This is not a reassurance page. It is the ten things worth knowing before you request a pilot, in the order they usually come up.
A pre-audience intelligence product for testing one surface before real-user exposure. You choose an artificial respondent panel, bring a page, deck, flow, or concept, and read reasoned reactions. Every run ends with a decision brief: whether to revise, rerun, or take this version to real-user testing, and which profiles to recruit next.
You can, and it can be useful for a quick thought experiment. It is not the same product. A chat tool creates a role on demand; antestrata composes the respondent before the surface appears.
Antestrata respondents are stable, reproducible, and carry stable identifiers you can cite across runs, studies, and decisions. That single architectural fact changes the workflow: you stop running one-off scenes and start building a body of evidence.
The composition method is proprietary. What we publish is the output: a respondent with composed context, behavioural structure, stable provenance, and contradictions surfaced as first-class evidence.
Show-the-evidence, not-the-recipe is deliberate. You can inspect the run evidence, respondent state, memory evidence, and reproducibility across runs. You will not see the private composition recipe, because that recipe is the moat.
No. Antestrata is built for the stage before that round. Pressure-test the concept, sharpen it, then bring a cleaner version to real-user testing.
The product explicitly recommends whether the concept is ready for that step, plus which real-user profiles to validate with after every run. That recommendation is a first-class output, not a side feature. If a vendor in this category tells you artificial respondents can replace real research at population scale, they are selling a different product to a different buyer.
As sentences, not ratings. Emotional response, purchase intent, specific objections, suggestions, and the reasoning each respondent used to arrive at the reaction. Traceable through the evidence available in the run.
You get output like "she hesitated on the enterprise tier because the billing language pattern-matched to a dispute at her first startup, and the resolution ambiguity made her assume the same outcome." Not "4/5 stars." Not "likely to purchase." Sentences with reasoning attached.
This also matters on awkward topics. There is no moderator to please and less polite self-presentation shaping the answer when the question is personal, sensitive, or charged.
Yes. This is the single clearest difference between antestrata and any one-shot chat approach. Respondents are stable. Same seed and configuration produce the same respondent, across runs weeks or months apart.
Ship v1. Iterate for a month. Re-test v2 against the exact same panel. See whether your changes actually landed with the respondents they were meant to land with. No one-shot chat workflow ships this as a primary workflow.
Less than the real-user session it replaces pre-testing, and meaningfully less than the cost of discovering a concept mismatch in production. Tier structure and details are on the pricing page.
Pricing is quoted directly because panel size, run cadence, and support needs matter more than a vanity starting-at number. The fit call is where that gets scoped.
Product teams, founders, growth leads, and agencies making buyer decisions weekly. Not enterprise market research programs with annual Qualtrics contracts.
The audience split is deliberate. There are excellent tools for the enterprise end of the artificial-research category. We are not one of them. If you are three pivots in and still not sure who you are selling to, if you have support tickets and CRM notes and no way to turn them into behavioural understanding, if you are about to burn a real-user session on a concept you already suspect is not ready, we are for you.
The respondent-composition engine inside antestrata. It is the reason respondents are stable and contradiction-rich, rather than shallow chat-role outputs.
LifecoreML lives inside the product. It is not a separate purchase, not a public API surface, not a technology you license independently. The "powered by" treatment exists because the engine is doing real engineering work and we want that credited visually. It is not a signal that LifecoreML is sold separately. It is not.
Start by email. Access is invite-only right now. Reach out by email and, if the fit looks real, we schedule a thirty-minute call to choose the right entrance and decide whether the product actually solves your weekly-decision problem.
No sales pipeline. No BDR follow-up. If the call confirms fit, you are in. If it does not, we point you at a better-fitting tool in the category.
The ten questions above are the ones sceptics ask. If you have read them all and you are still here, the onboarding call is probably a good use of thirty minutes.
Founding research pilots · open now · invite-only