candor

Templates / Market research survey

Research · Adaptive interview template

Market research survey template

Market research forces a bad trade. Surveys scale but flatten everything into checkboxes, while interviews go deep but reach a handful of people and take weeks to book. You usually end up with either a lot of shallow data or a little rich data, and rarely the thing you actually wanted, which is depth at scale.

This template closes that gap by running each respondent through an AI-moderated interview instead of a static form. You anchor with a behavioral question about the problem space and an open question about how they handle it today, and the interviewer probes from there: what they use now, what frustrates them, what they have tried and abandoned, and what they would pay for a better answer. Every respondent produces a transcript, so you read for converging patterns across dozens of interviews instead of squinting at cross-tabs.

When to use it

  • Sizing a new market or segment before committing to it
  • Understanding how a target audience currently solves a problem you might address
  • Mapping the competitive alternatives people actually use, including workarounds
  • Early discovery when you have a hypothesis but not yet a product to test

Running it well

  • Recruit the audience the market question is about, not whoever is easiest to reach. A precise segment of thirty beats a broad panel of thousands for depth.
  • Ask about current behavior before you ask about wishes. What people do today is real; what they say they want is a guess, and the two often disagree.
  • Read for the workaround. The spreadsheet, the manual process, the competitor they hate but keep using, that is your actual market, not the tidy category name.
  • Track share links by source with ?ref= so you can tell how a niche community answered versus a broad audience, because market signal varies by where you found people.

The questions, and why they're shaped this way

These are the anchor questions. You can edit, reorder, or add to them; the AI interviewer handles the depth between them.

Multiple choice

How often do you deal with this problem?

DailyWeeklyOccasionallyRarely or never

Frequency is the first cut of demand. It tells the interviewer whether it is talking to someone in acute pain or mild inconvenience, and routes the follow-ups toward urgency or indifference accordingly.

Open text

How do you handle this today?

The current-behavior question is the heart of market research. What people actually do, including the spreadsheets and workarounds, reveals the real competitor and the real unmet need better than any hypothetical.

What the interviewer asks next

Follow-ups aren't scripted. The AI reads each answer and probes what a researcher would. Depending on what a respondent says, it might ask:

"You said you deal with this daily. Walk me through the last time it came up and what you did about it."

"You mentioned you use a spreadsheet for this. Where does that approach break down or start to cost you time?"

"You've tried a couple of tools already. What made you stop using them?"

Live demo

Play the market research survey interview

This is the real interviewer, not a recording. Answer as yourself and watch the follow-ups adapt to what you write.

Prefer a full window? Open the demo.

Common questions

How is this different from a normal market research survey?
A normal survey collects the answers you thought to ask for. This runs each respondent through an interview, so the AI follows up on their actual behavior and surfaces the workarounds, frustrations, and alternatives a fixed questionnaire would never think to ask about.
How many responses do I need?
Because every respondent produces a transcript rather than just a data point, a few dozen from the right audience is often enough to see converging patterns. You are reading for repeated behaviors and language, not statistical precision.
Can I reach international markets?
Yes. The template supports 7 languages, so respondents can interview in their own language and you can compare how a problem is experienced across markets without losing nuance to translation.
What do the results look like?
Themes with supporting quotes and counts, the frequency breakdown, full transcripts of every interview, and a plain-language question box for asking things like "what workaround did people mention most often?"

Run the market research survey with your own audience

Join the waitlist