Project Summary
Company
Market Research Startup
Industry
Marketing & Market Research
Services
AI Software Development, Product Development
Location
London, United Kingdom
A London market research startup wanted to deliver focus group insight without the cost and lead time of recruiting participants. We built a platform that creates synthetic personas from real online activity and demographic data, then moderates a group discussion with dozens of them at once.
Grounded Personas: Built from real Reddit activity and demographic datasets rather than generic prompts.
Moderated Group Sessions: An AI moderator runs a single discussion with dozens of personas.
Faster, Cheaper Studies: Research that took weeks and tens of thousands of pounds now runs in a few hours.
The Challenge
Traditional focus groups are slow and expensive. Recruiting the right participants, scheduling sessions and running moderation can take weeks and cost tens of thousands of pounds per study. The client wanted to offer the same kind of insight at a fraction of the time and cost, without losing the realism that makes focus groups useful.
The Approach
We designed a persona engine that grounds each synthetic participant in real Reddit activity and demographic datasets, so every persona reflects how a real segment of the population talks and thinks.
On top of this, we built a moderation layer that runs a live discussion with dozens of personas at once, following a research brief in the way a human moderator would. The platform is built with FastAPI and React, uses Supabase for data, and is deployed with Docker on Railway.
The Impact
A study that previously took weeks and tens of thousands of pounds now runs in a few hours. The platform has become the client’s core product.
