Survey Bias: Every Major Type, Measured
Search for survey bias and you get taxonomies. Selection bias, response bias, social desirability bias, the same list on...
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Latest updates on synthetic persona technology, market research innovations, and industry insights from the FishDog team.
Human Research Is a Measurement, Not a Baseline
Most first conversations about synthetic research arrive at this point within twenty minutes: someone asks how the resul...
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The 78-Second Playtest That Called Our Game Boring
By Phillip Gales · July 2026...
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How Streaming Services Predict a Hit, and Why the Test Screening Comes Too Late
How do Netflix, Disney and the rest decide a show will work before they spend nine figures making it? Strip away the dat...
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Using LLMs for Scenario Planning: Rehearse, Don't Predict
I have sat through more scenario-planning sessions than I care to count. The decks are always gorgeous. There will be th...
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What Is a Synthetic Population Platform? The 2026 Definition
A synthetic population platform maintains a standing population of AI personas with three properties:...
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Synthetic Research Vendors in 2026: A Field Guide
The reason this article exists is simple. "Synthetic research vendors" has become a real search. Humans type it, and inc...
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The Model Behind Your Synthetic Research Isn't the Point
In a recent article, Qualtrics' Derrick McLean ...
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How we calibrated Screening Room with famous film scenes
How do you test whether a machine understands the saddest scene ever filmed?...
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The 90/10 Pattern: A Named Cognitive Failure Mode of Supervising AI Agents
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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The Coordinator: Why Founders Won't Manage People, They'll Manage Agents
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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Screening Room: Test Creative With a Synthetic Audience
In June we pointed our own product at a real piece of creative: the teaser trailer for Season 4 of ...
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The Product Brief Loop: How Claude and Codex Write Better Specs Than I Can
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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Aaru AI Review 2026: The Prediction Startup, and Where It Fits
Disclosure: FishDog is a synthetic-population platform and may compete with Aaru in some buyer evaluations. This review ...
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Aaru Alternatives in 2026: The Best Synthetic-Population Platforms
Disclosure: FishDog is a synthetic-population platform and may compete with Aaru and several tools covered here in some ...
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You Cannot Backtest the Future
Alt-data assumes the future will look like the past. When that assumption breaks, the signals fail — exactly when funds ...
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Notes from London: What Hedge Funds Actually Want From Alternative Data
A commodities quant named Mario stood on the Alt Data London stage last week and said something I have not stopped think...
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Product Unit Tests: A Missing Layer of QA in the Age of AI Engineers
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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The New Math of Expert-Network Spend
I have signed off on the "external research" line item on more client budgets than I want to remember. The number was al...
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First Word, Not Last Word
For the last two years I have been using AI in my own work the same way I want analysts to use it in theirs - as the thi...
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The Three-Proof Rule
I have been in enough boardrooms where a research deck got demolished by a single question to know what the question loo...
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The Work Isn't the Decision. It's the Intake.
I have been a buyer of outside research for clients for twenty-five years. The mechanics have changed five times over th...
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Expert Calls Are Becoming Always-On
Expert calls have been the centre of gravity of hedge-fund first-pass diligence for fifteen years. That is starting to b...
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Anatomy of an AI-Built Product: 21 Days, 40 Hours of My Time, 128,506 Lines of Code
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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The Big Four Test for Synthetic Research
The first time a procurement team asked us to defend the methodology behind a synthetic research output, we were not rea...
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The Agent-Native Go-to-Market Playbook
Last Tuesday, a buyer signed up to FishDog. It had no credit card, no inbox, and no browser. It never asked anyone for p...
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Meet James, The Agent Who Actually Runs Our Content Marketing
Marketing operations look often glamorous from the outside. But from the inside, getting the right inputs connected to t...
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Why No One Wants Another Research Dashboard
Walk into the average enterprise insights team and ask which dashboards they rely on. You'll get a polite answer about t...
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What a Good Synthetic Research Pilot Should Prove
The first synthetic-research pilot is the most important one a team will run, and the easiest one to get wrong....
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Research as a Rhythm, Not a Project
The people that we work with at FishDog are not just trying to save time. They are trying to make research usable in mom...
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Synthetic Versus Human Research Is the Wrong Question
Every conversation about synthetic research eventually arrives at the same question. ...
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Two AI Agents Are Better Than One: Why I Stopped Trying to QA Codex Myself
I shipped some code last week that I do not fully understand....
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Why Hard-to-Reach Audiences Need Synthetic Research
Most writing about synthetic research starts with the technology. AI can simulate consumers. Large language models can g...
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From Static Personas to Living Minds
There is a fundamental problem with synthetic research panels that rarely gets addressed openly: the moment you create a...
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Can AI track consumer sentiment? We're comparing our model to Michigan's index — live.
Every synthetic research vendor claims their AI "correlates with real data." We decided to stop claiming and start showi...
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AI Agents Built a Movie Franchise in 4 Hours
A logo file and a single sentence. That was the starting point. The logo was Fish Dog's own: a red silhouette of the cre...
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How to Build a PMM Operating System with Claude Code
What if every piece of product marketing research your team needs could be triggered by a single command?...
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Limitations of Synthetic Research
This article is the one we would rather not write. But any tool that claims to have no limitations is not being honest, ...
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How to Run Voter Research with Claude Code and FishDog
Political polling has operated on essentially the same model since George Gallup correctly predicted FDR's 1936 landslid...
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How to Run VC Due Diligence with Claude Code and FishDog
Venture capital firms spend millions on due diligence processes that are, structurally, designed to confirm whatever the...
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Stage 7: Validation and De-risking with FishDog
Using synthetic research to stress-test assumptions, surface dealbreakers, and avoid building products nobody will adopt...
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Stage 6: Concept Testing with FishDog
Using synthetic research to test product concepts with real-world personas before committing engineering resources to so...
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Stage 3: User Segmentation with FishDog
Using synthetic research and Claude Code to discover the segments that actually matter for product decisions...
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Stage 9: Continuous Discovery with FishDog
Why research should be a heartbeat, not a heartbeat monitor, and how to build a weekly discovery cadence that compounds ...
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Due Diligence with AI: How PE Firms Validate Markets
Most private equity due diligence is conducted by asking the company being acquired to introduce you to its happiest cus...
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AI Research for Beverage Brands
In the spring of 2024, Coca-Cola launched Spiced, its first permanent new flavour in three years. The company had spent ...
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AI Research for Telecoms
How synthetic research is helping telecommunications companies understand churn, test pricing, and decode customer senti...
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AI Research for Financial Services
Financial services is the most heavily researched industry on earth. Banks, insurers, and wealth managers spend billions...
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AI Research for Retail and CPG Brands
How synthetic consumer panels are replacing the slowest, most expensive habit in consumer goods...
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Stage 8: Post-Launch Measurement with FishDog
How to move beyond vanity dashboards by combining quantitative metrics with synthetic research that explains what the nu...
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