Most of them come down to one thing: can you trust research where the participants are synthetic? Here is the honest answer, plus the practical stuff.
Reach for a focus group when you need to understand a decision: why people lean toward one option, what would change their mind, where the room splits. Reach for a survey when you need a number you can defend in a meeting, broken out by age or region or income. A focus group goes deep on a handful of people; a survey goes wide across hundreds.
A focus group runs from 8 to 30. Smaller keeps it intimate and fast; larger gives more angles. A survey runs from 100 to 500, and more is steadier. If you go too small on a survey, we will tell you the margin of error is too wide rather than pretend the number is solid.
Yes. A focus group is built around comparing up to three at once, usually your product against two competitors. A survey can cover up to ten.
Fair question, and the right one. Three things keep it grounded. Every finding points back to the exact responses it came from, so you can read the actual words. Every number comes with a margin of error, and a thin sample gets flagged. And when a public benchmark exists, we run the same study and show you side by side how close we land. It is not a crystal ball. It is a fast, cheap first read that is right often enough to be worth having before you spend real money.
We read each answer and place it on a one-to-five scale, but not with a single shortcut. We weigh what the words mean, how spread out the room is, and whether the rating fits the kind of reviewer the person is. Then we estimate how much the average could move and report that range.
Always. Open any study and each theme, gap, and recommendation lists the responses behind it. Nothing in the read-out floats free of the transcript.
About twenty minutes from brief to read-out for a typical study. Bigger panels take a little longer.
Yes. Each saved study keeps the same setup, so a repeat run can reproduce the result. That lets you change one thing about the product and compare before and after without chasing noise.
Each step checks itself. If a step comes back thin or off, it gets told what was wrong and retries, up to twice. If it still cannot pass, the study stops and tells you why instead of handing you a polished report built on a broken step.
You spend credits, and the cost scales with how big the panel is and how deep the conversation goes. A small focus group is cheaper than a large survey. Add credits before running a study.
No. Everything runs on our side. You sign in and start.