Matt is an expert in customer discovery, with over 20 years of experience helping organizations of all sizes – from entrepreneurs to enterprises – listen to their customers to build innovative products and services. He began his career at Harris Interactive (now Nielsen) where he was a Senior Qualitative Research Consultant responsible for conducting hundreds of customer/user interviews annually across a wide range of clients and objectives. He eventually left Harris to launch a UX/CX consulting firm focused on web and mobile app usability and user experience research.In 2006, Matt co-founded PluggedIN, a company that built and managed online customer insight communities for large enterprises like Dell, T-Mobile, Samsung, E*TRADE, Kraft and General Mills. PluggedIN was acquired in 2011 by Edelman, the world’s largest independent PR firm, where he stayed on as a Senior Vice President in Edelman’s NYC office for two years following the acquisition.Since leaving Edelman, Matt has gone on to launch three SaaS products for customer discovery & insights, including FocusGroupIt (online focus groups), QualNow (video surveys) and Advise.Us (customer advisory boards). He has a passion for designing and developing easy-to-use SaaS products that democratize the ability to capture high quality customer insights for organizations of all sizes.In addition to his own companies, Matt is heavily involved in his local startup ecosystem in Rochester, NY. He serves as the Managing Director of Startup Incubation at NextCorps, where he has coached hundreds of startups around his region (Western New York) through the product ideation & discovery process on their way to product/market fit. He is also Managing Director of Embark, a "no code" software startup accelerator.Matt has been on the teaching team at multiple regional, state and international startup accelerators, including NEXUS-NY (clean tech startups), Luminate (optic/photonics startups) and Lean Launchpad (software startups), and has lectured on the topic of customer discovery at the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology and University of Buffalo - the latter of which was part of a NSF iCorps discovery program. When he's not working, Matt can be found mountain biking, snowboarding or hanging out with his family somewhere in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of NYS that he calls home.