — Tycoon for the workflow, Dovetail as the long-term research archive.
Can the AI conduct the interview itself instead of me?
Technically yes, but we strongly don't recommend it. The value of customer interviews is listening and asking follow-up questions that aren't in the script — the moment a customer says something surprising, a human hears it and probes. AI can execute a survey-like interview fine; it misses the 'wait, say more about that' moments where the real insights live. The pattern that works: AI handles everything around the call, you run the call itself. It's the 30 minutes of founder attention that makes customer research valuable — don't outsource that part.
What about confidentiality — customers sharing sensitive business info on the call?
Interview data stays in your workspace and isn't used to train foundation models. You can mark specific interviews as confidential (don't feed into cross-customer synthesis) or redact specific passages before synthesis. For interviews with enterprise customers under NDA, configure the transcripts to auto-redact names, dollar figures, and specifically-mentioned internal systems before insights ship anywhere. Most founders find the default settings (workspace isolation + opt-out of training) are enough for 95% of interviews.
What's the right frequency — 5/week sounds like a lot.
For early-stage (pre-PMF through early scale) 3-5/week is high but achievable and the highest-ROI research investment most companies can make. At larger scale (Series B+), weekly cadence of 2-3 interviews is more typical with deeper structure (discovery, validation, usability testing separated). Tycoon scales both — the workflow doesn't break at 5/week or 15/month. The constraint is your time on the calls (30 min × 5 = 2.5 hrs/week), which most founders can sustain and consider the most valuable 2.5 hours of their week.
Does this work for B2C where individual customers are lower-ARPU?
Yes, with adjustments. For B2C, surveys scale better than interviews for most questions; interviews are reserved for high-severity issues (churn reasons, major feature bets) or power-user recruitment. AI Customer Support can run a survey program (Typeform/Tally) in parallel, synthesize results, and surface interview candidates from the survey responses (power users, people with specific pain points). The hybrid mode — surveys for breadth, interviews for depth — is often more effective for B2C than trying to run 5 interviews/week with low-ARPU users.