In my experience, startups want to demonstrate efficacy about basic things: weight removed, increased revenue, personal productivity, product safety, etc.
This kind of research lends itself extremely well to protocol templates: a standardized sequence of steps to locate the participants, collect the data, and decide the results. These steps could be performed by a website. I've posted a story of how that might work here.
Without such a project, founders have two options:
Perform the study themselves. The scientific background and time required to design a study well is non-trivial, as is the expertise necessary to create participant waivers. There are also significant time costs in setting up the data collection, and performing the analysis. At the end, the study will be greeted somewhat skeptically.
Pay a University or Contract Research Organization to perform the study. This is expensive, which I believe is why more founders aren't doing it.
This project creates a third option:
Which may be imperfect, but is still a pretty appealing value proposition.
This kind of research lends itself extremely well to protocol templates
This is not at all self-evident to me. How, for example, would you demonstrate product safety (for a diverse variety of products) via a standard template?
Use a standard template then get back to work.
I don't see how a "template" frees one from
significant time costs in setting up the data collection, and performing the analysis.
Research costs money and requires competent people. If it were possible to do meaningful research on the cheap just by reusing the same template, don't you think it would be a very popular opinion already?
I'm a LW reader, two time CFAR alumnus, and rationalist entrepreneur.
Today I want to talk about something insidious: marketing studies.
Until recently I considered studies of this nature merely unfortunate, funny even. However, my recent experiences have caused me to realize the situation is much more serious than this. Product studies are the public's most frequent interaction with science. By tolerating (or worse, expecting) shitty science in commerce, we are undermining the public's perception of science as a whole.
The good news is this appears fixable. I think we can change how startups perform their studies immediately, and use that success to progressively expand.
Product studies have three features that break the assumptions of traditional science: (1) few if any follow up studies will be performed, (2) the scientists are in a position of moral hazard, and (3) the corporation seeking the study is in a position of moral hazard (for example, the filing cabinet bias becomes more of a "filing cabinet exploit" if you have low morals and the budget to perform 20 studies).
I believe we can address points 1 and 2 directly, and overcome point 3 by appealing to greed.
Here's what I'm proposing: we create a webapp that acts as a high quality (though less flexible) alternative to a Contract Research Organization. Since it's a webapp, the cost of doing these less flexible studies will approach the cost of the raw product to be tested. For most web companies, that's $0.
If we spend the time to design the standard protocols well, it's quite plausible any studies done using this webapp will be in the top 1% in terms of scientific rigor.
With the cost low, and the quality high, such a system might become the startup equivalent of citation needed. Once we have a significant number of startups using the system, and as we add support for more experiment types, we will hopefully attract progressively larger corporations.
Is anyone interested in helping? I will personally write the webapp and pay for the security audit if we can reach quorum on the initial protocols.
Companies who have expressed interested in using such a system if we build it:
(I sent out my inquiries at 10pm yesterday, and every one of these companies got back to me by 3am. I don't believe "startups love this idea" is an overstatement.)
So the question is: how do we do this right?
Here are some initial features we should consider:
Any placebos used in the studies must be available for purchase as long as the results are used in advertising, allowing for trivial study replication.
Significant contributors will receive:
I'm hoping that if a system like this catches on, we can get an "effective startups" movement going :)
So how do we do this right?