I met with Adam and Damian (RealEye's CEO and CTO) in September 2022 to discuss their company's challenges and how I could help them overcome them. I wanted to add value, especially from a sales perspective.
Instead, work-life balance was the first topic they raised and continued during the first 15 min of this meeting. They talked about their families and children and how they were essential to their lives.
That definitely wasn't the beginning that I expected.
Fast forward one year later, and we grew by 75% year over year, but there are more essential parts.
When joining RealEye, I was the first non-engineer on the team. The customer acquisition process in RealEye was focused mainly on self-serve customers. After a couple of workshops, we've realized that we must show our human face to our customers as we did to ourselves. Not everything may be DIY, especially for newcomers. The use cases differ significantly among customers, so we decided to replace the standard demo with a product demo tailored to the needs of every customer.
In addition to showing our human face, we've started attending conferences so our customers can meet us in person. In 2023 we've been to:
1. Etra2023
But we've also attended or organized virtual meetings to be even more accessible for everyone who wants to learn or benefit from webcam eye-tracking.
We've attended:
As an effect of numerous talks with existing and new customers, we’ve added to our website logos and testimonials of some distinguished organizations like the one below:
Thank you for your trust!
As for next year, we've already booked tickets for Quirks London. We've also decided to answer the call for presentations for UX – The Quant UX Con 24 together with Factworks.
Jakala has invited us to speak at their conference about eye-tracking, and a lot more is to come.
During the past 12 months, we've added two perfect study types for ad testing, shopper research, and UX testing.
We've developed both with and for our customers. This is what we like most - developing solutions so that our customers may solve their problems.
In both cases, the idea for the development appeared due to a conversation about the study's needs.
The beauty of those study types is that they offer similar to website experience and may be conducted on mobile and desktop delivering aggregated results.
The two study types are:
Our team has been working on the R&D of a new eye-tracker for the past couple of months. There are three goals we would like to achieve:
The technology we use for that is neural networks, and the results of our activities in this field are promising, although there is still quite a bit that needs to be done.
As of now, it seems you will see the first results of our R&D works at the end of Q1 2024. The idea is that every researcher can choose between two eye-trackers: the current one with extended calibration and the new one, a beta version without calibration and slightly worse accuracy.
To ensure our development is consistent with science and current academic knowledge about eye-tracking, we’ve strengthened our ties with Clemson University and SWPS from Warsaw. Moreover, we’ve signed an agreement with the latter to also receive help testing the accuracy.
Thanks to our developers, we’ve introduced polygonal areas of interest (AOI), so the shape of AOI may be in any form. Our customers may now measure participants' attention on any given AOI. Suppose the K-coefficient (representing attention) takes positive values (K>0). In that case, it means that panelists had focal attention (were thinking about what they were looking at). If the K-coefficient takes negative values (K<0), then it means that panelists had ambient attention (we’re looking for the next thing to focus on).
We had countless releases with performance optimizations and bug fixes. To know more, check our release notes.
Only in September did we migrate our website to a CMS. Till then, it was hardcoded, so when everyone was involved in product development, it was almost impossible to make any updates.
We could add a German version of the website thanks to the recent changes. Finally, we've integrated our blog and plan to reflect product changes in the website content until mid-January.
We're grateful that RealEye has been mentioned and used in number of academic publications this year. This includes among others:
This year RE was also mentioned in some business publications like ex.:
It's much easier to have fun and satisfaction from what you professionally do if you keep a work-life balance. This is one of many things Adam and Damian taught me last year. When attending conferences, we not only meet super interesting people and strengthen ties with existing customers but also plan conferences so that we may have fun and enjoy each other's company.
Half joking, half serious, one of the informal targets we set last year was to visit Asia for a conference or a significant potential customer. We weren't ready to do it over the past 12 months, but we'll all work hard to achieve this target in 2024.
Disclaimer: the title of the article is sarcastic so don't take everything literally ;)
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