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Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

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Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#11

Post by psb31 »

baby_wipe wrote: post #9

Could I send someone a link to my iOS app and have them record themselves using it for like 10 min? And get a little feedback from them? How much would that cost?

Yes, you could use Prolific for something like this. You would need to use our "opt-in" screeners and avoid collecting personal data as part of the study.

It would probably cost about $5-15 (it depends on how much you would pay the participant, I would recommend being generous for a study like this).

If you'd like to tell us a little more about your goals, we can get back to you with some more specific information: https://prolific2.typeform.com/to/aczPoI

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#12

Post by slugalicious »

Congrats on creating a side hustle while completing grad school. This UX is far superior to MTurk, but as others have suggested, the price point is definitely higher. A few questions:

1)"You can easily invite participants for follow-up studies at no extra cost." So, I can re-contact them through your platform OR I gain access to their contact info?

2) What % of customers are repeat buyers (multiple surveys)?

3) What if I want to recruit childless individuals? The current audience-checker doesn't seem to offer zero as an option.

4) How automated is this process for you? What % of customers require a touchpoint or multiple touchpoints?

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#13

Post by psb31 »

slugalicious wrote: post #12

Congrats on creating a side hustle while completing grad school. This UX is far superior to MTurk, but as others have suggested, the price point is definitely higher. A few questions: 1)"You can easily invite participants for follow-up studies at no extra cost." So, I can re-contact them through your platform OR I gain access to their contact info? 2) What % of customers are repeat buyers (multiple surveys)? 3) What…

Thanks! We're actually cheaper than MTurk for the same participant reward. We take a 33% fee, while MTurk takes 40%.

1) You can run follow up studies through our platform using anonymous identifiers we provide.

2) ~40%

3) We have many more filters when you create an account. The "Number of children" filter is actually a followup to a "Do you have children?". If you select "No" you'll see we have ~ 38,755 active participants who are childless.

4) Good question, I don't have good stats on this right now. The process of setting up a study is mostly touchless for us, especially for 'expert' users who have run online research elsewhere. Support mostly consists of billing issues, custom filtering, and complex studies (we sell to universities, so billing can be complex). We're working on improving onboarding and making the whole process as self-serve as possible.

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#14

Post by uxamanda »

This is really interesting. I've run into an issue finding qualified participants for user research studies many times. The companies focused on that space tend to be very businesses. Will take a look next time I have a survey!

A tiny thing I noticed on the site. If you change the estimated time on your "Study cost calculator" and hit tab, you are bounced down to the next section on the screen so you cannot see the results. I believe adding "tabindex=0" to the HTML on the result would solve this. I kept getting confused as to where the result went. :-)

Good luck on your project!

Edit: typo

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#15

Post by jbob2000 »

psb31 wrote: post #7
notafraudster wrote: post #4

I'm locked in to my current vendor, but I just wanted to share some of my thoughts about some pain points I saw in your sales pitch. My experience is that most academics pay less than $6.50 per hour for an initial point of contact. For instance, I am currently fielding a survey (N > 5,000 per week, cross-sectional rather than panel) and we pay about $2 all-in, including the provider's charge, for a survey that's abou…

> what is your balance of private and university clients as of today? Our clients are about 80-90% academic, and we find that there’s a strong move within academia towards fair payments. In the long term we think that this will show in the data quality and reliability of samples such that paying fairly will result in the best value. Regarding cost, we're about $2 total for a 15min survey right now. > How large is you…

> have highly targeted invites, we hypothesize high earners would be willing to help out if we need someone of their demographics in particular, and if this was communicated well. If you have suggestions, we’re all ears!

I have had some involvement in running charity events that target high net worth people. You attract them via their ego. Put their name on everything, use their name frequently when speaking with them.

And the kicker - never actually ask them to donate or take the survey or whatever. Just describe what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. They already know you’re talking to them because you want something from them, but if you ask them directly, they’re trained to say no because they have to do it all day. You need to let them make the decision to participate on their own.

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#16

Post by mettamage »

It's very cool to see this idea. Most notably because I had it myself! I thought about it between 2014 and 2015. For me your post is a case study as to why I didn't go through with it and you did.

