Early access is opening in small groups
Ask the town before you ask the world.
townFolk builds a town of AI personas around your idea. Tell it what you're planning, and the people it affects show up and argue it out. You hear the objections before anyone real does.
TRY ASKING THE TOWN
Should I quit my job to start a meal-prep business?
Save this as my first questionFree during early access. No card needed.
The kind of questions townFolk is built for
The problem
Most ideas meet their first real critic too late.
By the time strangers react, the money is spent or the post is already up. The usual ways to find out sooner all have a catch, and most of them start with finding the right people.
Friends go easy on you
People who like you soften the hard part. You hear "sounds great" and miss the reason it won't work.
Research takes weeks
A proper survey or focus group costs more time and money than most decisions are worth. So most people skip it and guess.
The right people are hard to find
The people whose opinion matters most are often the hardest to reach, like night-shift nurses or first-time buyers in a new city. Panels fill the gap with whoever is available.
People drop out halfway
Long surveys, diary studies and follow-up interviews lose people every round. The ones who stay to the end aren't always the ones you needed to hear.
The loudest voice wins
In meetings and comment threads, a confident few set the tone. The quiet people who will actually decide never get heard.
You get one launch
Real life gives you one shot. A rehearsal gives you best case, worst case and every case in between.
THE PEOPLE PROBLEM
Why is it so hard to find the right research participants?
Research usually goes wrong before anyone answers a question. First you have to find the right people. Then you have to keep them until the last question. Both are slow, and both quietly change who you end up hearing from.
Finding the right people
- Screeners get gamed. Some people say whatever gets them into a paid study.
- Niche audiences cost more and take longer to fill, so studies settle for close enough.
- Your real customers are busy. The people with time to answer surveys are often a different crowd.
- Reaching people in several countries means several panels, several vendors and several sets of rules.
With townFolk: describe exactly who you need, down to the city, the job and the budget. Your town is drawn from townSquare City to match that brief, and nobody can fake their way in.
Keeping them to the end
- Every extra round loses people, so a multi-week study ends with a thinner, different group.
- Tired respondents rush, skip questions and pick the easy answer.
- The people who quit are often the ones with the strongest objections.
- Going back to the same people next month usually means recruiting all over again.
With townFolk: residents don't drop out or get tired. Come back next week with a new question, and the same people are there and remember what they said.
How it works
How does townFolk work?
You go from one sentence to a room full of opinions in four steps. No survey design, no recruiting, no waiting on a panel.
- STEP 1
Describe it
Write down what you're planning the way you'd explain it to a friend. Plain words are fine.
- STEP 2
The town forms
townFolk works out who your idea touches and builds them, like a landlord or a factory manager. Each one gets a background and a stake in the outcome.
- STEP 3
They argue it out
The people talk to each other over a few rounds. They push back on each other, and some of them change their minds.
- STEP 4
You see where they split
You get the objection that mattered and the reasons people moved. Keep it private or share the card.
Meet the town · townSquare City
Meet the residents of townSquare City.
Every person in townFolk lives here. townSquare City is home to ten million synthetic residents around the world, each with a personality, a budget, goals and habits of their own. When you ask a question, your town is drawn from them.
POPULATION
10,000,000
virtually, real.
TOWNSQUARE CITY · WORLDWIDE
Each number opens the same resident every time. Try your birthday, like 150892.
Valentina Silva, 34
Factory supervisor · São Paulo, Brazil
“If it saves me an evening, I'll pay for it.”
GOALS
Get fit without a gym membership
Retire five years early
MOTIVATIONS
Making a difference locally
Independence
PAINS
Rent takes most of the paycheck
Slow refunds
GAINS
Learning something new
Tips from people like them
How they decide
Sticks with brands they know
Where they spend time
LinkedIn and tiktok
Every resident of townSquare City is synthetic. Any likeness to a real person is a coincidence.
What you get
A room that pushes back.
Chatbots are built to agree with you. townFolk is built to give you the disagreement your real audience would.
A cast built for your question
Ask about a meal-prep business and you meet office workers, a rival café owner and a delivery rider. Ask about a LinkedIn post and you meet the readers you're trying to reach.
Private by default
Your ideas stay yours. Nothing is shared unless you share it.
People who change their minds
Each person remembers what the others said. A good argument moves them, and you can see which point did it.
The objection that matters
Out of everything said, townFolk pulls out the point that kept coming back, so you know what to fix first.
A card worth sharing
Every run ends in a verdict card you can post on LinkedIn or send on WhatsApp. The link opens the whole debate, so anyone can read the reasons and start a town of their own. The card always says the town is simulated.
Sample card. Illustrative only.
I asked office workers, a café owner and a delivery rider about my meal-prep business.
The objection that mattered: delivery fees eat the margin on a $12 lunch.
townfolk.io · run your own town
How it compares
How is townFolk different from asking friends, a survey or a chatbot?
Each way of getting feedback is good at something. Here's what you get from each before you commit, including the one thing townFolk can't do.
The town is a rehearsal. For a decision you can't undo, check what it tells you with a few real people.
Who it's for
For anyone with a decision and nobody honest to ask.
Friends say it's a great idea. Customers haven't met it yet.
YOU WALK AWAY WITH
The objection an investor will raise, while it's still cheap to fix.
Who's behind it
Built by zeldaLabs, an applied AI research lab.
townFolk runs on the same engine zeldaLabs uses to study how people decide. We publish our methods. Once townFolk is live, we'll post how often the town got it right against real results, misses included.
GROUND RULES
Everyone in the town is made up. No celebrities, no named companies, no one you could look up.
No election questions. Parties, candidates and vote shares are off for everyone, in every country.
You decide what we learn from. We only use your activity to improve the town if you switch that on. It starts off.
Early access
Get into the town first.
We're letting people in small groups, and the waitlist goes first. Early access is open worldwide.
- Early access to live towns
- Free runs while we're in early access
- A founding price when paid plans start
- A say in which towns we build next
townFolk is a web app from zeldaLabs that builds a town of AI personas around your idea and lets them debate it. You describe what you're planning, and you get back the argument between the people it affects, including the objection that mattered most and who changed their mind.