[00:00:00] Sebastian: You're listening to the Insightful Connections podcast. Our guest today is Michael Hess. Michael is the co-founder and CEO at Emporia Research. Founded in 2021, Emporia is a premier B2B audience activation company, enabling organizations to find, qualify, and engage hard-to-reach decision makers worldwide. Unlike others in the sample and insight space, Emporia unifies programmatic recruitment, automated LinkedIn credentialing, and real-time activation, allowing clients to launch studies, refine marketing campaigns, and surface actionable intelligence without wrangling multiple vendors. Definitely done that before. Prior to founding Emporia, Michael was an information systems consultant at Baker Tilly, before starting a small digital content agency for travel brands, mostly boutique hotels, which led to an opportunity within global marketing at Marriott International as a manager of global creative and content marketing, supporting social content strategy for the company's 33 hotel brands. Michael, thanks for being on the show today.

[00:00:59] Michael: Seb, very happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:02] Sebastian: So before we get into it, because I have a usual intro that I start with, I actually wanted to kind of intro you, something I'm excited about is as a fellow podcaster, right? I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about Twerr and kind of what it is and where you guys got the idea for that.

[00:01:39] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm flattered that you think of me as a fellow podcaster. I feel like I'm a wannabe podcaster that has a bunch of podcast mics from my past career at Merion, and I'm just trying to get some use out of them. But yeah, Twerr, I started six months ago, it stands for This Week in Research, and partly just as a way to keep myself informed, frankly. And so it was right around the time that, well, I was just ahead of deep research coming out with OpenAI. And so the first early versions of Twerr, I kind of set up all these different automations with Make.com and Zapier, and I was kind of testing things out, and then at the same time, kind of sharing workflows on LinkedIn and so on. But it was just a way to keep myself up to date on the industry. There's a handful of really great resources that are out there. I found myself not always visiting the usual suspects to really get a great pulse on everything. And it didn't feel like everything was always covered. And there was always really great representation across, you know, all different geographies and segments of market research. And so really just started as a way to solve my own problem, so to speak, in terms of keeping myself informed. We shared it internally, just in our Slack channel for a couple weeks. And then it wasn't even my idea. I think it was someone else on our team that was like, we should turn this into some kind of LinkedIn content. I was like, better to do that rather than just have this sit in folder somewhere or in our Slack channel. And so that's, you know, what it became. And then as soon as deep research came out, it became such an easy thing to do, frankly. I mean, I spend very little time each week putting this together. It is one long prompt, which I share at the header of every actual blog post on our site. The exact prompt that I use, folks can get in there, manipulate things, change things if they like to. And I paste that into deep research. I change the dates. And then I take the output of that and I create a notebook LM podcast, which is just the pasted full tour report. Plus, you know, some custom instructions. But long winded answer to your question, just started it to keep myself informed on the industry and decided to share because it felt like other folks could benefit from getting a more holistic view, in my opinion, of kind of what's going on week to week in the space.

[00:03:41] Sebastian: When you guys were using it internally as like a news summary tool, was it still in a podcast format or is that something that came with sort of the external pivot?

[00:03:50] Michael: It wasn't in the beginning. And then right at the time that we decided to start sharing this on LinkedIn and on our company blog is when notebook LM released their audio overview feature, which now feels like ages ago. I think it was about six months ago. And actually just last week, they released this video overview feature, which we've been super curious about and kicking the tires on. But I was kind of timed with that, that we thought it was just easy enough to create a podcast version. We don't go to the full extent of uploading on Spotify and Apple podcasts. It just lives on our website. I don't think it merits space on some of those platforms just yet. I know it is helpful, but at the same time, you're listening to it and you're like, this is still an AI fumbling over some things at some point. It's so funny to me how interjected will be different ums and uhs and oftentimes it's totally overdone. So I don't feel it's ready for prime time on Spotify just yet. But, you know, maybe, maybe one more turn of the crank and we'll be there.

[00:04:46] Sebastian: Nice, nice. So, Michael, I always start with this question, and I think in your case, it's going to have a really interesting answer. So how did you end up in market research originally? And how does that sort of origin story, if you will, account for where you've come in the years since?

