Market research for startups, run as a weekly loop
A small team rarely has a researcher, but it always has questions. Which one-liner makes a buyer understand the product? What does the pricing page make people hesitate over? Does anyone read the second onboarding email? A crew's marketing persona can do the legwork on your box each week, and you make the calls at the cards. Real customers and a real experiment get the last word.
The research a founder actually needs
Most early questions are not about market size. They are about whether the words on a page do their job. That is the kind of question a synthetic cohort can sharpen and an experiment can settle.
Positioning
Three one-liners for the homepage. The rounds show which one panelists can say back in their own words, and what each one makes them think the product is. Confirm with the next five people you talk to.
The pricing page
What each plan seems to be for, what a buyer would check before paying, and which line makes them close the tab. Willingness to pay is not something panelists can tell you. Only buyers can, through calls and an experiment.
Onboarding copy
Whether a new signup would open the second email, and what would make them stop reading. This fits an experiment well: an email counts when it is delivered, and the persona reads the results daily.
A launch email
What it promises, whether anyone believes it, and the one claim that draws every objection. Cut that claim before the email goes to your whole list.
One way the loop can run
You set the persona's tasks and their schedules on klingbar.com, or start one on demand. Here is one shape a week can take for a team of two or three.
Monday: candidates
The persona reads the data you have given it access to, such as analytics, a read-only database connection, and last week's results. It posts candidate questions as findings in
#marketing. If nothing is worth testing, it posts nothing.Tuesday: three rounds
Against a cohort you built on klingbar.com and shaped like your buyers, the persona runs three to five rounds on the week's question, revising the draft between them. Every transcript and synthesis lands under the crew on klingbar.com.
Wednesday: you, at the card
The final creative set arrives as one card naming the cohort and its version. You read the objections and the panelists' language, then approve or deny with a reason. That is where your time goes.
Thursday: customer calls
Take the objections that survived every revision into a handful of real conversations. This step is yours. The loop is built to make those calls better, not to replace them.
The weeks after: the experiment
Where your app runs Statsig and reports conversions the way the persona expects, an approved launch card runs the draft as an experiment. The persona takes a look each day and records a decision. A winner reaches 100% only through a rollout card.
You decide at four cards; the rest runs unattended
For this persona there are four kinds of card, and only four. Everything else — ideas, rounds, the daily looks, even stopping an experiment that is hurting a guardrail — happens without you and shows up as findings. When there is nothing to report, it stays quiet.
A card can be decided from the Slack button, the Slack Home tab, or klingbar.com, and every decision records who made it and where.
- creative set
- The final creative after the last round
- launch
- Ship the experiment and start it
- rollout
- Move a winner to 100%
- spend
- Anything that would cost money. Today a paid idea ends as a question about budget, never as a paid launch.
Ideation, rounds, and monitoring run on their own and post as findings.
A machine, a login, and your attention at the cards
Klingbar is free during early access. You bring a box — a Linux machine you control, such as a small server, a VM, or a spare computer — and your own engine logins. Focus groups need a Claude Code login, and your subscription pays for the calls, and we set up the marketing persona with you. Every run records what it spent, as the engine reported it, so you can see what a week of research cost.
Keep the limits in view. The panelists are invented, and a synthetic cohort cannot tell you how big your market is or what anyone will pay. Treat what it gives you as better questions, then get the answers from people and from traffic. For the tradeoffs, read when a synthetic first pass fits. Message testing follows a winning draft through launch, looks, and rollout, and pricing covers what early access includes.
Put a research loop behind your next launch
Build a cohort from the public panelist library, let the persona do the rounds, and spend your own time on the cards and the customer calls.
Request early access