
Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants - psb31
Hey HN,<p>We’re Katia and Phelim, cofounders of Prolific (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prolific.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prolific.co</a>). We help psychological and behavioral researchers quickly find participants they can trust.<p>We built Prolific because Katia had a hard time finding participants for her psychology studies during her PhD. She briefly used Amazon&#x27;s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), but didn’t like the user experience and couldn’t get the data she wanted (UK participants). The fundamental problem we’re hoping to help with is better access to psychological and behavioral data. This is challenging in many ways: You have to balance the growth of a multi-sided platform, achieve high data quality, align incentives for all stakeholders (researchers, participants, ourselves, society), diversify the participant pool, to name some. We’re first-time founders and we’ve been bootstrapping our startup for the past 5 years during our PhDs.<p>Researchers build their surveys using Google Forms, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or another tool; all you need is a survey URL to get started. We verify and monitor participants so you can get data fast (most surveys are completed in &lt;2 hours). Studies range from one-to-one interviews to surveys of thousands of people and you can retarget participants anonymously for follow up studies. You only pay for data you approve. Our business model is to charge a % service charge (typically around 25-35%) on top of rewards researchers pay the participants.<p>We have 70,000+ survey takers in Europe and North America (for distributions of demographic variables see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prolific.co&#x2F;demographics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prolific.co&#x2F;demographics</a>) and 100s of demographic filters (try our audience checker via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.prolific.co&#x2F;audience-checker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.prolific.co&#x2F;audience-checker</a>). This means we can find many target demographics for you. For example, you can filter for Democrats vs. Republicans, old vs. young people, students vs. professionals, different ethnicities, people with health problems, Brexit voters, and even collect nationally representative samples!<p>Anyone can sign up as a participant and start earning a little extra cash.<p>It&#x27;s possible to do research using existing platforms like MTurk. Actually, over 50% of behavioral research is now run online, mostly on MTurk. But there are problems with the quality of data you get from existing platforms, and worse, problems with how the people who participate get treated [1]. Our approach addresses these issues. We think the key differences are:
It’s data you can trust: We mandate a minimum hourly reward of $6.50, and often rewards are even higher than that. As a result, participants feel respected and treated like valuable contributors, providing high quality data. We comply with data protection regulation and have a range of technical and behavioral checks in place to ensure high quality data [2].  
Demographic prescreening is flexible and free: You can easily invite participants for follow-up studies at no extra cost. You can get niche or even nationally representative samples on-demand. 
Prolific is built by researchers for researchers. We try to distribute studies as evenly as possible across our participant pool through rate limiting, so have less of a problem with “professional survey takers” than MTurk.<p>Our bigger vision is to build tech infrastructure that empowers behavioral research on the internet. The market opportunity is significant because any individuals, businesses, and governments would benefit from better access to rigorous behavioral data when making decisions. For example, what could we do to best curb climate change? What’s the best way to change unhealthy habits? How can we reduce hate crime and political polarization? The stakes are high, and behavioral research can help us find better answers to these kinds of questions.<p>Moreover, although we built Prolific primarily to help academics, we&#x27;ve noticed that businesses have been using the platform for things like market research and idea validation. This is a new market for us that we&#x27;re excited to explore. We’d love to hear about any ideas, experiences, and feedback you might have. Thank you!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19719197" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19719197</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.prolific.co&#x2F;bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourcing-platforms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.prolific.co&#x2F;bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourc...</a>
======
notafraudster
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 about 20 minutes. We'd
fall afoul of your compensation rate pretty substantially. If we wanted to do
some panel work and we needed re-contact, we'd definitely ramp up our payment
quickly to help avoid attrition, but for the first contact, no.

If we wanted to be paying out your rate, we would almost certainly have to get
an additional sponsor partner to piggyback some consumer research on top of
our actual treatment. We don't want to do this, it's hard enough dealing with
our primary funders. This makes me believe you are mostly targeting commercial
/ market behavior researchers. That's fine, but the pitch suggests you want
academics. For transparency's sake, what is your balance of private and
university clients as of today?

Second, even working with large sample providers, their pools are often fairly
small. We requested 5,000 unique respondents a week for a year and found our
sample provider could only guarantee a 1-2 month lockout. Obviously the
effective pool you need to guarantee 5,000 * 52 is enormous and so we were
expecting to have to negotiate on lockout, but all of this dances around the
fact that sample providers are not transparent about the size of their pool
and researchers like us are constantly worried about fraud both by sample
providers and by respondents. How large is your pool?