[00:05:01] Michael: Yeah, no. So we don't come from the space. Originally, we kind of fell backwards into it, as I think many folks do, that we've met in this world. I've still yet to meet a single person that went to, what is it, University of Georgia or something that went through that esteemed market research program. Haven't met any of those just yet. Most folks I meet have kind of fallen into the space and that was the case with us. So maybe rewind a couple of years. Jake, who is my co-founder, our CTO, he and I were college buddies at the University of Maryland, have known each other since we were 18 or so. Always built little products nights and weekends in school, but nothing that we felt that we could, you know, really leave our job to go pursue. Fast forward a couple of years to 2021 during the height of the pandemic, a little extra time on our hands, right? And we were just kind of throwing ideas at the wall, evaluating different problem spaces that we'd come across in our career. And right around that time, GLG, the expert network, filed their S-1 to go public. We were a little bit familiar with GLG at the time. I started my career in consulting and was familiar with them from that world. Jake and our third co-founder, Mark, both started their career at Goldman Sachs on a trading desk. They were both engineering strats there. And so they witnessed their peers in the finance team leverage GLG and AlphaSites and these other expert networks for big deals and due diligence. And so we just thought that was kind of interesting. So we dove into the S-1 in 2021. This is pre-chat GPT, would have been nice to just upload this 200-page document to chat GPT and say, you know, what does all this mean? But we combed through this S-1 over a weekend and we kind of maybe naively realized for ourself at that time, wow, this is a massive business. $600 million plus a year business, but pretty traditional in their operations, so to speak. And so pretty thin margins in our opinion. And we thought maybe there was a bit of operational efficiency to be had with more of a technology layer to what we think is the most operationally expensive part of their business, which is just the recruitment aspect of experts for engagements. And so Jake and Mark Wallach-Goldman, they were on the engineering team and so they were not your finance bros, Patagonia vest wearing folks. Although I say that and then we have got a whole Rolodex of different colors of those vests. Anyway, we basically kind of thought, hey, maybe there's a bit of a weight of technology here that could make this a bit operationally more efficient. We took that hypothesis and applied to an accelerator program in New York called ERA. We incubated the company there, graduated that program, raised two rounds of funding to grow the team and kind of get after things. But everything was originally through the lens of building a more programmatic expert network, as it were. And we've widened our aperture from there. But it all kind of started with us throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall. And then right around that time, GLG had filed the rest one. And we're like, this is pretty cool. We're familiar with this business and maybe there's something to be done to make this a bit more efficient.

[00:07:46] Sebastian: And that wasn't the company you set out to build originally, right, Michael?

[00:07:50] Michael: No, so that is the short version. As I'm sure you can appreciate, Seb, as a startup founder yourself, we had originally started with a separate idea. It was an ed tech company where we were trying to basically marry TikTok and Udemy or Skillshare. So all short form education content on your phone, all five minute or less classes. Turns out folks go to TikTok for that. So that was eight months of pain trying to build a beautiful product, but not really solving anyone's problem. And there is a kind of meandering way in which we kind of got to our interest in that S1 to begin with. But we originally started to build an ed tech company and then we'd left our jobs at that point and there was no turning back. And we were going to pivot until we found something that worked. And it was right around that time that the S1 for GLG came out and we decided to march in that direction.

[00:08:38] Sebastian: You guys kept the name Emporia.

[00:08:40] Michael: We kept the name for a couple of reasons. One, because we didn't want to have to go kind of reincorporate the company and do all of that again. So that was one. Two, the name is nondescript enough where, you know, basically means global marketplace. And we're like, OK, you know, global marketplace for insights or data collection or what have you that, you know, we can keep the name. And so, yeah, we ended up just keeping the name. But now we feel like it's even maybe more fitting than it was for, you know, the education company. So we don't totally regret keeping Emporia.

[00:09:08] Sebastian: When you were in that headspace of, you know, obviously, and as you, I think, speculated, but correctly, I've also been there. When you were in that headspace of, you know, this idea isn't working, we need to pivot into something else. Obviously, you and your co-founders decided to make a bet on market research to an extent. And maybe at the time, you know, given your background in finance, consulting and expert networks being a little bit in the penumbra of the space, you know, maybe you weren't even thinking of it in those terms. But what was it that made you guys think this is a good space to bet on?

