{"id":92560,"title":"Motives - Qualitative consumer research run by AI","tagline":"We use AI agents to run focus groups for consumer brands","body":"Motives is a team of AI agents that runs qualitative research for consumer brands. Running a focus group can cost $20k+ and take 1-2 months to recruit participants, interview them, and analyze the results - Motives AI runs that whole process in 1-2 days.\n\n**The problem**\n\nMarketing teams thrive on understanding their customers, with large brands spending $100mn/year on consumer research. Today they choose between surveys, which are fast and affordable but shallow, and focus groups or in-depth interviews, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take weeks or months.\n\n**The solution**\n\nWe’ve built AI agents that can plan, run, and analyze consumer interviews, giving marketing teams deep qualitative insights in days instead of months.\n\nhttps://youtu.be/dHFtzfFaRKg\n\nAsk a research question, and get results in hours - here’s how it works:\n\n* Customers chat with our AI agent to describe their research questions or the concepts they need to test, and our AI builds a research plan. \n* Our AI then recruits relevant people from our global panel network and interviews them over video.\n* The AI automatically analyzes the interviews and generates a report with actionable insights. \n* Customers can view specific video highlights and chat with our AI to answer follow-up questions.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=92560\u0026key=user_uploads/1153026/b6befb62-7947-4b2a-bc94-fd9caf7d4946)\n\n**Results**\n\nOur customers include some of the biggest consumer brands in the US and Europe - check out our [case study](https://www.motives.ai/posts/motives-wild) about how Unilever’s recent acquisition Wild has been using Motives to test new packaging concepts.\n\n**Who we are**\n\nSean (CEO) ex-PM and Growth at Google, Dataiku, and Truelayer\n\nSam (CTO) ex-Palantir software engineer\n\nWe’ve been friends since our undergrad days at Oxford. From our own product development backgrounds we know how difficult it is to learn what your customers really want - so we’re building a better way, focusing on helping marketing teams at consumer brands since they feel the pain on the largest scale.\n\n**Want to know more?**\n\nNeed to understand your customers better? Know marketing or insights teams that could use faster, more scalable research?\n\nCheck out our [website](https://www.motives.ai/) to book a demo, or reach out directly to [sean@motives.ai](mailto:sean@motives.ai)\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=92560\u0026key=user_uploads/1153026/ca2e647e-01df-4706-a78d-f2de00ee2fc8)\n\n","slug":"O4u-motives-qualitative-consumer-research-run-by-ai","created_at":"2025-07-30T05:28:53.540Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T01:39:19.555Z","total_vote_count":13,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/O4u-motives-qualitative-consumer-research-run-by-ai","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=92560\u0026key=user_uploads/1153026/ca2e647e-01df-4706-a78d-f2de00ee2fc8","company":{"id":30713,"name":"Motives","slug":"motives","url":"https://motives.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/6ccc0035baccfcafd8c4eccd692ca8198963efca.png","batch":"Summer 2025","industry":"B2B","tags":["B2B","Marketing","Market Research","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30713"}}