Finally, this kind of quota sampling relies on our ability to weight the
sample to the population. Weighting is totally permissible, but responsible
weighting is going to cap the weight at the high end -- no one wants the one
black Republican to skew the entire poll because they have a 150 weight on
their observation (this isn't me getting needlessly political, this happened
with the USC tracking poll last election cycle). 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).

Finally, what is your pool attrition rate? If someone takes their first
Prolific survey today, what is the probability they will still be taking a
survey a year from now? It's nice that you have re-contact as part of your
system, but the problem in my experience is not figuring out how to recontact,
it's getting people to stay engaged for a long time.

Hope you have good answers to these questions, and that if you do, answering
them here will help you get positive exposure from other readers.

~~~
psb31
> 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 your pool?

Lack of transparency about pool size is one of the most frustrating things
about online panels. This is one of the reasons why we don’t report our total
pool size, but only our ‘active and accessible’ pool (participants who have
been active within the past 90days). As a result, you can expect > 50% of the
numbers of eligible participants we report to actually take part in the next
24/48hours. We have ~70,000 active participants (20,000+ in the US). I expect
we would be able to get a sample of 5,000 people in <48hours, but would only
be about to repeat this for about 10weeks with unique participants. Our
‘pool’, as measured by traditional panel providers is approaching 500,000, but
we don’t think this is a useful metric as the majority no longer respond to
invites.

> a) how you recruit high income people into your pool;

To be honest, we haven’t cracked this nut yet and we expect our pool to be
unrepresentative for high income people also right now. Ideas we have to help
address this problem are to 1) introduce charitable donations for those who
aren’t motivated by cash incentives 2) improve non-financial incentives (e.g.
feedback on the impact your data is having) and 3) 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!

> and b) what percentage of your pool would be high income (say HHI > $125k a
> year or so).

According to self report we have ~2,000 participants from a HHI (>$100k/year
on our screener), though it’s possible this suffers from slight inflation and
we don’t (yet) have a way to verify income levels.

> Finally, what is your pool attrition rate?

Our annual retention rate is ~40% or so (e.g. if a participant takes part in a
study, they’re about ~40% likely to do so again 12months later). There’s a
balance between ‘refreshing’ our pool and keeping high engagement, and we’re
working on keeping “naivety” high while allowing for studies over a long
period!

~~~
jbob2000
> 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.

~~~
ed405
That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. "The psychology of high net
worth people"... lots to explore there!

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rococode
This is definitely a space that needs innovation! How do you plan to handle
the case of survey takers being real people but just skimming through the
survey?

In my experience running research studies, this was the main problem with
MTurk. Things like bots and blatantly junk answers were relatively rare and
easy enough to detect and filter. What was much harder to deal with was the
fairly high volume of users who just want to finish the survey as fast as
possible. It's not so bad for short surveys, but anything over 5 minutes
starts to have issues with low quality responses.

We had to introduce several control questions to check for consistency in
answers and measure time to find outliers. But, it was not an ideal setup and
there were still many survey takers we suspected were not paying much
attention. The breakdown for our studies was something like 60% good quality
answers, 35% low quality answers that are hard to distinguish from high
quality, and 5% total junk answers. We ended up doing an in-person study where
we got much cleaner results, presumably because people pay better attention
when they feel someone is watching them.

Wages don't seem to do much for this. We were paying a relatively generous $4
per HIT, estimating 30 minutes per HIT when in reality in reality the average
time was under 20.

So I'm wondering, are you able to share with us how exactly the "unusual data
patterns" and "technical and behavioral checks" can help ensure quality in an
ecosystem where users are generally motivated to 1) finish surveys as fast as
possible, and 2) appear as if they are giving high quality responses when they
are not?

~~~
psb31
It’s a great question and a tough problem. We have written a little bit about
the problem of ‘slackers’ (participants with low attentiveness and engagement)
[1,2]. The things we’re doing right now to address this problem is to 1) test
for attentiveness and engagement before participants take part in real
studies, 2) distribute surveys more broadly to reduce the % of “professional
survey takers” in each study and 3) educate researchers about ways to use good
attention and engagement tests [3] in their studies. We can then feed this
data back into our system so we can iteratively improve on data quality.

I can’t go into too much detail about the attention and engagement checks we
have built in, but if you sign up as a participant and pay attention you might
spot some. In the long run, we think good feedback systems and high trust will
be key so that our pool iteratively gets better and participants don’t feel as
incentivized to cheat. It’s key to make sure that participants feel that their
high effort responses get fairly rewarded (both financially and with social
appreciation).

