A focus group alternative, and when not to use one
A synthetic focus group is not a cheaper recruited one. It answers different questions. Use it as a first pass, to find the objections and cut the weak drafts the same afternoon. Recruit real people for anything you would defend as a number, and never let one stand in for the other.
Two instruments, not one at two prices
| Synthetic cohort | Recruited group | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to answers | The same day: three to five rounds, run in one task on your box | Usually weeks to screen, recruit, and schedule |
| Cost | A few dozen model calls on your own engine login | A recruiter, incentives, a moderator, and a room or a platform |
| Who answers | Invented panelists a model plays from written, versioned documents | Real people who passed your screener |
| What it can defend | That an objection exists and is worth answering before launch | What these people said, did, and hesitated over |
| What it misses | How common anything is, whether anyone will pay, and whatever its authors did not know | Anyone outside the room, and what people say once the loudest voice has spoken |
| Doing it again | The same panelist versions, whenever you like, with a revised draft | New people, a new schedule, and a new invoice |
Neither column is the honest one. Recruited panels have their own failure modes, from professional respondents to a moderator who leads. Synthetic respondents vs real people walks through the published evidence on both.
Which one the decision calls for
Start synthetic when
You have three drafts and room to test one. A synthetic pass often cuts a draft for a reason nobody had noticed.
You are about to pay for recruiting and want to find out whether your discussion guide draws anything but agreement.
The decision is small enough that the real alternative is no research at all, like a subject line or the second screen of onboarding.
The team needs to argue with a specific buyer rather than nod at a demographic bracket.
Recruit people when
The decision rests on how many, how much, or whether: incidence, willingness to pay, the size of a segment.
You need to watch someone use the product, not read a description of it.
The audience is one a written document is unlikely to capture well, or one where getting it wrong does real harm.
The finding will be quoted outside the team, in a board update, a pitch, or a case study.
How to use them together
A synthetic first pass
A crew's
marketingpersona runs three or more rounds on your box against a cohort you built on klingbar.com, revising the draft between rounds. Each panelist answers alone and, from round 2, sees only its own earlier reaction.Real people get the questions that survived
Take the objections that outlasted every revision, and the words panelists reached for, into your recruited session or your customer calls. The synthetic pass wrote the questions; people answer them.
Traffic settles it
When the draft is something your app can show, and your app runs Statsig and reports conversions the way the persona expects, the persona can propose it as an experiment through a launch card. Only real exposures count, and the decision comes from the analysis, not from anyone's opinion.
What not to do with synthetic reactions
The failure that matters is not a bad transcript. It is a good-sounding transcript that ends up somewhere it was never meant to go. A synthetic quotation in a pitch deck, presented as a customer's voice, is a fabrication, however carefully the panelist was written.
Klingbar's pages describe every cohort as shaped like its rationale, never as standing for a market, and keep each transcript beside the panelist version it came from. Carry the same care into anything you write up.
- never cite
- a synthetic reaction as customer evidence
- never convert
- a score into "a percentage of buyers"
- never stack
- a cohort with people who agree with you
- always disclose
- which panelists, which versions, which model
- always confirm
- with people and with an experiment before you commit
A first pass on your own box, with a record you can check
Klingbar is free during early access. You bring the box and a Claude Code login, and we set up the marketing persona with you. See what one looks like, start to finish, in the walkthrough.
Request early access