[00:09:43] Michael: One, it solved a problem that we were acutely aware of. So when we were running this ed tech company, we maybe obviously conducted zero market research. We didn't talk to a single person, you know, in that seven or eight months. That was a good fit for our product until the very end. And it was, again, around that time that the whole GLG thing was going on. And we're like, you know, we can see how talking to your respective customers and these expert calls, how there's kind of a marriage of an opportunity there. But I think we got a lot of conviction early on serendipitously in meetings and folks that have just been in the market research space for a long time and have had success who were telling us that, you know, B2B is a really hard space and there's so many problems and fraud is a big issue. So very early on, we met folks like, I think the first person we ever met in market research was Matt Gershner. If you're familiar with Matt, we feel like he's a degrees of Kevin Bacon type of person. He just, you know, has been in the space forever and knows so many folks. We also got connected super early on to Patrick Comer, who was the founder and CEO of Lucid and folks like Steve Schlesinger, who were very kind with their time in kind of the early days and when we were still ideating on things, but gave us some level of conviction hearing from folks like Patrick and Steve and Matt and other market research folks that we were kind of heading down the right path this time and that there was a real problem to be solved here. And so I don't know how long we would have stuck with things in the early days if we didn't have, you know, some of those folks saying, yes, this is worth, you know, your time and your energy and there's a business here. So very thankful to some of the folks we met in the early days who just kind of gave us that additional, you know, level of conviction with what we're doing.

[00:11:19] Sebastian: So I was on your site researching for the episode and I found your about section to actually be really entertaining, which, you know, is not something to take for granted with most businesses, right? It's typically not the case. But in particular, there was one section that I read and I'll read it here. So Jake and Mark met while working as software engineers at Goldman Sachs in New York, where they observed their finance peers leveraging expert networks. If you know anything about expert networks, you know they come in with a high price tag and rely on slow manual email correspondence with experts. Shots fired. Most of us can agree that these services are operationally expensive and inefficient. We thought there could be a better way of connecting professionals to engagements that didn't cost an arm and a leg. I guess my question for you is, what was the vision for how you guys could, at an operational level, differentiate from the incumbents in the space? How did you see that inefficiency and say, oh, hey, this inefficiency is actually something we can solve against?

[00:12:19] Michael: Yeah, great question. Didn't mean to shoot any shots there, but yeah, I guess we just thought about not having come from the space at all and having more of a product and tech background. We just thought of things pretty differently as we kind of have come to learn. And so rather than proactive panel building, we always thought of things in terms of active recruitment. So companies like GLG and AlphaSights and GuidePoint and some of these expert networks that folks are familiar with, you know, might have, I don't know, call it a million folks that are in their panel, right? And when they get a request for a project where there aren't folks that are already sitting in and double opted in and so on, then it becomes, you know, a hair on fire situation to go out and scour LinkedIn and message folks and email folks and get on the phone and call folks. Where we kind of took a totally different approach from the beginning, where we buy all the same data that like a Zoom Info buys or Apollo buys. We work with about 15 upstream data providers and data brokers, but rather than for sales and lead gen, we just apply a research recruitment lens to things. And so folks can come into our product or if we're, you know, managing a product project on someone's behalf, it's our team just going in. But you can filter on things like location and management level and job title and company size and revenue and industry and so on. And we'll show you all the LinkedIn profiles that match. They may not be folks that are even aware of us or double opted into our network, but they're folks that we can at least get in front of programmatically with an invitation that's hyper-personalized to try and drive them into your project. And so taking that approach from the beginning is kind of what, and seeing it work. You know, we spent a whole lot of time, probably four or six months, four to six months in the early days to kind of stand up the first version of what is now our sourcing engine and distribution engine, which identifies the folks that are a good fit and then reaches out to them to participate. Seeing that work a couple times, even today, it's kind of shocking to us when we get a totally new audience and we kind of click a couple buttons and set up a project and kick it off and it starts to recruit folks into a project without us, you know, doing much. We've done everything from truck drivers of rare earth metals in Alberta, you know, for qualitative projects or airline reliability engineers in Singapore. And it's just us kind of plugging in these fields and kicking off a project. And then, you know, you see completes or screener completes and interviews start to get scheduled. It still shocks us a little bit, but I think taking that approach was just a very different method for sourcing these experts as maybe some of these more traditional folks or incumbents is kind of what gave us some confidence in the early days that this is a thread worth pulling on and building on top of.

