.png)
Anyone who has ever done user research has dealt with the painful repetitive steps of finding people to survey and interview, outreach campaigns, crafting and testing surveys, scheduling and rescheduling meetings, call prepping, note taking, call transcripts, and insights interpretation. These processes are often very expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, unless companies have a massive research budget and a vast network of users to reach out to, the hypothesis testing process and the insights generated, are at high risk of being limited, biased, and therefore flawed. These half-baked, unreliable outputs make it hard to justify significant investment decisions, such as a product launch.
This dilemma exists not only for early-stage technology-intensive ventures like the ones we build at Founder’s Studio, but for any business at any stage that is looking to launch a new product or feature or enter an unfamiliar geography or market segment.
It’s estimated that ~80-90% of new products either don’t make it to the market or fail to meet performance expectations, in many cases due to lack of proper testing and flawed user research. All stages of the product journey can significantly benefit from real-time large-scale high-quality consumer insights, but limited budgets, research team bandwidth, and lack of proper methodology stand in the way, and often result in costly mistakes that could have easily been avoided early on with better research tools.
Seer allows product, brand, and innovation teams to conduct instantaneous consumer research at scale, and at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional user research methods. Forget the headaches of finding perspective users, setting, prepping, and conducting surveys and interviews, or paying expensive agencies to do it.
Seer ingests product attributes, commercialization strategy details, and up-to-date market data to simulate diverse consumer behaviors at scale and help predict product market performance across various markets and consumer segments.
Users can interact with Seer’s proprietary synthetic consumers the same way they would interact with real-world consumers - through interviews and surveys to generate stated insights, through Seer’s extensive real-world data inputs to collect behavioral insights, as well as through in-silico product physical testing to get physiological and physical responses to dramatically increase the likelihood of product success.
We are starting with what we call digital twins of consumers, but essentially, it's a way to digitize human psychology and physiology. And once that's achieved, that foundation and accumulation of learnings can unlock a much broader scope of use cases. Kun, founder of Seer
Relying solely on existing LLMs themselves is not sufficient to drive reliable business decisions in the near-term, which is why Seer is using a ‘mixed reality’ approach.
Essentially, we are significantly enriching the model outputs by a combination of Bain’s decades of proprietary methodology and real-world consumer research data as well as extensive public data. The synthetic data and real-world data will complement each other to provide insights with the highest quality.
Using this approach, Seer is creating a platform where decades of proprietary methodology and real-world consumer research data, extensive public data, and synthetic data come together into a “mix-reality” experience that accurately replicates high-fidelity real-world consumer behaviors.
Increased speed
Conventional research involves many time-consuming steps such as design, execution, analysis, and synthesis. Seer's GenAI-powered synthetic consumers provide insights almost instantly and accessible from any where, at any time - allowing product teams to de-risk product development early and quickly.
Lower cost
A company can spend millions of dollars on market research and consumer insights collection each year. The annual cost of using Seer is significantly lower (by several orders of magnitude!) due to the drastically lower amount of manual input and tasks required.
Higher flexibility
Traditional survey/interview design is difficult and costly to iterate, and follow-up questions are expensive, time-consuming and often impossible! Seer provides limitless longitudinal consumer insights with a deep dive into 2nd and 3rd-level insights - in other words, Seer users can double-click on any synthetic consumer of interest.
Unparalleled performance
Traditional consumer insights collection is prone to bad actors / unfaithful respondents and low completion rates, limiting the reliability of the generated outputs. Seer’s synthetic consumers are powered by LLMs fine-tuned with copious amounts of vetted consumer data - gathered through years of global on-field experience by Bain teams including surveys, expert calls, and other proprietary datasets and methodologies.
Better scalability
Linear cost/labor scaling of traditional consumer research limits necessary granularity in respondent demographics and geographies. Seer’s large library of consumer personas can scale easily without time or labor limitations.
Enhanced confidentiality
No risk of leaking highly secretive “next big ideas” to the public. No disclosure to the real world is necessary when testing product ideas with synthetic consumers.
A founding team combining top technical and business expertise
Kun holds a PhD from Yale University with rich data science experiences and had a postdoctoral training at Stanford University applying AI technologies in research studies. His team members include both advanced AI technical talent and top business talent trained by Bain & Company. Combined with a solid experience in building advanced GenAI-powered business solutions at Bain, Kun and his team are well positioned to bring Seer’s vision to life.
Bain provides decades of consumer research expertise and data from expert call transcripts, large-scale surveys, and real-world consumer preferences and behavior data to build on.
A long and proven experience in understanding consumers, a newly developed capability in applying GenAI to business problems, and a vast client and alumni network make Bain’s Founder’s Studio the ideal place to launch Seer: the new golden standard in consumer research.
We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Kun and the Seer team to the Founder’s Studio to disrupt the future of market research.
Seer is building an AI-powered consumer insights platform to dramatically increase the likelihood of product success at a fraction of today’s time and cost
Associate Product Manager, Milan