[1] [https://blog.prolific.co/how-to-improve-your-data-
quality/](https://blog.prolific.co/how-to-improve-your-data-quality/)

[2] [https://blog.prolific.co/bots-and-data-quality-on-
crowdsourc...](https://blog.prolific.co/bots-and-data-quality-on-
crowdsourcing-platforms/)

[3] [https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-
gb/categories/3600...](https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-
gb/categories/360000850653-Prolific-s-Best-Practice-Guide)

------
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

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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.

~~~
ed405
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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elektor
Very cool!

I signed up and will be looking out for surveys. Looking at the demographics,
I noticed the survey panel is similar to that of Hacker News: white English
speaking 20-30 year olds many who are in school. I'd love to hear about your
efforts to have a more nationally/globally representative sample?

~~~
ed405
Hi, Katia here. Thanks for your question!

Right now we’re available to participants in OECD countries and it’s probably
going to be another while before we can expand globally. Within the 36
countries that we’re in, we’re currently trying to work out what incentives
might work best: How can we encourage the average citizen to sign up and take
part in online research? What about very hard-to-reach demographics like
professionals?

We feel that cash generally works well as an incentive, but it’s not
everything. A lot of the time people want to contribute to projects they
personally care about. So on Prolific’s end, it will come down to matching
projects with the right participants. Another type of incentive could be to
offer to participants that Prolific donates their earnings to charities on
their behalf, and perhaps Prolific could match their donation?

We’ve recently launched quota-based representative samples for the US and UK
[1], where we stratify based on sex, ethnicity, and age. A by-product of this
feature is that it specifically invites niche demographics to participate,
helping fill gaps. We hope that having more surveys available for demographics
that are in the minority (e.g. certain ethnicities and age groups) will
improve our ability to recruit these participants (although there’s a bit of a
chicken-and-egg problem here).

Another thing we’d like to do is launch a mobile app for participants, so
anyone can take a quick survey on the go (while waiting in line, chilling at
home, commuting). Making our surveys more accessible to participants through
different channels should help represent more people in society.

And then there’s user experience. We’re working on making our site as self-
explanatory as possible, so anybody can sign up and start participating, even
if you’re someone who doesn’t spend much time on the internet.

What do you think––what might be other ways to diversify our participant pool?
Very curious

[1] [https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-
gb/articles/360019...](https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-
gb/articles/360019236753-Representative-Samples-on-Prolific)

------
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?

~~~
psb31
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.

~~~
slugalicious
How are you selling to universities? Do you mean individual labs, or
departments, or enterprise level university accounts? My experience has been
that individuals are easy, departments are hard, and universities are next to
impossible. Since your product is ad hoc, perhaps it's easier. You might want
to think about how you could offer this as a SaaS.

------
yc_user_2019
Started using Prolific a few days. Love the fact that it has a clean and
simple interface and it pays in British Pounds which then translate to higher
CAD/USD amount. The only thing is that there are not enough survey and the
site does sign me out sometime after showing a 500 error. Would also love to
know if you guys plan to have a mobile app/mobile friendly site at some point.
Started using Qmee app on my phone and love it's interface and level of
engagement so far. I understand that Prolific and Qmee might be serving
different markets but would be nice to see Prolific implement some of it.
Would love to give additional feedback if you'd like.

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omarhaneef
We use Survey Monkey. This seems similar/identical. How do you compare to
that? Is there a reason to pick you over them? They charge about $1/response.

~~~
psb31
The short answer is that with Prolific you can use any survey/experimental
software you'd like. Behavioural researchers (our primary customers) don't
tend to use SurveyMonkey, but instead use Qualtrics, Gorilla, and custom
experimental software which have many features important for behavioural
research (e.g. randomisation and reaction time recording).

In addition, SurveyMonkey audience uses a survey exchange provider CINT [1]
and as a result you don't have any transparency of where exactly the
participants are coming from, how they're vetted, the user experience they're
having, and you can't communicate directly with participants or retarget them
for longitudinal studies. All of which is important for research and are
features that Prolific provide.

[1] [https://www.cint.com/press-release/surveymonkey-audience-
exp...](https://www.cint.com/press-release/surveymonkey-audience-expands-
globally-strategic-partnership-cint/)

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baby_wipe
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?

~~~
psb31
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](https://prolific2.typeform.com/to/aczPoI)

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bwb
Nice work, checking it out now as I've been looking for something like this :)

