Episode Overview

Angelique Taylor, founder of AddMaple, shares how frustration with fragmented data tools inspired a visual-first exploration platform built for insights teams.

Episode Highlights

• From UX researcher to founder: Ange’s background in user research — spanning qualitative interviews, SQL data, and survey analytics — led her to build a tool that bridges the gap between different data types in a single visual interface.
• What AddMaple does: AddMaple is a visual-first data exploration platform that ingests survey data, online reviews, customer support tickets, social media feedback, and data lakes, allowing insights teams to filter, cross-tabulate, and identify themes with automatic statistical testing throughout.
• The AI integration debate: Ange makes a clear architectural distinction between generative AI and deterministic analysis — in AddMaple, AI sits as an interpretive layer above a stats engine that runs all calculations, ensuring reproducible, traceable results every time.
• Synthetic data: hype vs. reality: Ange is sceptical of synthetic data as a replacement for real human research, though she uses AI personas herself as a sparring partner for ideation and hypothesis testing — not as a substitute for statistically valid findings.
• The undervalued UI: Against the prevailing trend of chat-first AI interfaces, Ange argues that a well-designed user interface — one that integrates AI rather than replacing the GUI with it — remains under-appreciated and is central to her product philosophy.
• Bootstrapping in an insight-tech world: Building fully bootstrapped in a space dominated by well-funded competitors has kept Ange close to her users, though she reflects honestly on the trade-offs — including reconsidering how she presents that status to enterprise prospects.

About the Guest

Angelique Taylor is the CEO and founder of AddMaple, a visual-first data exploration platform designed for market researchers and insights professionals. She began her career as a user researcher in FinTech, developing an early fluency in both qualitative methods and quantitative data analysis.

That dual perspective became the foundation for AddMaple, which she has built as a fully bootstrapped company while based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ange is a vocal advocate for high-quality user interface design and rigorous, reproducible research methods in an era of rapid AI adoption.