Hacker News Reader

This type of market research was previously only accessible to companies that could drop 10k or more on these surveys. This tool will help entrepreneurs validate ideas they were unable to test because it was cost prohibitive.

View on HN

I spent a couple of years working for a company in a market research space. It's an interesting business of which I knew very little before I worked there. But the answer is that you could do a survey for a fraction of that cost. SurveyMonkey has the same product and so do a few others.

As an aside, google launched this about 6 months ago and pretty much has everyone in that business scared. Ultimately it all boils down to having profiles on a lot of users and selling access to them. Google's user base (and what they know about them) dwarfs what everyone else has combined. If they wanted to, with a bit of effort they could own that market in 6-12 months.

I hear you on that - but that survey monkey panel is going to cost $3-$8 a response depending on the audience you want to reach (i.e. 50 year old working men tend to be expensive), and the results just aren't that pretty looking like googles. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook comes out with a similar product - they seem to be in a better position to give users rewards to perform MR activities, and have more data on users for additional cross tabs;' Google only has approximate age, gender, location.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com