Yesterday we got the chance to talk to Leon Noel, CEO of Social Sci. Social Sci is a play on two things. It’s a play on Social Sciences, who we cater to the most. Also, the idea of creating a community around helping to further science online. This Cambridge startup has worked directly with individual researchers to offer them ready-made populations of survey participants along with statistical sampling and analysis data. Social Sci has positioned the company to go up against established companies such as Qualtrics, Inc, SPSS, and Survey Monkey.
Bostinno: Tell me a little about your background and how you came to start Social Sci?
Leon: Before we started Social Sci, my co-founder and I were both undergraduates at Yale. Around May 2009, I was in the grunt in academic research. I was the one who was going onto college campuses and begging students to stop and take my survey, and then I was giving them $5 and a Gatorade for doing such! There are a lot of complications with that…it takes months to do your research and then you have a bunch of messy surveys that you have to transcribe before you can analyze the data. So I realized we had to come up with something better. Over the summer I was working in a lab at Yale, and my co-founder Harley Trung was working as an intern at Microsoft but we were still working on this idea of getting participants to come to our labs and participate in our research.
Over that summer we built a functioning site, which is now what you can see if you go to live.socialsci.com where you could type in your zip code, and it would show a list of in-person studies that you could show up and take. Before we even tried to market it, we had about 50 people go to our site simply because we were the only ones that had New Haven Research – Bipolar Studies. People were going to our site and into these labs. That was the point that clicked for us, if there is a way that we could bring the scientific process online, that would increase the turnaround time on the actual science. We realized that there was a need for scientific researchers to bring their surveys online, and reach a participant pool that was honest but also anonymous online…which is really hard to achieve.
In December 2009, we decided that we were going to build out this full research platform that would cover everything from building complicated surveys with a simple and intuitive interface to recruiting participants to those surveys, and then piping all that data into an analytics platform. We were accepted into Techstars in March 2010, so we left Yale, and came up to Boston. After completing that program we raised our first round of $500,000 in funding. We then hit revenue in December 2010, and are glad to say we are experiencing recurring revenue now as well.
Bostinno: How does the Social Sci service work exactly?
Leon: We are the only company out there that combines survey tools, with a participant pool. One of the things from day 1 that we realized was that there is really no leader in bringing that participant pool online in the market. So we had the freedom to develop what exactly does “bringing a participant pool online mean?” What we wanted to do was to develop a platform that was anonymous, honest, yet still enable you to pay participants. If you are a participant in Social Sci, you can sign up by using your cellphone. We then send an SMS code directly your cellphone and that authenticates you as a real human being. We know you’re not a robot, and once you input that code you are kept completely anonymous. The user will then go ahead and setup an account, and no data is tied to that account: no IP, no email, no phone number. There’s nothing tying you to that account, so for all I know you could be powerrangers55 and I would never be able to tie your responses in our platform to that username.
Once you are in the Social Sci platform, every direct response that you give us – so something that has a direct answer such as what is your ethnicity, gender, etc. we actually store and keep track of over time. So if you say you are male one week, but next week you say that you’re a female…that sends out a red flag to us and the researcher and lowers the quality score in the game mechanics feature of the website. This is our way of tracking whether or not you are being honest in these surveys. Over time it enables us to build out this really complex profile of this completely anonymous entity to which when researchers want to present their research they don’t have to worry about biasing in individual group participants.
For example, if a researcher wants to attract a 30-35 year old male, who plays golf and is stressed out, the normal method is to post a flyer around a college campus. That introduces a whole level of bias in the actual survey. But with Social Sci, we can ask a simple question, “are you stressed out?” and the only people who will see it are males who are 30-35 and play golf, because we already have that information built into our pool.
We’re revolutionizing this idea of what does it mean to “bring research online,” but once you do have that power how do you utilize it to: 1) make the research better, 2) keep participants safe and finally what else can we do that’s pretty cool in terms of helping that research online.
Bostinno: How are you able to go about obtaining a large, accurate sample size in such a short turnaround period?
Leon: Since we are recruiting online there are tons of methods that we can use in Social Media. We run a distributed ad network of about 40 different places to bring participants into our pool at a very low cost, and at a very target rate. Since we know you’re beinghonest over time, researchers feel comfortable using our pool because they know they are getting unbiased, and targeted participants. To encourage participants our system also has game mechanics built into it. There are always new studies coming out every Friday or Monday and we’re tweeting about the new studies, putting them up on Facebook, and it almost becomes a race to be able to take the studies! People hear about the study and know only 300 or 400 people need to be there, so in 24 hours we can complete a 300 to 400 study since people are excited to participate. A survey site has never been solely focused on furthering science. When you take a Social Sci survey, you’re earning points, prizes, and badges but at the end of the day you also realize you are doing something good by helping further the general scientific mindset. Since we can gather the participants at such a low cost we can then turn those savings over to the researchers. They are then able to get their research not only done 10 times quicker, but 10 times cheaper as well.
For more information on Social Sci, and to sign up to be a participant in one of the many studies offered go to: https://www.socialsci.com/participants
