I help founders find out what's true.
I'm Dominique. I run CX UX Spark out of Seattle.
My training is in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and data science. Before consulting, I spent years doing applied user research — the kind where you sit with people, watch what they actually do, and try to reconcile it with what they told you they'd do.
Those two things are almost never the same. Understanding the gap between them is most of my job.
Why this work
Early-stage teams operate on conviction, which is necessary — you can't build anything without it. But conviction is very hard to distinguish from certainty from the inside.
I've watched teams spend a year building something because three people were enthusiastic in a meeting. I've watched teams kill something good because one loud customer complained. Both are evidence problems, and both are avoidable.
What I do is bring an outside read on what your evidence actually supports. Not to be contrarian — to be accurate.
The research background, and why it matters here
Most validation work is pattern-matching. You run interviews, you spot themes, you count mentions.
Psycholinguistics gives you a different lens. How someone describes a problem — the verbs they choose, what they hedge, where they shift from I to you, what they explain without being asked — carries information that theme-counting throws away.
Cognitive psychology tells you which parts of a customer's self-report to trust and which to discount entirely. People are reliable narrators of their frustrations and unreliable narrators of their future behaviour. Knowing which is which is the difference between good research and expensive confirmation bias.
That's not a credential I list for decoration. It's the reason my synthesis is worth more than a tool's.
Seattle
I'm embedded in the startup community here — thinkspace, Seattle AI Week, and the wider founder network. Seattle has a particular profile: technically exceptional founders, often out of Amazon or Microsoft, building genuinely hard things.
The recurring gap I see isn't capability. It's that deep technical fluency and deep customer fluency are different skills, and the first one doesn't produce the second.
Also
I write Signal & Sense, a biweekly newsletter about what happens when cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and user research talk to each other. It's the least commercial thing I make and probably my favourite.