[00:14:50] Sebastian: That's really interesting. You know, one of the things that I always find actually the most rewarding in my own capacity as a recruiter, you know, typically on consumer qualitative studies, is introducing somebody to their first focus group. When they've clearly never participated in market research ever before. I think, you know, a lot of the concerns we have about panel health or about sample quality can kind of be shortcut by just engaging real random people who've never heard of this before in their life. And it sounds like that's kind of what you guys are doing at scale.

[00:15:21] Michael: Yeah, essentially, that's it. We now have, call it, north of half a million folks that have participated with us in the last year or so that are familiar with us. Where if we have, call it an IT decision maker project in an enterprise company, it's like, okay, we can find those folks within our quote unquote panel. But yes, oftentimes it's, you know, these hyper personalized invitations. Of course, we're using a ton of just the LLMs under the hood to create these invitations that are personalized to someone's professional experience. But, you know, that's it. In a lot of cases, folks are hearing about us for the first time through an invitation. We've done a lot of work to create some additional resources for folks that are first time participants. You kind of like a participant's guide to research and what they might expect and so on. There is definitely some education. They are first time participants, but then, you know, folks seem to get the hang of things if you answer all of their questions up front, right?

[00:16:11] Sebastian: Yeah, yeah. I might be going out on a limb here, but I guess a question that I'm curious to ask you is, you know, how did your background as a marketer play into developing this sort of way of operating?

[00:16:23] Michael: I was familiar with kind of expert network world from some of my time in consulting. I was never super close to those projects, but it was at least the names, GLG and AlphaSites and GuidePoint and ThirdBridge. You know, they weren't, I had heard them before, which is, it's not the case for most folks. And so I had at least something of that unique insight. And then when I went over to, or not unique insight, but kind of a unique experience. And then when I went over to Global Marketing at Marriott, we worked a little bit with market research companies. And so I remember we would get one big report every year that, you know, always, this is going down another rabbit hole, but it was always kind of, you know, we would sort of question, but we were like, well, you know, this research company like gave us this report. I guess it's right. And they did a good job. And we've learned so much that just, you know, whole world that happens between maybe that research agency and the panel company and the participants and everything that before it ends up in someone like our team. Hands, but had some familiarity with both of those worlds and expert networks are under the umbrella of market research. But I think just some level of exposure to that, you know, gave us a sense of how this world works. And then everything else has kind of been maybe taking some inspiration from what we did at Marriott. So, for example, I worked within our global marketing team, specifically on our content studio. So we supported all 33 brands through content marketing, everything from articles and videos and podcasts up to the in-room entertainment that folks don't really watch to, you know, the Super Bowl commercial and stuff our team got to work on. And we would create these content franchises that were just super easy. You didn't have to think about them after the franchise was created and the framework for that marketing was created. We've adapted those to maybe not so much of our business processes, but at least for the core business, but in how we think about marketing. So things like Twer, things like this, we started publishing this tool tip Tuesday where this is the framework for this bit of content or this content franchise or vertical. And, you know, you just got to publish that every week and you can kind of rinse and repeat and just put it on repeat. And so that was a very long winded answer to your question. But, you know, we're familiar with those kind of two worlds to operate in and then have definitely taken some inspiration from global marketing at Merriot in terms of how we think about just our own marketing.

[00:18:31] Sebastian: My question is more like, have you found your skill set as a marketer useful in getting people to trust you at scale with participating in market research for the first time?

[00:18:41] Michael: So in getting folks to participate for the first time, yes and no. I think we've put out a handful of just resources. We want to be present. You know, it's one thing to get an invitation to participate in the market research engagement and you go to the company LinkedIn page and there's nothing really there. You know, it's a different story when you go to that company LinkedIn page or company website and you see folks on the founding team or team members that are like very much publishing content every day, every week, every month where you're like, OK, this is, I feel like I have a connection here because I've seen a couple of videos that you've posted. Seems like a legitimate opportunity. And that's how I think about it, maybe through the participant lens, but even more so on just the customer lens. I mean, so much of our inbound comes from LinkedIn. And this is partly why we started investing in some of these LinkedIn quote unquote content franchises, because when you come in and book a demo through our website, you've got a little dropdown that you answer how you've heard about us. And 90% plus are through either referral or through LinkedIn posts. And so that's why I've kind of chosen to double down there. But the investment is a trust thing. You know, the more you see us in your LinkedIn feed or, you know, ahead of you participating in the market research study for the first time, probably the more you're going to trust us that we're a legitimate outfit. Right.

