A study is one or the other. If you want responses from both your own participants and the panel, run two studies — you’ll get cleaner analysis from each anyway, since you can compare them.
Bring your own participants (BYOP)
You already know who you want to talk to — your customers, your users, people on a list you control. You handle the recruiting; we run the interviews. Three ways to get them in:Why the study link is the default here
A study link keeps the invitation coming from you. It arrives in your voice, in the channel your customer already knows you from, alongside whatever context makes them want to help — an account manager’s note, a line in your newsletter, a reply in an existing thread. That matters twice over. Response rates are better when the ask comes from someone the person already has a relationship with. And you keep control of that relationship, rather than handing a slice of it to a vendor they’ve never heard of. Use email invites when the list is long enough that sending by hand is impractical, or when you want the invited-and-completed status tracked for you.Research panel
You don’t have the people, or you need people who aren’t your customers. Two options here, and the right one comes down to how common your target is. The panel fields in 58 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa — see Where we recruit for the list. Niche recruiting isn’t limited to that list; a hard-to-reach geography is one of the things it’s for.
The number in that first column is your audience’s incidence rate — the share of the general population who’d qualify for your study.
You don’t need to calculate it precisely. The question to ask is: if I stopped 100 random people, how many would qualify? “People who’ve bought running shoes in the last year” is a lot of them. “People who own a drone” is a few. “VPs of Finance at companies over 500 people” is approximately none, and that’s a niche recruit.
What it costs
Credits are charged for every interview regardless of how the participant got there. See Billing and credits.
How many participants do you need?
Whichever lane you’re in, the number comes from the same place: how common the thing you’re looking for is, and how confident you need to be that you’d have heard about it. Most studies are smaller than the confidence people want from them. Ten interviews feels thorough — and for anything affecting fewer than 1 in 5 participants, it isn’t.How this is calculated
The reasoning, the reference tables, and what to do when you need a proportion rather than a discovery.
Screening participants
Whichever lane you’re in, screener questions qualify people before they reach the interview. Standard attributes — age, gender, location, household income — are one click, and you can write custom questions with disqualifying answers. For panel studies, screeners are what the panel matches against. For your own participants, they’re a safety net against the wrong person following a forwarded link.Best practices
Say how long it takes
Say how long it takes
People abandon an interview that runs longer than they were told. Put the real number in the invitation.
Say why them
Say why them
“We’re talking to customers who switched plans this year” outperforms “we’d value your feedback.” Specific asks feel less like spam and more like being asked to help.
Watch your response rate, not just your count
Watch your response rate, not just your count
Compare invites sent against calls completed on the dashboard. A low rate is usually the invitation, not the study.
Consider a reward for your own participants
Consider a reward for your own participants
Not always necessary for engaged customers, but it moves response rates on longer studies and with busy audiences.
Next steps
Share a study link
The recommended way to reach your own participants
Research panel
Panel recruiting and niche audiences