Launch HN: Prolific (YC S19) – Quickly find high-quality survey participants
I&#x27;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.<p>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 &gt; 5,000 per week, cross-sectional rather than panel) and we pay about $2 all-in, including the provider&#x27;s charge, for a survey that&#x27;s about 20 minutes. We&#x27;d fall afoul of your compensation rate pretty substantially. If we wanted to do some panel work and we needed re-contact, we&#x27;d definitely ramp up our payment quickly to help avoid attrition, but for the first contact, no.<p>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&#x27;t want to do this, it&#x27;s hard enough dealing with our primary funders. This makes me believe you are mostly targeting commercial &#x2F; market behavior researchers. That&#x27;s fine, but the pitch suggests you want academics. For transparency&#x27;s sake, what is your balance of private and university clients as of today?<p>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?<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s very difficult to get high education &#x2F; high SES &#x2F; 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 &gt; $125k a year or so).<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s getting people to stay engaged for a long time.<p>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.