The segmentation survey that redefined VEED's Ideal Customer Profile
How it uncovered distinct user segments rolled together under one ICP with different needs, preferences, and values
The Background
VEED is an AI video creation platform used by over 10 million businesses, content creators, and educators each month to easily create professional-quality videos.
In early 2025, VEED’s team realized their understanding of key customer segments was becoming outdated. They had plenty of qualitative insights from user interviews, but lacked the data needed to inform strategic decisions like their product roadmap or marketing strategy.
The Challenge
Maedhbh Greene, Senior UX Researcher at VEED, set out to understand how use cases vary across VEED’s main customer segments. After digging into best practice advice about how to run a project like this, Maedhbh realized she would need three key features:
MaxDiff → a survey method for measuring the relative importance of different customer needs and use cases.
Enrichment → a way to associate existing CRM data, like customer pricing plan or email address, against survey responses.
Segmentation → an automated way to compare results of different customer groups (eg. by pricing plan, job title, or industry) to see how their needs vary by segment, ideally without manual spreadsheet work.
Despite VEED already having a subscription for Typeform, Maedhbh quickly realised that Typeform wouldn’t work for this kind of project due to its lack of market research methods like the maxdiff question type or segmentation analysis features. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — after all, Typeform is built for data-collection forms, not user research!
Instead of sacrificing important aspects of her project to make it work on Typeform, Maedhbh searched for a survey platform that was better suited to user research requirements like measuring user needs, ranking VEED’s features by perceived value, and mapping differences by customer segment — which is how she discovered OpinionX.
The Solution
OpinionX is a survey platform designed specifically to help product teams run advanced market research surveys, helping you measure what matters most to your most important customers. When Maedhbh went looking for a survey tool with maxdiff analysis, she felt like OpinionX was the obvious choice for her study.
Maedhbh jumped right into OpinionX and designed a comprehensive customer segmentation survey with 34 questions in total. The survey had three main sections: one about users’ professional context, one to learn about their process when making videos, and one section about their experience with VEED specifically.
Only four open-text response boxes were included in the survey to gather unstructured opinions from participants. Most of the survey consisted of basic single-choice or multiple-choice questions for gathering segmentation data that the VEED team didn’t already have stored, such as:
Which social media platforms do you share to most often? (Select 1-3)
What’s your typical turnaround time from video concept to publication?
How confident do you feel about creating and editing videos?
Each question like this included a list of options to choose from and specific criteria determining how many choices each participant could make. Whenever a participant answers a question like this, OpinionX treats this like a tag that sorts them into a group that you can use later on to filter or compare different customer segments.
Alongside these multiple-choice questions were special voting blocks designed to measure user preferences and priorities. Maedhbh used a mix of question types for this, such as:
MaxDiff Analysis → measure which challenges/frustrations are the highest priority to customers.
Points Ranking → give people 100 points to allocate according to how they spend their time.
Ranked-Choice Voting → ask people to rank existing features from most to least important.
Here’s an example of the MaxDiff Analysis voting section within Maedhbh’s segmentation survey:
Once she had finished designing her survey, Maedhbh’s attention shifted from setup to distribution.
Using hidden fields (survey links with customized URL parameters for each respondent), Maedhbh pulled data from VEED’s CRM into OpinionX and associated it with each user’s answers. This enabled her to enrich the survey results with information VEED already had about their customers, like user IDs or pricing plans, helping to reduce the number of questions required. This enrichment data would be essential data later on during her segmentation analysis.
To incentivize VEED users to complete the survey, they offered a $10 gift card to each participant. In total, 205 VEED users participated in the survey with a median completion time of 13min 12sec.
The Results
Maedhbh would later admit that it was only after running her survey that she realized how limited Typeform’s analysis features are for things like comparing results by customer segment:
“We came to OpinionX because it offered maxdiff surveys, but it was the analysis functionality that really surprised me — I did 90% or more of my analysis work within the survey tool for the first time maybe ever. OpinionX’s ‘Compare Segments’ feature in particular was great because our analysis ended up being framed around comparing two subsets of our Ideal Customer Profile against each other. This made life so much easier for me and involved a lot less time importing, exporting, and organising data in spreadsheets compared to what I would usually do for a research project like this.” — Maedhbh Greene, Senior UX Researcher at VEED
The results of her survey led Maedhbh to the realization that their former Ideal Customer Profile actually contained 2 distinct segments with different needs. It helped her understand how each of these segments gets value from VEED, their perception of its existing features, and attitudes towards AI innovations in the video editing space.
Maedhbh’s research led to an update of VEED’s internal data definition of their ICP segments, which flows down to every team in the company — from efforts to acquire new users to their definition of success metrics. On a more immediate basis, it gave Maedhbh ideal data to identify users to invite to follow-up interviews for digging even deeper into their customer segmentation.
The Takeaways
What would Maedhbh recommend to other user researchers thinking of running a similar customer segmentation survey?
“If Typeform is too limited for your research needs and Qualtrics is too expensive to consider, then OpinionX is the one for you! It took the pain out of adopting a new research method like maxdiff analysis with segmentation automations that saved me a lot of hassle, plus amazing customer service that made us feel like we were in safe hands the whole way through.” — Maedhbh Greene, Senior UX Researcher at VEED
It’s common for user researchers to be given access to a form builder or survey tool that their company already has a subscription for — often without much of a second thought for the research or analysis methods that user researchers uniquely require.
As AI continues to push user researchers towards more strategic studies, you need to ensure that you have access to the necessary research toolkit. OpinionX helps product teams adopt advanced market research survey methods, with clever analysis automations, an intuitive user interface, and expert researchers on hand to help ensure you succeed.
-- Daniel
Really solid case study on how quantitative segmentation can validate qualitative hunches. The bit about discovering 2 distinct segments under one ICP is a classic pitfall when teams rely too heavily on personas without testing assumptions. What often gets missed is that MaxDiff works best when the initial list of use cases comes from deep qual work first, otherwise you're just ranking stuff that dosent matter to customers.