Company Background

A1Zap is a social network of student-built apps. Instead of posting to a shared feed, students build small tools for their clubs, roommates, and other groups they're part of on campus.

Pasha Rayan and Pennie Li are the co-founders of A1Base, the parent company of A1Zap. Their team of five or six people ships new features daily, running nightly Listen Labs studies to guide what gets built next.

The Challenge

Before Listen, growing A1Zap meant emailing users directly and booking calls, sitting in on an hour of usage at a time to get feedback. As the user base grew, that one-on-one approach couldn't keep up with the patterns the team needed to see. They turned to Listen to synthesize what was coming in, and it's since become part of the daily routine rather than an occasional project.

"We're an early stage company. When it comes to ROI, for us, it's really about how much does something enable us to get to product market fit faster," Pasha said. "It's very much a startup hack for us to understand users better than anyone else."

The Insight That Shaped the Product

A1Zap's social features started as an afterthought, added without much design intent behind them. When the team began testing on Listen, they noticed users responded to those features more than anything else in the product.

The team kept testing the same signal for weeks, on Listen and in person, before treating it as something real enough to design around. Once they trusted it, the team shifted product development toward those social features, rather than continuing to build out the individual mini apps. It's since become a defining part of the product.

A Nightly Research Workforce

Each night, the team tests a new version of the product with real users. Pasha compares that pace to what it would take to replicate manually.

"If we were to do this manually with our own team, that would be a whole research workforce of about 10 to 20 people to keep up with what we do. Even then, 10 to 20 people wouldn't be able to give us insights every night," Pasha said.

Instead, the team runs it themselves. "We let anyone run two or three Listen Labs tests every day, and that allows us to pick up subtle insights and improvements at a really fast pace," Pasha said. That cadence isn't a one-off push. The team has kept it up for months, running tests every night regardless of how the previous night's insights turned out.

Confidence to Make Bolder Bets

For Pasha, the real value is in seeing the emotional reactions and context behind what users say. Watching real behavior across many sessions shows the team what's actually happening, not just what gets reported after the fact.

Pennie sees the same principle at the core of building anything worth using. "Getting your product into the hands of real people and seeing how they use it, that's what really makes a difference in building a good startup."

A Second Product, Built the Same Way

The same workflow now extends to StudyArena, A1Base’s newest product for students. StudyArena lets students ask one question and compare answers from multiple AI models side by side, making it easier to find the answer that works best for them without bouncing between different tools or paying for multiple subscriptions.

The team has applied the same rapid build-and-test rhythm they developed with A1Zap: shipping during the day, then using Listen Labs to see how real users respond and where the product can improve.

Using that approach, the team shipped StudyArena in roughly half the time it took to build A1Zap.

The Result

Nightly testing equivalent to a 10–20 person research workforce, running two to three tests every day

• A product insight that shifted the roadmap toward social features, identified through Listen Labs

• Deeper conviction in product decisions, built from real user behavior rather than what users say

  
  

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