Quickstart

A synthetic consumer (persona) is a virtual consumer sampled from Türkiye’s population and income data and role-played by a language model. A population is the group of personas that answers your questions. For other concepts, see Core concepts.

Before you start

• An SCL account. If you don’t have one, apply on the early access page. Account, organisation and user settings are covered in Account and organisation.
• At least 500 credits. A credit is the prepaid unit you spend to run studies. To create a General Research study in the New Research flow, you need at least 500 credits in your balance, whether you create a new population or select an existing one. This is a minimum, not the amount you will spend: the example on this page uses 120 credits. You can see your balance on the Remaining credits: line at the bottom of the sidebar; if you are a member of an organisation, this is the organisation’s shared balance.

If your balance is below 500 credits, clicking Create population for a new population opens the Insufficient Credits dialog. With an existing population, no dialog opens: when you click Continue with selected population, no warning appears on screen and you do not move on to the next step. For details, see Credits and Buying credits and billing.

Example study

Throughout this page, you set up the following study:

1. Log in and choose the vertical

1. On the Sign in to your account screen, enter your email address and password, then click LOGIN.
2. On the Choose a vertical screen that opens on the home page, click the General Research card.

A vertical is the area a study belongs to; you cannot use a population created in one vertical in another. You can return to the vertical picker later with the New Research item in the sidebar. For the other verticals, see Verticals; for the overall layout of the screen, see Interface tour.

2. Choose the method

1. On the Choose Your Research Type screen, click the Survey card.

This card opens the Multiple-Choice Survey method: for each question, the personas choose one or more of the options you provide. To compare the other methods, see Choosing the right method.

3. Create a new population

1. On the Choose Population Mode screen, click the Create New Population card.
2. If you like, type a name in the Population Name field. If you leave it blank, the population takes the research topic as its name.
3. Leave the default value of 40 in the Population size field. Below the field, it reads “40 synthetic consumers will be created.”
4. In the Research topic field, type “Premium coffee subscription”. SCL looks for a segmentation that divides the personas into market segments for this topic: it checks saved segmentations first and, if there is no suitable match, tries to prepare a new one for your topic.
5. Click Find segmentation. While the search runs, the button shows Searching…. If a new segmentation is being prepared, the search can take a minute or two; as long as this text is showing, the search is still running.
6. On the suggested segmentation card, click Use segmentation. If the card says Segment rules found (v2), SCL has found ready-made segment rules for this topic and has accepted the segmentation automatically; skip this step.
7. Leave the filters as they are. An attribute set to All does not restrict the population.
8. In the Population summary panel on the right, click Create population.

Until you accept a segmentation, the filter area appears blurred and you cannot click Create population. If the message “No matching segmentation found for this product/brand” appears, describe the topic more clearly using the category or product name and search again (e.g. “Monthly coffee bean subscription”); do not use abbreviations. If you still get no result, write to the support team from the Support page in the sidebar (Support and troubleshooting).

Creating a population does not use credits; only the 500-credit minimum above applies.

Filters, ratios and custom features are covered in Creating a population and Filters and attributes.

4. Write your questions

The Multiple-Choice Survey screen opens. The badge next to the title first shows Generating Personas…, then Personas Created once the personas are ready. You can write your questions while the personas are being created in the background; you only need to wait for the badge to change before moving on to the next step.

Use these three questions in this example:

1. In the Survey Title field, type “Coffee subscription pre-test”.
2. On the Create New Question card, type the first question in the Question Text: field.
3. Type an option in the Answer Options: field and click Add Option. Repeat this for every option of the question; each question needs at least 2 options.
4. Leave Answer Type set to Single Select.
5. Click Add Question to Survey. The question appears as Q1 in the Survey Questions list.
6. Repeat steps 2–5 for the other two questions.
7. Once the badge shows Personas Created, the Waiting… button at the bottom changes to Next Step. Click Next Step.
8. In the Are you sure you want to continue? dialog, click Continue.

The survey you write is saved to the Surveys library. For adding images, conditional questions and Multi Select, see Multiple-Choice Survey; to reuse saved surveys, see Survey library and question design.

5. Check the preview and the credit estimate

The Research Preview screen opens. On the Experiment Summary card, check these values:

In General Research, the estimated credits for a Multiple-Choice Survey study are the number of questions × the number of personas: 3 × 40 = 120 credits. Credits are deducted from your balance once the responses have been generated and saved, not when you start the study.

For how the preview and start steps work in the other methods, see Starting a new study.

6. Start the study and track its progress

1. Click Start.
2. In the Are you sure you want to continue? dialog, click Continue. The Start button briefly shows Starting….
3. On the progress screen, watch the status panel move through the PREPARING, RUNNING and SAVING stages.
4. When the study finishes, the Your analysis is ready card appears and the report opens automatically after 3 seconds. To open it without waiting, click Go to Reports.

You can leave the progress screen; the study keeps running in the background. If Experiment Failed appears, click Back to Preview and try again with Start. If the problem persists, see Support and troubleshooting.

7. Open the report

The top of the report page shows the Research Report label and your survey title. The summary cards show:

• Participants: the number of personas who responded.
• Total Questions: the number of questions in the survey.
• Avg Response Rate: for each question, the share of personas who answered it out of those who saw it, averaged across all questions.

On the Response Distribution tab, you see how many personas chose each option of each question, as a count and a percentage. The Demographic Breakdown and Crosstab tabs split the same responses by dimensions such as age, gender and SES (socio-economic status).

In a 40-persona population, segments are very small: each of the six SES classes gets 6–7 personas on average. The survey’s Demographic Breakdown charts still show these small segments, whereas price reports hide segments with fewer than 5 personas. If you want to look at segments, make the population larger; even with 100 personas, each SES class gets only 16–17 personas on average. For details, see Segmentation.

You can find the report later on the ANALYSIS › Reports page in the sidebar, using the Survey filter.

Results are model output: they show the direction and size of a trend. Before high-stakes decisions, we recommend validating the results with real consumers. The reasons are explained in Accuracy and limitations, and every section of the report in Reading a report.

8. Download the Excel file

1. Click the Download Excel button at the top of the report page.
2. While the file is being prepared, the button shows Downloading Excel…. When the file is ready, your browser downloads it.

The Excel file contains the response distribution tables, persona information and the raw responses; in the raw responses, each persona is a row and each question is a column. The Download PDF button next to it creates a PDF report from the same results. Opening the report and downloading files cost no credits. The contents of the files are covered in Exporting and downloading.

Next steps

• Run a price test. The steps are in Price Analysis. If you are staying in the same category, click the Select Existing Population card in the population step and select this population; the personas are not generated again, so you do not have to wait for them to be created. Because personas are assigned to market segments based on the Research topic, this population’s segments are based on coffee subscriptions; if you are testing a category other than coffee, create a new population.
• Find the right method for your question. The methods are compared in Choosing the right method.
• Learn the terms on screen. See Core concepts.

Related pages

• Multiple-Choice Survey
• Creating a population
• Population library
• Reading a report
• Credits