Building Got Easy. This Startup Solves What to Build | Alfred Wahlforss, Listen Labs
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alfred Wallforss is the Co-founder of Listen Labs, the AI customer research company.
Companies like Microsoft use Listen to run AI-powered customer interviews, and Alfred talks about how they first landed them as a customer at a pitch competition.
We talk why startups should pursue enterprise customers early on, why 85% of survey answers are random clicks, how AI is changing the $140B market research industry, leveraging VC’s for customer intros, how to stand out when recruiting as a startup, and hiring for obsession.
Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode
Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.com
Flex: Get premium banking and a net 60 day credit card at 0% APY https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital
Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com
Timestamps:
(0:14) Listen: AI customer research tool
(7:30) Fraud is a big problem in customer research
(9:06) The $140B customer survey industry
(12:08) Why running customer surveys is so hard
(16:03) AGI will never replace humans
(18:25) Surveys vs interviews
(21:13) Importance of emotion in data collection
(22:54) Using AI interviews to get product feedback
(26:15) Building digital twins creates better data
(32:22) Outperforming generic AI tools
(34:17) Sweetgreen’s Max Protein Bowl
(36:09) Jevon’s Paradox in customer research
(40:37) Quantitative vs qualitative
(42:38) Landing Microsoft as an early customer
(44:50) Targeting enterprise customers from day 1
(48:05) Building a VC customer intro leaderboard
(51:53) Recruiting with billboard games
(57:20) Hiring for obsession
(1:02:07) Alfred’s favorite movies
(1:03:53) Listen’s custom agent harness
(1:06:24) Velocity Fellowship for Swedes moving to SF
(1:08:34) Growing up with entrepreneurial older brother
(1:09:46) No shoes in the office
Referenced
Try Listen: https://listenlabs.ai/
Careers at Listen: https://listenlabs.ai/careers
Sweetgreen protein bowls: https://listenlabs.ai/case-studies/sweetgreen
Toni Erdmann: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4048272/
Episode with Erik @ Modal: https://www.thespl.it/p/building-ai-native-infrastructure
Follow Alfred
Twitter: https://x.com/itsalfredw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wahlforss
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alfred, how's it going? Welcome to the show. |
| 0:05.0 | Yeah, thank you for having me. |
| 0:07.0 | Yeah, this will be fun. |
| 0:08.0 | Really quick for people who don't know, what is listen? How do you describe it to people? |
| 0:13.0 | Yeah, so we built this AI agent that can understand what people want by talking to them. |
| 0:19.0 | So marketers, PMs, user researchers will go to listen and ask a question, |
| 0:25.8 | like Microsoft is one of our customers. And they can go and ask, like, what do CIOs think of |
| 0:32.4 | Azure versus GCP or AWS? Listen, we'll go and find hundreds of CIOs. |
| 0:38.3 | So we have a database of 30 million people. |
| 0:40.3 | And then it will run interviews, sort of like Zoom calls, |
| 0:43.3 | with hundreds of people in parallel, |
| 0:45.3 | and then give you recommendations of what you've learned. |
| 0:48.3 | And then you build this repository of all of the interviews in one place. |
| 0:53.3 | You can start to query that. Now we're also |
| 0:55.8 | building simulation, so you can actually use the interviews you've collected to simulate how people |
| 1:00.1 | will answer questions in the future. You can talk about that later. And yeah, we've raised |
| 1:06.3 | $100 million. We're used by a large portion of the Fortune 100, including Microsoft Anthropics, |
| 1:13.6 | Sweet Green, P&G. |
| 1:15.6 | Anthropic is considered Fortune 100 now? I guess. I guess they're pretty big. They've gotten |
| 1:19.0 | pretty big, pretty quick. |
| 1:20.2 | I mean, it probably would be up there, yes. But we also are used by startups, like perplexity cursor, I think 20% of the |
| 1:33.0 | Forbes AI50 use listen as well. So it's really like every company that one understands |
... |
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