SeedBlink Blog

Daniel Dunose, CEO and Founder of Brainactive, has spent over 18 years immersed in the market research industry, building and leading international teams, and delivering quality data to clients across various sectors. His passion for helping others reach their maximum potential has driven him to establish two successful start-ups. Based in Bucharest, Romania, Daniel brings extensive experience from previous roles at The Staff Supply, DataDiggers, Rakuten Insight, and Ipsos Interactive Services.

Brainactive leverages AI and automation to connect businesses with their target audiences in real-time, enabling them to gather actionable insights directly from their customers. This self-service platform simplifies the process of obtaining vital feedback, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes and industries. By reducing the need for intermediaries, Brainactive cuts costs and time significantly while maintaining complete confidentiality over tested concepts and prototypes.

• What ‘aha’ moment led to the founding of Brainactive?

The launching of the ChatGPT 3.5 made me instantly think about the myriads of options that this technological advance could create in multiple industries, including ours. Though far from offering a perfect output, the general purposed LLM was already able at that point to provide a good start in covering many of the regular tasks of a researcher. I realized then that we could put together a revolution if we harnessed what’s best of the two sides, technology and human talent, by properly training a model to become a true researcher and offering qualified human support to facilitate the switch.

• What was your drive back then, and what change did you aim to make?

I’ve always been up for innovation, to the tiniest details. If there is a way to do things better, reduce resources consumption to achieve the same or a superior outcome, then we should go for it. It’s the same target that I had in this case: if we could create an alternative to the current traditional market research process that benefits all parties involved, then by all means we should do it. So, we gathered a team of experts in different areas, brainstormed, planned and executed, and 10 months later we managed to launch the actual product.

• How does Brainactive's platform contribute to obtaining actionable insights, and what specific market gap does it address?

For me, actionable insights translate into accurate, easy to digest information that comes when I need it and not “when it is ready”. And this is just what Brainactive does:

Imagine you are a SaaS start-up, you have been working on your concept, you have a business model and even some pretty neat wireframes. Your biggest question is: Will somebody buy my product?

How do you answer that? You defined that perfect persona, but where do you find the people that fit that pattern, what do you ask them, how do you ask them, will they answer? How long does this process take?

Now, imagine you have a place where you can ask you initial question (Will somebody buy my product?) - and only that question - and it will take care of every step you worried about and bring you in a few hours the simple, unbiased and direct answer.

In terms of gap, I will not even refer to AI driven platform; just think about this: digital Do-It-Yourself market research platforms account for less than 2.5% out of the entire industry. But this niche dynamic is well over 25% YoY.

• How do you scale Brainactive’s business model?

Our go to market strategy follows a waterfall logic:

• we’ll first use a full specter of digital marketing tactics to attract free users to the platform, have a look around, get convinced of its features and USP
• then we’ll implement full-on onboarding, engaging and retention communication to turn free subscribers into paid ones (the Plus plan, which is a one-seat type of subscription)
• then further on the focus will be converting Plus into Team subscribers (the plan dedicated to larger market research teams that accommodates up to 15 seats, with ability to share/assign tasks and roles)
• and finally, we’ll aim to turn Team users into Enterprise license holders, our prepaid account that covers all the needs of a large market research buyer, with a 24/7 available team dedicated to enhancing customers’ experience, while enjoying the significant financial benefits that come with it.

And we will carry on this logic ongoingly, optimizing it on the go.

• How does Brainactive guide and empower businesses to make informed decisions about their products and services?

Businesses can directly interview their current and potential buyers in the Brainactive platform, selecting those who are most relevant to them out of our pool of 300+ million engaged consumers in 135 countries. With a few simple clicks, the user can have a brief conversation with our in-house research-engineered gen AI that plays the role of an experienced market researcher, and its purpose is to guide and fine-tune user’s idea or market problem that needs to be fixed.

The AI can instantly generate a professional questionnaire, help users with adjusting it, and suggest the demographics for the audience that companies need to interview. In a short while, the AI will be able to ensure the responses meet the quality standards by actively removing incoherent or sub-par answers and will be able to suggest key insights that sound business decisions rely on.

• How do you envision Brainactive's future growth?

I strongly believe the market research industry (and for that matter, all industries) will change dramatically in the next 5 to 10 years, even earlier, considering the fast advance of technology. As a matter of fact, it hasn’t seen much innovation for the past decades, other than being able to interview people online rather than face to face or over the phone. And I think that what we are witnessing today with the AI expansion is only the tip of the iceberg.

Brainactive is here to take part in this transformation, with a full focus on providing our customers with higher data quality, faster than ever before, controlling their expenditure on a service that is more than vital for sound business decisions.

We have a phenomenal roadmap of features to implement which will gradually turn Brainactive.ai into a research powerhouse that will completely change the way companies source their insights today – to name just a few:

• Improved user-AI interaction, introducing voice recognition, exposing AI to images, audio and video stimuli to self-generate relevant research from the scratch
• Diversify the pool of respondents from the 300+ million engaged and profiled consumers in 135 countries that are already integrated in the platform into over 1 billion people, by posting surveys in mobile apps networks and social media
• Increase the accuracy of AI output by integrating it with statistics and secondary research sources, to help AI get a better context for the advice provided to users.
• Do you have a mentor or figure whom you admire and draw inspiration from?

Absolutely. I highly admired Lee Kwan Yew in his stubbornness, tenacity, and drive to create the nation of Singapore. I draw inspiration from the way he overcame all possible barriers to reach his objectives despite all complications and risks, to turn a poor piece of the planet into the highly evolved society that it is today, focusing on meritocracy and on building and improving country’s relevance on the global stage. I see running a business in a similar manner: first you need to find a spot that you can tackle effectively, then to iterate until finding the right formula, and then scale. Just as he thought of a country, I believe that the main purpose of a business is to win the #1 spot in its niche, nothing less.

• What are potential exit scenarios for investors supporting Brainactive?

We plan to raise more funding rounds to secure our scale, so one exit scenario for the investors who enter in early stages is when we raise a higher round. Another one is when firms get acquired, which I’m confident it is a likely scenario considering the level of innovation we bring to the market research industry, the quality of our team that translates into the capacity of execution and business development, and our future product roadmap. Finally, we explore the option of listing publicly in the long run, so that event will transform our investors’ input into a highly liquid one.

• Why should investors consider being part of Brainactive's journey?

First, it’s the solid idea behind Brainactive: market research should be a commodity available to everyone, regardless of previous experience with surveys, expertise in sociology, or even the understanding of basic terms. We like to keep things simple: companies run surveys mainly to be able to become more competitive and/or increase their market share; for that to happen they need accurate, on time, and actionable information from the people that buy or might be interested to buy their products. And Brainactive is here to simplify this process, make it financially accessible to everyone, and providing those answers in nearly real-time.

Then, the team that build Brainactive is not only highly skilled in different areas (UX, AI, software dev, product design, marketing), but it has actual successful experience in building and running businesses, so it is perfectly able to execute a plan this ambitious.

And finally, the potential that Brainactive has to decisively turn the tides in this industry by introducing a completely new alternative to the traditional market research process, together with implementing the features roadmap mentioned earlier. The total turnover of the industry was $129 bn in 2022, growing at an average CAGR of ~4% YoY. Most of this growth is due to the tech-enabled sector of market research, specifically the one that belongs to the DIY platforms. Yet, these platforms only represent ~2.4% of the total turnover. Hence, the natural trend of switching from traditional research methodologies to the tech-enabled ones has already started and it is a matter of time until it will accelerate, as the benefits for companies (time, speed, and data quality) are unbeatable.