How to Start a Project on Minds

Starting a project on Minds begins directly in the workspace by creating an audience and setting up a study with your stimuli, such as copy, Figma prototypes, or scale questions. The Minds PRISM engine simulates directional responses based on modeled contexts, enabling preliminary feedback without the recruitment and incentive costs of physical panels.

This guide walks you through the steps from an initial pilot project to structured scaling across your team.

Who This Onboarding Guide Is For

This overview is designed for insights leads, UX research leads, product managers, and marketing decision-makers preparing to adopt synthetic research methods. If you already know that synthetic audience simulations can accelerate your feedback loops and now want to understand the exact organizational and technical process, this guide provides a clear framework. It covers how to move from an initial hypothesis through a controlled pilot project to a scalable workspace structure without undermining established research standards.

The Structured Workflow: From Workspace Setup to Your First Study

Implementing Minds follows a three-step process designed for minimal setup time and maximum consistency.

Step 1: Audience Definition and Modeling via Minds PRISM

Every project is built on one or more audiences. An audience in Minds consists of individual Minds that represent specific demographic, psychographic, or behavioral traits. You create these entities through narrative profile descriptions, uploaded research reports, persona documents, or publicly accessible context links, where enabled for your workspace.

Under the hood, the Minds PRISM reasoning and inference engine processes these data points. PRISM serves as the methodological foundation that maintains contextual consistency, ensuring simulated participants respond within their defined profile framework during qualitative deep-dive interviews and quantitative questionnaires.

Step 2: Study Design and Stimulus Integration

Once your audience is established, you configure your study. Minds is an end-to-end platform for commercial synthetic research, covering a broad spectrum of interaction types:

• Qualitative exploration: Open-ended questions, exploratory follow-ups, and reactions to problem statements.
• Quantitative surveys: Single-choice, multi-select, and custom scale questions.
• Forced-choice methods: Valid trade-off analyses such as MaxDiff designs to prioritize features, claims, or pain points.
• Multimodal stimuli: Direct integration of copy, images, campaign visuals, video assets, app flows, or Figma prototypes, where enabled.

The study design allows you to test product and UX questions within the same workflow used to evaluate marketing and positioning concepts.

Step 3: Analysis, Refinement, and Export

Once the study completes, Minds delivers structured qualitative summaries alongside quantitative distributions and deterministic calculations. Because synthetic research results are always directional and context-dependent, they help eliminate weak variants early, sharpen core messaging, and validate hypotheses before committing budget to physical field tests or final rollouts.

Comparing Implementation Approaches

When implementing user feedback infrastructure, organizations typically face three paths:

Traditional panels provide real human observation but require fresh recruitment budgets for every minor copy change. Unstructured chatbots lack consistent persona grounding and do not support structured research designs like MaxDiff or scale questions. Minds bridges this gap as a full-fledged platform for commercial synthetic research.

When Minds Is the Right Choice and Where the Limits Lie

Minds is ideal for scenarios where speed, iteration frequency, and budget efficiency are critical:

• Rapid pre-testing of positioning options, marketing claims, and value propositions.
• UX and usability feedback on information architecture, Figma screens, and interaction concepts.
• Feature prioritization via MaxDiff analysis prior to expensive software development cycles.
• Packaging and visual testing before finalizing production budgets.

Limits of synthetic research: Minds does not replace physical taste tests, regulatory clinical trials, high-precision price elasticity measurements, or political polling. Where legally binding representativeness or physical sensory testing is required, real-world field studies complement the Minds workflow at critical milestones.

Next Steps for Your Team

You can launch an initial project immediately. For flexible testing without commitment, Pay as you go offers prepaid responses at €0.12 (incl. VAT) or $0.12 (before US sales tax) per response with 10 saved audiences and unlimited workspace users. For expanded requirements, the Pro plan at 199 euros or dollars per named user per month (25 audiences per user, 5,000 pooled responses per user per month) provides an ideal starting point. Larger organizations can evaluate specific data requirements and custom tiers directly under an Enterprise agreement.

Launch your first study now and set up your workspace directly via Minds platform access.