What I'm noticing is the following

My issues:

1. Not being able to find a good business model for the markets I identified

2. Not being able to identify all markets

3. Not testing it out or simply starting it

4. Uncertain whether I'd be able to amass a pool

My successes:

1. Identifying the same pain point for researchers

2. The ability to create the web app (not that I did this, but I was confident back then that I could and in retrospect, I think I was right)

It's funny as I'm currently prepping for becoming a strategy consultant (first round at MBB firm, never got a reply by FAANG in Amsterdam) and I'm already much better at the conceptual thinking regarding my issues -- though strategy consultants simply scratch the surface when it comes to identifying markets, so I have a lot to learn there. And since this is just all interview prep, I've got a long way to learn business skills anyway.

An unusual tip if you are 'suffering' the same fate as me. Look on YouTube on how to do new market entry consulting cases and you'll get an idea on how to think about it from a high level.

I still wonder what good resources are to learn marketing though.

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#17

Post by cosmie »

notafraudster wrote: post #4

I'm locked in to my current vendor, but I just wanted to share some of my thoughts about some pain points I saw in your sales pitch. My experience is that most academics pay less than $6.50 per hour for an initial point of contact. For instance, I am currently fielding a survey (N > 5,000 per week, cross-sectional rather than panel) and we pay about $2 all-in, including the provider's charge, for a survey that's abou…

> In my experience, the hardest thing about quota sampling as opposed to the old RDD phone samples 20 years ago is that it's very difficult to get high education / high SES / high income respondents. High income respondents should be 10% of the population and they simply are nowhere near 10% of the pools that you get from standard recruitment methods. Can you speak a bit about a) how you recruit high income people into your pool; and b) what percentage of your pool would be high income (say HHI > $125k a year or so).

A friend of mine runs into this periodically, with her response pools over-sampling on lower income and older individuals, with a lot of geographic skewing (she does local/regional research, so appropriate sampling at a census block and/or zip code level is needed).

I've worked with her several times to fill that gap, by leveraging Facebook ads for recruitment to balance out the deficiencies in her response pool. Ad cost + incentive tends to work out to the ~$10 range per qualified response. Which is too expensive as a recruitment method for her entire pool, but she's found fantastic to reach the otherwise unreachable demographic gaps she'd have. Different demographics respond better to certain incentive structures and ad copy than others, but in general it's been effective for capturing those hard-to-get groups.

Leveraging the same avenue for re-contact is also handy if your response pool is large enough to create a custom audience to target for follow-up ads. Even out of date contact info can be useful for this. Although your IRB (if relevant) may shut that down if you didn't account for it if the language in your initial contact didn't account for it, since doing this involves disclosing the subject's PII to a third party (Facebook) for creating the custom audience.

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#18

Post by [deleted] »

uxamanda wrote: post #14

This is really interesting. I've run into an issue finding qualified participants for user research studies many times. The companies focused on that space tend to be very businesses. Will take a look next time I have a survey! A tiny thing I noticed on the site. If you change the estimated time on your "Study cost calculator" and hit tab, you are bounced down to the next section on the screen so you cannot see the r…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#19

Post by ed405 »

jbob2000 wrote: post #15
psb31 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is your balance of private and university clients as of today? Our clients are about 80-90% academic, and we find that there’s a strong move within academia towards fair payments. In the long term we think that this will show in the data quality and reliability of samples such that paying fairly will result in the best value. Regarding cost, we're about $2 total for a 15min survey right now. > How large is you…

> have highly targeted invites, we hypothesize high earners would be willing to help out if we need someone of their demographics in particular, and if this was communicated well. If you have suggestions, we’re all ears! I have had some involvement in running charity events that target high net worth people. You attract them via their ego. Put their name on everything, use their name frequently when speaking with the…

That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. "The psychology of high net worth people"... lots to explore there!

Re: Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants

#20

Post by ed405 »

mettamage wrote: post #16

It's very cool to see this idea. Most notably because I had it myself! I thought about it between 2014 and 2015. For me your post is a case study as to why I didn't go through with it and you did. What I'm noticing is the following My issues: 1. Not being able to find a good business model for the markets I identified 2. Not being able to identify all markets 3. Not testing it out or simply starting it 4. Uncertain w…

Thanks for sharing your experience! At Prolific, we found that one good resource for learning about marketing/growth is this book called Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It explains 19 different growth channels and instructs you around best practices on how to experiment with them.

On a very basic level, the best way to validate your market & marketing ideas is talking to the right target audience. Often you can do this in your personal circles, but sometimes you need a less biased sample (in which case Prolific might be able to help). Good luck!

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