Synthetic focus groups
Seat a room. Follow the same people. Ten questions deep.
Traditional focus groups cost thousands, take weeks, and you only get them once. Lewsearch seats a room of 5–30 calibrated participants you follow across up to 10 questions and follow-ups — reacting to your creative, talking to each other, and landing in a client-ready PDF. In minutes.
Lives in the Lewsearch terminal · same engine as enterprise research · within ~7.5 points of real polls across 460 questions
What buyers expect vs what you get
The focus-group job — a tight room, several questions in one sitting, quotes you can share — without the three-week recruit or the one-shot session you can never re-run.
| Traditional | Lewsearch | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $4,000–$12,000 | 1 credit (Large = 2) |
| Timeline | 2–3 weeks to recruit and field | Results in minutes |
| The room | 8–12 people you can't re-run | 5–30 you follow across every question |
| Questions | Whatever fits one session | Up to 10 + up to 10 follow-ups |
| Discussion | A moderator and a transcript | Optional participant-to-participant page |
| Deliverable | Notes + a few clips | Client-ready PDF with quotes |
Audience to deliverable in one flow
Describe the room
Pick a market — a city or state panel, U.S. national, or a census region — set the panel size, and refine the audience in plain language ("women 35–54 who lean Democrat"). Choose how many people to highlight — 5 to 30 — and we seat that room from the panel.
Add your questions (and creative)
Write up to 10 questions. Optionally attach a PDF, image, or URL so the room reacts to a specific concept, ad, or landing page — the same stimulus engine as message testing.
Auto-run or go question-by-question
Auto-run fires every question in order. Or go one at a time, reading the room and dropping in up to 10 follow-ups whenever something's worth probing. The same people answer throughout, carrying memory of what they already said.
Debrief individuals, then export
On the debrief page, probe specific participants 1:1 — ask up to 10 direct follow-ups of the people whose answers you want to dig into (the best questions often come after you've seen their quotes). Optionally let 5 small groups talk it out, then export a client-ready PDF.
Straight answers
Is this a real focus group?
It's a synthetic focus group: calibrated AI respondents grounded in census demographics and benchmarked survey data, not eight strangers in a room. You get a full statistical panel for the numbers plus a room of 5–30 named participants you follow across every question with verbatim quotes. It's benchmark-calibrated and defensible for most decisions — not a replacement for probabilistic human sampling.
How many questions can I ask?
Up to 10 questions in one session, plus up to 10 follow-ups. The same people answer all of them and carry memory of their earlier answers, so follow-ups feel like a real moderated thread rather than a fresh poll.
Can the room react to my ad or landing page?
Yes. Attach a PDF, image, or DOCX, or paste a URL, and every question is asked in that context — "how would you feel about this, given what you just saw." It's the same stimulus pipeline as Message Testing.
Can I follow up with a specific person?
Yes — that's the debrief. After the group questions, you land on a debrief page where you can ask any participant a direct 1:1 follow-up (up to 10 total). It's the same person, in character, carrying memory of everything they already said. Then you generate the PDF — it's not auto-generated, so you can probe first.
What's the participant-to-participant discussion?
An optional +1-credit add-on. We seat 5 small groups who actually talk to each other about your topic, then synthesize where each group landed and how opinions shifted as they heard one another. It becomes its own page in the PDF.
What does it cost?
A focus group is 1 Lewsearch Credit (a Large room of up to 30 on a 1,000-person panel is 2) — you're running the full panel plus a memory-carrying room with verbatims on every question. The participant-to-participant discussion add-on is +1 credit. No per-seat recruiting fees, ever.
Skip the recruit. Run the room now.
Seat your room, add your questions, and download the report. Need help scoping? Book a demo and we'll set up your first session with you.