5.3% Conversion Lift. How Hue Turned User Testing into Client Revenue with Userbrain
Janvi Shah co-founded Hue with a conviction she brought straight from her years as a product manager at Google: building without user feedback is designing in the dark. Hue helps brands embed authentic shoppable video on their websites — the kind of real, unscripted content that builds customer trust and drives conversions. Getting that product right means understanding shoppers deeply. But at a 10-person, pre-seed startup, "user testing" had come to mean running Facebook ads, offering $25 gift cards, scheduling Zoom calls, and losing half those sessions to no-shows.
When Recruiting Testers Eats Your Runway
User testing was non-negotiable for Hue from day one. In the early exploratory phase, the manual approach had value — open conversations with real shoppers helped Janvi figure out what questions to ask. But as the team began expanding into fashion retail and needed to test across 20 different brand websites in a single sprint, the manual process started breaking down.
"We needed to test across like 20 different websites. We're like 10 people. How are we going to do that in a repeatable and scalable way?"
Between recruiting through ads, scheduling calls, running the sessions, and doing the analysis, every round of testing consumed days the team didn't have. Up to half of scheduled participants simply didn't show. For a startup where speed is the entire competitive advantage, waiting weeks for research results meant falling behind.
The $12,000 Dead End
When Janvi went looking for a proper tool, the first name she knew was a large competitor she'd used at Google. The quote came back: $12,000 per year, minimum, no exceptions.
"They're like, this is our base level. We can't do anything even less than this. I was like, absolutely not."
A quick Google search for alternatives led her to Userbrain. The contrast was immediate — flexible plans, around $45 per tester with compensation included, and a platform she could launch from the same afternoon without an enterprise sales process.
"I could just create an account, set up the test. The platform is super user friendly. The flexible pricing options made it really more feasible for us as a pre-seed stage startup."
From a Click to Same-Day Insights
Within an hour of launching a test, results were already coming in. For a founder used to weeks of coordination, the speed was the first thing that landed.
"You launch the test and then maybe like an hour later you already have someone who's done it. It just accelerates our speed of learning. And in a startup, speed is everything."
No-shows disappeared entirely. Userbrain's tester pool is reliable and filterable — Janvi could screen for women aged 35-50 who do outdoor activities like hiking or water sports, the exact demographic for a Title Nine campaign, in a few clicks. The AI insights and searchable transcripts cut analysis time further, letting the team jump straight to what mattered rather than scrubbing through full recordings.
"The AI features have been super helpful — having the transcript and being able to quickly jump around and get to the insights you're looking for just gets us a lot of leverage."
+5.3% Conversion Rate. One Round of User Testing.
Title Nine, an independent, women-owned outdoor apparel brand, had Hue's shoppable video widget running across four bestseller product pages and a custom homepage module. A 50/50 A/B test ran for two months. The numbers came back positive across the board — but behind the aggregate data, there were patterns no one could explain. Some videos dramatically outperformed others. Engagement on the homepage module was stronger than expected in certain spots. Certain star ratings were pulling more clicks than five-star reviews.
Rather than argue over internal hypotheses, Janvi ran 17 unmoderated Userbrain tests with real Title Nine shoppers — women matching the brand's exact demographic, screened for outdoor activities, sent to the live site with open-ended tasks. What they said changed the entire next campaign.
The whole team had assumed outdoor filming would feel most authentic for an outdoor apparel brand. Users said the opposite: videos filmed at home — showing someone trying on shorts and zooming in on the waistband, the pocket, how the fit actually looked on a real body — felt far more genuine than polished footage from a hiking trail. And three- and four-star reviews were driving disproportionately high engagement because shoppers read them as honest rather than promotional.
"Initially the whole team thought that people filming outside would be really important. It turned out from the user feedback that that was not important at all. The next campaign we're doing with them right now, we're not having people film outside whatsoever."
The user testing also revealed a placement problem: shoppers were scrolling straight past the video section because it sat in the wrong part of the page. When asked where they'd expect to find this kind of content, they said the reviews section. Hue moved it there.
The combined A/B test and Userbrain research produced a clear action list: move videos under the Reviews header, surface a mix of star ratings instead of defaulting to five-star, shift from outdoor to home filming in the content brief, and autoplay preview thumbnails. The test results across the two-month run:
- +5.3% Conversion Rate
- +3.11% Revenue per Visitor
- +2.71% Average Products per Visitor
The impact reached further than the product pages. The same Userbrain-informed content began outperforming in paid ads, delivering 1.3+ ROAS — on par with Title Nine's top campaigns.
"Hearing from the actual customer helps to focus everyone on the things that customers are saying rather than running around in circles based on different people's opinions. The content that they liked the most wasn't always the content that performed the best."
The ripple effect went one step further: after seeing the results, Title Nine's e-commerce manager reached out to Janvi asking for a full Userbrain demo. They wanted to bring it in for their own testing.
A Tool That Earns Its Keep
Hue now uses Userbrain in two directions: internally, to test the shopper experience with their own video technology and explore new verticals; and externally, as part of the service they deliver to clients — giving brands the qualitative depth that A/B testing alone can't provide. It's become something Janvi has trained interns to run.
"Not only are you saving time with testing — you're accelerating your roadmap in a more productive direction. The last thing you want to do is work on things that customers don't care about. This is just another tool in your toolkit to do that in a more effective, fast, efficient way."
Results at a Glance
| Before | With Userbrain | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first insight | Weeks | Under 1 hour |
| No-show rate | Up to 50% | 0% |
| Cost per tester | Unpredictable (ads + coordination) | ~$45 all-in |
| Annual tool cost | $12,000 (competitor minimum) | Flexible, month-to-month |
| Title Nine conversion rate lift | Baseline | +5.3% |
| Title Nine revenue per visitor lift | Baseline | +3.11% |
| Paid ads ROAS (UGC content) | — | 1.3+ |
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