Startup Spotlight #79: Highlight

Highlight is a next-gen product research startup, leveraging technology to generate targeted, efficient, agile consumer insights.

Jan 29, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough, co-founders of Highlight, about what they are working on at their startup, and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.

Kim has five years of experience at a brand strategy firm, running market research projects as a qualitative researcher (focus groups, interviews, online smart communities, etc.). She’s run global insights projects for key clients such as Uber, Facebook, Coca Cola, Nike, and many more. Kim has been on both the research side of things, so understand how to execute smart, efficient, successful research studies, but also have been on the business development teams and is used to pitching companies and selling in market research offerings to client-side consumer insights teams.

Kellough is Highlight’s technical lead. His experience is in product design and venture development. He oversees customer discovery, technical architecture, and product management to ensure effective data collection and an epic user experience. Kellough and our team of two full-stack developers have completed the foundational layer for our next-generation platform and are sprinting towards an initial release.

Startup Spotlight: Highlight

Highlight cofounders (from left to right): Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough.

Problem: Consumer brands need consumer insights more than ever in developing, refining, and expanding their product offerings; however, traditional market research approaches have serious limitations such as being costly, taking too long, and only reaching a very specific pool of participants. For startups and big companies trying to rapidly iterate and create, market research solutions today simply aren't nimble enough to support this agile innovation.

Market: First, we're tackling the $3.4bn consumer product market research industry. Then, we will to scale up and out into the larger (and growing) $225bn FMCG marketing industry.

Solution: Highlight is a venture-backed product testing platform, with a focus on CPG innovation. Highlight offers curated discovery boxes for consumers, delivered to your home for free, in exchange for your feedback on the products you get, and for brands, we offer agile, scaled product testing with rich qualitative product feedback at a quantitative scale.

Team: Kim is the CEO. Kellough is Highlight’s technical lead as the CPTO.

Recent Success:

Kim and Kellough: We really emphasize listening to and learning from our consumers. We are incessantly asking what users like and don't about the end-to-end process, and ensuring we're refining and building per their needs and wants. We successfully executed a full business pivot when COVID hit and quickly transitioned to a whole new business model in a short period of time. Our first product was vending machines for market research - same thing, free products in exchange for feedback, but we shut that down as soon as we learned that public spaces would be inaccessible and transferred all our learnings to meeting consumers where they were: in their homes. The pivoting process has taught us to not hold onto anything if it’s not supported by the data to keep it and helped us look at our business more objectively and with less emotional attachment to any particular part of it.

Recent Struggle:

Kim and Kellough: Not being in the same room, sitting side by side makes it brainstorm and get creative juices flowing. Hiring an early team in a remote environment has also been a challenge, especially not being able to onboard them and work with them in a ‘physically together’ space. This means we’re a lot more intentional about ongoing communications. Daily standups on Slack, weekly check-ins on Zoom, etc., help us keep strategic goals in check while still delivering on the day-to-day.

Founder Advice:

Kim and Kellough: Listen more than you talk. The questions people ask you are the most valuable source of information out there, so resist the temptation to be defensive when someone pokes holes in your business or assumptions. If they don’t get it, it’s probably because you’re doing something wrong or need to change the way you present your information or logical process. You know your business the best, but that doesn’t make you the smartest person in the room. You must have the humility to absorb different ideas and opinions and use those data points to help you refine your offering.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Kim and Kellough: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Shanel Fields, Founder of MD Ally: MD Ally is an advanced 911 telemedicine platform designed collaboratively by EMS and ER practitioners to support non-emergency callers with instant access to healthcare providers when the use of emergency resources is deemed inappropriate.
Kate Kim, Founder of rmdy: rmdy’s mission is to unlock higher quality of life + health with research-backed wellness solutions that work.
Rooshy Roy, Founder of aavrani: aavrani is Indian Inspired Skincare.

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