[00:19:59] Sebastian: So I recently saw you guys are branching out into AI personas based on B2B profiles. I'm curious if you can tell me a little bit more about that initiative, what it involves, what the rationale is, what people should be watching for from Emporia.

[00:20:13] Michael: Totally. So we've been interested in this world for a long time. A year after we started the company, we invested some time and resources here. We published a case study in the beginning of 2023, all on synthetic personas and comparing them to verified responses. If you Google B2B synthetic personas, we should be the first result with that case study from early 2023. We put that back on the shelf at that time, partly because we don't think that both the models or the market was ready for it just yet. I mean, when he brought up synthetic personas in early 2023 to any researcher, they would just kind of cringe and they didn't want to have anything to do with it. We've found it to be a very different story now, but we maybe eight or nine months ago started to revisit some of the work that we did there, partly because of a bit of research that came out of Stanford. So Stanford published a study called Simulating 1,000 Humans, which was pretty buzzy right when it came out, where they took 1,000 consumers, they ran them through a two-hour long qualitative interview, and then from the transcript of each of those interviews, they created these one-to-one synthetic personas or digital twins that were based on the real folks, the real participants. They had the humans take a survey afterwards, and then they had the digital twins, quote-unquote, take the same survey and saw repeatedly an 85% match in how they were answering questions, which not 100% of the way there, but pretty interesting. And so we were like, okay, maybe it's time to revisit this. Part of the reason why we explored this in the first place was one, we find it really interesting, but two, we didn't want to be the brand new kind of B2B research tech startup that is immediately disrupted by this whole new wave of technology. But so the Stanford study got us to revisit some of this stuff, and they open sourced their entire methodology, right? So this is why we love academia, where we took their entire methodology and started iterating on it to create more of a B2B specific persona from these interviews. So we've layered on an additional hour of B2B questioning. So tell me about your company culture and how decisions are made and what considerations you have when buying software and how do you like your boss? You know, things like that to get to the B2B version of your synthetic respondent. We've learned a ton of things along the way there, but that was kind of the original thinking. And we don't see a world in even a year from now where these are not some part of your research toolkit. There's so many just immediately helpful use cases today. So even just like survey testing. So while I get into field with this, you know, expensive survey before even just like testing that your survey design makes sense or what have you with, you know, the synthetic representation of who you're going after. So that's one that we're deploying today. There's a bunch of other ones with message testing and concept testing that are super, super interesting. We have now started as of a couple of weeks ago, now get requests from some of our largest customers that ask us to quote for both real and synthetic personas, which is a little crazy to us. But it's telling us that, you know, this isn't something that's going to go away and it's going to be a big part of how we do research in the future, for sure. To what degree? Well, I guess we'll, we'll kind of find out, but yeah, it's been a really exciting thing to just work on as a team and playing with these synthetic personas can be a little black mirror-esque, but at the same time, just, you know, really cool. And from a technology problem standpoint, just one that's really fun to work on.

Last question, what keeps you motivated? So part of what we really enjoyed about B2B specifically is it touches every form of commerce. There's no consumer products without B2B. Every business, whether they're targeting businesses or consumers, relies on B2B applications or services to run. And so there's this trickle-down effect whereby building better B2B products or services or strategies, they'll ultimately help bring about better consumer experiences in the long run as well. And to us, that's just really, really exciting. It's awesome to see some of the stuff that we do just out in the wild. We were working on just a couple of months ago, a really long, kind of longstanding project for a major, through an agency on behalf of a global B2B tech company. And part of the result of that were just billboards all over New York and San Francisco and Austin and other cities. And it was so cool to drive around and kind of see those billboards. And we're like, you know, our research that we supported, you know, helped informed what was on that billboard. And so just knowing that we're having that kind of level of impact at a lot of these companies, and then there's this trickle-down effects to bring better consumer experiences to the world as well, just gets us really excited and motivated to keep plugging away and building stuff. Michael, thanks for being on the show today. Awesome. Thanks, Seb. This was great.