The focus group alternative
for teams that move fast
When you can't wait three weeks for a recruiter or sign off on a five-figure study, Klingbar gives you the next-best thing: a synthetic panel of 185 personas that read your message and react honestly in minutes. Compose the room, run the session, read the synthesis before the kickoff call would have ended.
Live session · ran in 4 minutes
The math that makes the decision
A traditional focus group runs on a screener, a recruiter, a facility, and a calendar. By the time eight strangers are in a room, three weeks have passed and the bill clears five figures. That cost only makes sense for a handful of decisions a year — so the rest of them get made on a hunch.
A synthetic focus group runs on a filter. You compose the panel, run the session, and read the synthesis in the time a kickoff call would have taken, for the cost of a few credits. The point isn't to undercut a good study; it's to give the long tail of fast decisions a place to go besides guesswork. See how the format works in our synthetic focus groups overview.
Honest reactions you can dig into
Speed is only worth something if the reactions are real. Put a stimulus in front of the room — a tagline, an ad, a pricing page, a positioning line — and each persona answers in their own voice, with their own objections. When someone pushes back, probe them the way a good moderator would: ask the follow-up, surface the real objection, and watch where the room agrees and where it splits.
The synthesis hands you resonance, dissent, and the exact words the group used, so you ship copy that sounds like your buyers. Because the panel is synthetic, you can rerun it with a tighter message in the time it takes to read the last result. Browse who you can put in the room in the persona library, or run it from your browser on the virtual focus group platform.
Synthetic vs a real panel: when to use which
A recruited focus group is still the right tool when the stakes are late and high. If you're defending a launch decision to a board, watching a stranger hold your product for the first time, or need a sample you can stand behind in a regulated claim, nothing replaces real people in a real room. Synthetic personas won't catch the unexpected gesture, the visceral reaction, or the answer no one on your team thought to script — and you shouldn't ask them to.
But those are the exception, not the week. Most decisions a product or marketing team makes never clear the bar for three weeks and a five-figure budget — so the realistic alternative isn't a better study, it's no study at all. That's where a synthetic panel earns its place: sanity-checking a headline before a sprint review, picking between two positioning angles, or pressure-testing a concept before you spend on the real thing. Use Klingbar as the fast first pass, then escalate to a recruited panel for the calls that warrant it. If you're weighing the model details behind the panel, walk through how it works first.
Stop guessing on the fast decisions
Join the waitlist and run your first synthetic focus group with five free credits.
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