We question markets for a living

See the signal. Before the market does.

FishDog builds your market in software: a synthetic population you can question in minutes, built on real-world data, checked against real-world results. For decisions too expensive to guess.

FishDog helps you make the right call

01 / PRODUCTS
Fig.01 · Instrument

Innovation Lab

Any question, for any enterprise

Bring your hardest question. If your market lives in our population, you can test it here: product, pricing, message, positioning.

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Swiss Army knife with tools open
Fig.02 · Screen

Screening Room

A test audience for studios, before you spend

Put a film, pilot or ad in front of a synthetic, calibrated audience. They watch, they react, you learn, all before you spend on production or media.

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Vintage Super 8 film camera
Fig.03 · Radar

Thesis Lab

Radar for hedge funds that move first

Replace the week or two you'd wait for an expert call. Ramp an analyst on any thesis in minutes: customers, competitors, channel checks.

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Vintage radar antenna dish
Fig.04 · Teardown

Deal Room

For private equity: take every deal apart

Commercial due diligence on any company with a public footprint. Built for PE deal teams and the consultancies that serve them.

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Disassembled smartphone with all components laid out
Fig.05 · Trajectory

VC Lab

Conviction for VCs, before the data exists

Early stage companies leave little public trail. Build the thesis from the pitch deck and your own notes, not a web search.

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Paper aeroplane

The engine comes with a partner.

02 / HOW WE WORK

FishDog shows you signal that was invisible a year or two ago. But the technology is only half of it. Every engagement is run by a senior partner: somebody who learns how your business decides, pressure-tests the why behind the what, and stays. As a result, the tenth study knows what the first nine taught.

We recruit the audience your question needs and land the signal where you work: a report, a working session, a live feed into your stack. The engine delivers the speed. We sharpen your judgment.

The team behind FishDog

03 / TEAM

These are the people who help you see the signal before the market does.

Rod Banner

Rod Banner

Co-founder & Chairman
Andreas Duess

Andreas Duess

Co-founder & CEO
Phillip Gales

Phillip Gales

Co-founder & CPO
Gianluca Angelici

Gianluca Angelici

Co-founder & CTO

How we build a population-true world

04 / METHOD

Every FishDog population is grounded in real census data and behavioral science, then built persona by persona, calibrated against real-world behavior, and kept current as the world changes.

01

Start with the real world, not a blank canvas

We anchor every project to trusted, public statistics (think national census-style facts about age, households, income bands, etc.), plus any approved client data you choose to share. That sets the "truth" our synthetic personas must match at the national, regional, and local levels.

Plain EnglishWe make sure the big picture adds up before we worry about small details.

02

Pick the right map for the job

Different questions need different levels of local detail. We choose a geography that preserves meaningful differences (cities vs. rural areas, commuter belts, provinces/regions) without creating unnecessary complexity.

Plain EnglishIf you only need state-level insight, we won't model down to the street; if neighborhood matters, we don't stop at state lines.

03

Keep the attributes that actually move behavior

We focus on a handful of variables that consistently explain outcomes: age/life stage, household setup, income bands, urban/rural context, and a small set of culture/identity indicators appropriate to each country. We avoid piling on nice-to-have fields that add noise but not signal.

Plain EnglishFewer, smarter dials beat a dashboard of toggles no one needs.

04

Build synthetic people, weight them to reality

We generate a pool of synthetic individuals or households and give each a "weight" so that, in total, they mirror real population counts in every region and subgroup we care about.

Plain EnglishIf a city has 10% young families, 10% of our personas will be young families there too.

05

Compress the model without losing the plot

To keep things fast and affordable, we group highly similar personas together. This preserves the important differences (e.g., downtown students vs. suburban parents) and trims the rest.

Plain EnglishWe remove duplicate look-alikes but keep the characters that matter to your story.

06

Calibrate against observed behavior

Where possible, we align the personas to real outcomes (market shares, adoption curves, survey responses, or past campaign results) so the model doesn't just look right; it acts right.

Plain EnglishWe don't stop at "demographically correct"; we check that choices and habits make sense too.

07

Validate like we mean it

We hold data back and test on it ("holdouts"), compare to historical periods ("back-testing"), and monitor error bars by region and segment. If a slice is too thin or unstable, we merge it or flag it.

Plain EnglishWe measure twice, then measure again later to be sure.

08

Protect privacy by design

All personas are synthetic. We never try to re-identify real people, and we suppress or blend ultra-small groups. Sensitive attributes are handled carefully and, where appropriate, aggregated.

Plain EnglishIt's a model of people, not a list of people.

09

Keep it fresh

Populations shift. So do markets. We refresh controls on a regular cadence and re-check calibration against new outcomes. That way, the personas evolve as the world does.

Plain EnglishYour model doesn't gather dust.

Questions, answered

05 / FAQ

ChatGPT predicts the next word. FishDog simulates how real people think and decide. Each population is built from census data, behavioural patterns, cultural context and live market signals, so it carries the contradictions of real humans, not the averages of internet text. That is why "just prompt ChatGPT" does not reproduce it: the input is a different class of data, not a better model.

A simulated population that mirrors a real one. Every persona is grounded in official statistics, behavioural data, cultural context and live signals, and they do not just answer in isolation. They discuss, disagree and shift position the way real people do in a room together.

Frontier models freeze at their training cutoff. Ours do not. A live pipeline feeds each archetype real signals: market data, cultural shifts, even today's weather where they live. So when you ask a question today, you get an answer grounded in today's reality.

We run generalisation checks, test-retest stability and wording-sensitivity analysis on every population, and keep results aligned to real-world signals like sentiment and market movement. Because the populations are fed live data, reliability does not decay the way a static panel does. Every answer ships with traceable rationales, so you can see the reasoning, not just a score.

Every response comes with traceable rationales and segment-level drivers, so you see the reasoning behind the number. Outputs stay grounded in real population data, and we flag low-confidence areas rather than fabricating certainty.

We recruit audiences, we never create them. Every audience is drawn from a standing population calibrated against official statistics, so its composition is set by real-world data, not by what a model imagines your customers look like. Creation is where bias lives; recruitment is where representativeness lives. Then we check the output, not just the input: results are validated against external ground truth like the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index and live prediction markets, and we preserve disagreement instead of averaging it away. When a real population skews, ours skews with it, and we tell you rather than smoothing it out.

When the question has nothing we can ground it in: a genuinely unprecedented product with no comparable market, a decision that turns on one named individual rather than a population, or a claim that needs lab measurement or jurisdiction-specific legal advice. We would rather tell you that up front than sell you a confident answer we can't stand behind. For high-stakes calls we can also validate direction with a small real-world study before you commit.

Usually, and we tell you up front when we can't. Audiences are recruited from the standing population, never invented to fit a brief: that is what keeps them representative. For specialist groups (hedge-fund analysts, category buyers, clinicians) we check recruitability before anything runs, validate against signals you share such as pipeline mix or win/loss, and say so honestly when a group is too narrow for the population to carry.

Yes. FishDog runs behind a full API, and some clients take their signal as a live feed straight into their own stack. You never integrate alone, though: our engineers design and build the integration with you, so what lands in your systems is signal your teams can use, not a raw endpoint and a manual.

We use your uploads to run your work inside your private workspace, nothing more. We do not sell your data or use it to train public models. Production runs on AWS, with full DPAs and NDAs available.

Stay in the loop.

Signal from our synthetic populations, product updates, and the occasional hot take. No spam.