Co-founder of the global research platform Besample shares her story of starting a company that is now used by researchers from top American universities, providing access to research participants outside of the Western world.
What inspired you to start Besample?
I've always been fascinated by understanding cultural differences and breaking down communication barriers. After my degree in cultural studies, I moved to project management in the nonprofit sector early in my career. I started in the migration and refugee program at the local Red Cross. Later, I took part in various other nonprofit projects, gaining skills that still help me today.
After relocating to the US, I met my friend and now co-founder, Elena Brandt. She is working on a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and talks a lot about the ongoing challenge researchers face: finding a diverse population from various countries for their studies. This challenge inspired us to create Besample.
What's the purpose of Besample?
Besample was created to connect researchers from academia, business, healthcare, and other sectors with human samples anywhere in the world. Not many people are aware of this mind-blowing fact: 96% of all human research data comes from people who live in Western countries. Meanwhile, the Global South is rapidly growing and getting richer. And soon, everyone will want to know how these people make decisions, what they consume, and more. But in this changing world, we've only learned to study Western populations.
It's expected that studies on non-Western populations will increase. However, there is currently no automated and efficient way to collect human samples worldwide. The mission of Besample is to provide researchers with quick, easy, and affordable online access to a global pool of research participants with the highest quality standards.
I think what we're doing is important. Researchers from top universities around the world give us positive and warm feedback, and some even invest in us. It makes me believe that we are making a difference, and people trust us.
How does Besample work?
In Besample, we have algorithmized the sampling, so researchers don't have to pay for manual recruitment anymore. Respondents are automatically found, screened, engaged, paid, and retained using our proprietary data quality technology. So, instead of paying $50,000 to an agency, a researcher pays about $1,000 to cover respondents' time, plus a small platform fee, and usually gets the dataset in just a few days.
Also, we assist clients in targeting quite specific samples. For example, we can help pick a representative sample of non-heterosexuals from the Philippines or a few hundred African women employed in STEM fields. By the way, we adjust our pricing to local minimum wages, ensuring participants are paid ethically.
So far, among our users are hundreds of researchers from around the world, most of them scholars from prominent American universities such as Northwestern University, Yale University, and Chicago Booth. I appreciate the fact that one of our users has called Besample "a tremendous advancement."
You have a degree in cultural studies. How does your education and experience contribute to your startup's success?
I suppose it's not only about my degree in cultural studies. I have a degree in STEM and extensive experience in project management within both the tech field and non-profit sectors. This long journey has allowed me to collect a valuable set of knowledge and skills, enabling me to create Besample and ensure that our platform possesses both technical integrity and cultural sensitivity. Additionally, my background provides the scholarly foundation needed to navigate cross-cultural interactions effectively.
I believe what I know and can do will help not only Besample to grow but also make American science better. I would be happy to contribute to bringing diverse cultural perspectives to the table and align human-focused research with nowadays realities.
Why did you decide to start working in the tech sector?
Primarily, the decision to pivot into technology was driven by a desire to explore new areas. I wanted to push my limits, acquire new abilities, and, as the saying goes, create new neural connections in my brain.
In fact, I had plans to create a non-profit platform. Later on, I met my co-founder, whose ideas inspired me, and we decided to work on the concept of Besample together.
We are considering the idea that Besample might eventually have a non-profit branch, making it easier for collaborations and securing research grants.
What should we expect from Besample anytime soon?
We are focusing on providing researchers with more options to target demographics from different countries. It is about giving researchers the freedom to use different platforms for their studies. We want to ensure they have the flexibility to create and conduct their research easily. To make it possible, we developed a unique multiplatform solution and patented this business process.
The quality of data in online research is a long-standing challenge. Here are just a few examples: the same person can register under many accounts, use bots, mislead about the country of residence or knowledge of the language, or simply be inattentive and click through responses as fast as they can. So, we address this challenge by putting in a huge effort.
Fortunately, there are ways to protect against these types of fraud, and we're actively using them, as well as developing our own tools. Among measures against online fraud are checking duplicate IP addresses, bad fingerprint checks, browser translation checks, time-series correlation of response patterns, attention checks, consistency checks, test-retest reliability, etc.
We are developing an NLP model that predicts respondent quality (we call it fidelity) from written text, which is also proprietary. We are in the process of filing a second patent for this algorithm.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to make a global impact?
It would be beyond my nature to offer advice, and making a global impact might be too much of a statement. What I've learned is that success, whether on an international scale or not, is not an overnight process.
Iteration is critical; experiment, gain knowledge, and build on small wins. It's crucial to reassess constantly your approach based on lessons learned.
