How we calibrated Screening Room with famous film scenes
How do you test whether a machine understands the saddest scene ever filmed?...
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Latest updates on synthetic persona technology, market research innovations, and industry insights from the FishDog team.
The 90/10 Pattern: A Named Cognitive Failure Mode of Supervising AI Agents
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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The Coordinator: Why Founders Won't Manage People, They'll Manage Agents
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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Screening Room: Test Creative With a Synthetic Audience
In June we pointed our own product at a real piece of creative: the teaser trailer for Season 4 of ...
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The Product Brief Loop: How Claude and Codex Write Better Specs Than I Can
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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Aaru AI Review 2026: The Prediction Startup, and Where It Fits
Disclosure: FishDog is a synthetic-population platform and may compete with Aaru in some buyer evaluations. This review ...
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Aaru Alternatives in 2026: The Best Synthetic-Population Platforms
Disclosure: FishDog is a synthetic-population platform and may compete with Aaru and several tools covered here in some ...
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You Cannot Backtest the Future
Alt-data assumes the future will look like the past. When that assumption breaks, the signals fail — exactly when funds ...
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Notes from London: What Hedge Funds Actually Want From Alternative Data
A commodities quant named Mario stood on the Alt Data London stage last week and said something I have not stopped think...
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Product Unit Tests: A Missing Layer of QA in the Age of AI Engineers
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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The New Math of Expert-Network Spend
I have signed off on the "external research" line item on more client budgets than I want to remember. The number was al...
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First Word, Not Last Word
For the last two years I have been using AI in my own work the same way I want analysts to use it in theirs - as the thi...
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The Three-Proof Rule
I have been in enough boardrooms where a research deck got demolished by a single question to know what the question loo...
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The Work Isn't the Decision. It's the Intake.
I have been a buyer of outside research for clients for twenty-five years. The mechanics have changed five times over th...
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Expert Calls Are Becoming Always-On
Expert calls have been the centre of gravity of hedge-fund first-pass diligence for fifteen years. That is starting to b...
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Anatomy of an AI-Built Product: 21 Days, 40 Hours of My Time, 128,506 Lines of Code
By Phillip Gales · May 2026...
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The Big Four Test for Synthetic Research
The first time a procurement team asked us to defend the methodology behind a synthetic research output, we were not rea...
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The Agent-Native Go-to-Market Playbook
Last Tuesday, a buyer signed up to FishDog. It had no credit card, no inbox, and no browser. It never asked anyone for p...
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Meet James, The Agent Who Actually Runs Our Content Marketing
Marketing operations look often glamorous from the outside. But from the inside, getting the right inputs connected to t...
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Why No One Wants Another Research Dashboard
Walk into the average enterprise insights team and ask which dashboards they rely on. You'll get a polite answer about t...
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What a Good Synthetic Research Pilot Should Prove
The first synthetic-research pilot is the most important one a team will run, and the easiest one to get wrong....
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Research as a Rhythm, Not a Project
The people that we work with at FishDog are not just trying to save time. They are trying to make research usable in mom...
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Synthetic Versus Human Research Is the Wrong Question
Every conversation about synthetic research eventually arrives at the same question. ...
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Two AI Agents Are Better Than One: Why I Stopped Trying to QA Codex Myself
I shipped some code last week that I do not fully understand....
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Why Hard-to-Reach Audiences Need Synthetic Research
Most writing about synthetic research starts with the technology. AI can simulate consumers. Large language models can g...
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From Static Personas to Living Minds
There is a fundamental problem with synthetic research panels that rarely gets addressed openly: the moment you create a...
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Can AI track consumer sentiment? We're comparing our model to Michigan's index — live.
Every synthetic research vendor claims their AI "correlates with real data." We decided to stop claiming and start showi...
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AI Agents Built a Movie Franchise in 4 Hours
A logo file and a single sentence. That was the starting point. The logo was Fish Dog's own: a red silhouette of the cre...
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How to Build a PMM Operating System with Claude Code
What if every piece of product marketing research your team needs could be triggered by a single command?...
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Limitations of Synthetic Research
This article is the one we would rather not write. But any tool that claims to have no limitations is not being honest, ...
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How to Run Voter Research with Claude Code and FishDog
Political polling has operated on essentially the same model since George Gallup correctly predicted FDR's 1936 landslid...
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How to Run VC Due Diligence with Claude Code and FishDog
Venture capital firms spend millions on due diligence processes that are, structurally, designed to confirm whatever the...
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Stage 7: Validation and De-risking with FishDog
Using synthetic research to stress-test assumptions, surface dealbreakers, and avoid building products nobody will adopt...
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Stage 6: Concept Testing with FishDog
Using synthetic research to test product concepts with real-world personas before committing engineering resources to so...
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Stage 3: User Segmentation with FishDog
Using synthetic research and Claude Code to discover the segments that actually matter for product decisions...
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Stage 9: Continuous Discovery with FishDog
Why research should be a heartbeat, not a heartbeat monitor, and how to build a weekly discovery cadence that compounds ...
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Due Diligence with AI: How PE Firms Validate Markets
Most private equity due diligence is conducted by asking the company being acquired to introduce you to its happiest cus...
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AI Research for Beverage Brands
In the spring of 2024, Coca-Cola launched Spiced, its first permanent new flavour in three years. The company had spent ...
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AI Research for Telecoms
How synthetic research is helping telecommunications companies understand churn, test pricing, and decode customer senti...
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AI Research for Financial Services
Financial services is the most heavily researched industry on earth. Banks, insurers, and wealth managers spend billions...
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AI Research for Retail and CPG Brands
How synthetic consumer panels are replacing the slowest, most expensive habit in consumer goods...
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Stage 8: Post-Launch Measurement with FishDog
How to move beyond vanity dashboards by combining quantitative metrics with synthetic research that explains what the nu...
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Stage 5: Solution Ideation with FishDog
Using Design Sprints, structured brainstorming, and synthetic research to move from "what's the problem" to "what could ...
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Stage 4: Synthesis and Prioritisation with FishDog
How to distil weeks of discovery into a ranked set of opportunities, using structured frameworks and synthetic validatio...
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Stage 2: Discovery Research with Ditto
Using synthetic research to move beyond surface validation into the rich territory where real product insights live...
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Stage 1: Problem Framing with Ditto
How to define problems worth solving before you build anything, using synthetic research to validate faster than ever...
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Analyst Relations Prep with Claude Code and Ditto
Most analyst briefings fail before the analyst even speaks. The problem is not the presentation. It is not the product. ...
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How to Build Customer Advocacy with Claude Code and Ditto
The most effective customer evidence does not come from asking customers to say nice things about you. It comes from res...
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How to Run Cross-Market Research with Claude Code and Ditto
What works in New York does not necessarily work in Munich. But how do you find out before spending six figures on local...
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Why Agents Are the New Channel
For twenty years, distribution meant reaching humans through screens. Quietly, and mostly without anyone noticing, that ...
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