41 — Improving Data Integrity in a Gig Economy

Lenny: 00:00:10

Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another episode of the GreenBook Podcast. Thank you for taking the time to share a little bit of your day with us. We appreciate it. And as usual by us, it means that I have a guest. Just kind of the point of this whole thing, right? So, [laugh] maybe one day, I’ll surprise you and I’ll just come on and just talk, and then our podcast ratings will plummet. But [laugh] in the meantime, today, my guest is Kerry Hecht, founder and CEO of Echo MR. Kerry, welcome.

Kerry: 00:00:43

Hi, thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Lenny: 00:00:46

Well, let’s see if you feel that way when we’re done. That’s always the best, right?

Kerry: 00:00:50

[laugh]. Of course.

Lenny: 00:00:52

Yeah [laugh]. No, it’s great to have you on. And, as usual, Kerry and I have known each other for a very long time. You’ll pick up on that during our conversation. But this is a topic that I’ve wanted to get to for a while because one of the things that I’ve always loved about you is this collaborative passion that you have.

Kerry: 00:01:42

Yeah, of course. So, I am one of the people that my story in the industry is a fairly common one, you know, where back in the day before there were market research degrees, people just ended up working in market research, you know, in one capacity or another. My journey started at M/A/R/C Opinion Research as a phone interviewer back in the early ’90s. So, I’m dating myself when I say that Snapple was a new brand at that time. And I have been so passionate about the industry and I’ve always felt very fortunate that I ended up here, you know, that I ended up in a place where I could be passionate about the people that I work with, about the work that we do, and really about the endless opportunities any individual that works in this industry has to try out new things, wear new hats.

Lenny: 00:02:57

Yeah. And you know, I share the same story, right, of following [unintelligible 00:03:00] my start running a phone room. So—[laugh].

Kerry: 00:03:05

Yeah. Right. I ca—I remember the script.

Lenny: 00:03:07

Yes. We were doing CAHPS surveys, which is a Consumer Assessment of Health Plan Satisfaction. I still remember that. So basically, customer sat telephone surveys. So now, let’s talk about Echo now because you founded Echo in 2017 and you have grown tremendously, from what I can tell. You found a really great opportunity and gap in the market. And tell us a bit about that.

Kerry: 00:03:30

Yeah, so Echo was founded, kind of on the idea that there was some systemic gaps, especially when it came to digital research. So, particularly at that point, it was asynchronous qualitative. And you know, even in the past five-and-a-half years that Echo has been around, we’ve seen, you know, such a shift in the digital space, right? So, we were set up initially from the get-go to support longitudinal research from a project management perspective because I think that there’s a lot of nuances in supporting those kinds of projects that are different from, you know, face-to-face research. And over the course of the past many years, we have been fortunate enough to partner with a lot of the tech companies that have positioned themselves to varying degrees as DIY, when really there is more of, like, a do-it-together component to it.

Lenny: 00:06:01

So, you became really busy probably about midway through 2020, right? As—

Kerry: 00:06:09

Yeah. I mean, so we are really fortunate in that we grew rapidly from day one. So, day one, it was two of us, we had nine projects, literally on day one. And now we have, you know, a global team that is, you know, getting closer to a hundred people across all of the continents. And, you know, we have some interesting ideas about how to expand that moving forward in a way that also brings this data quality issue, hopefully, forward as well.

Lenny: 00:06:58

Which at the end of the day, that’s really the goal, isn’t it, right, as an entrepreneur is to feel good about what we’re doing. The money and everything’s nice, right? The growth—

Kerry: 00:07:28

Yeah. In my head, I said meaningful opportunities, right? And I think that it can be meaningful opportunities in so many different directions, right? It can be meaningful opportunities for the people that you start to work with who don’t have any background in it and, you know, we had talked previously about developing a training program that involves college coursework that we send them through, through Coursera, which doesn’t really cost us any money, right? And we’re able to cultivate the knowledge base that we want.

Lenny: 00:09:16

Yeah. I love that. And I don’t know if we’ve ever—you probably know this, but we took a very similar model within GreenBook, right? So, the GreenBook family of companies of Savio and Veriglif, and Gen2 Advisors were exactly that same motivation. Here’s an idea. It didn’t fit particularly well within GreenBook’s core mission but helped create the funding mechanism to spin those off and give them an opportunity to thrive and succeed with their own teams that are building off of that. Yeah. That’s great.

Kerry: 00:09:45

And it’s just an exciting thing. I mean, you know, and we’re also fortunate that we’ve got a lot of young people on our team. And I think that, you know, as we look to create new ideas and have this culture of innovation, you know, that’s the future right? So, if I look at my job as making sure that this company is still viable and relevant in 30 years, you know, I should be looking to the people who are going to be in charge in 30 years, not me. So it’s, you know, again, it’s exciting. And we all get jazzed about new ideas, so it’s working.

Lenny: 00:10:14

[laugh]. Yeah, obviously it is. It’s fantastic. So, what is the connective tissue between that mindset, that philosophy, and passion around translating that to creating new opportunities and experiences for respondents?

Kerry: 00:10:31

Yes, so I have always been very passionate about the participant experience. And I’ve been a project manager at a focus group facility, I’ve been a director at a focus group facility, I’ve been a researcher in quant. So, I’ve seen some of the wacky things that come across your desk that, you know, show that there is definitely some systemic fraud from the side of the research participants. And, you know I think I’ve said this before, and this is kind of a strong statement but I will stand behind it, you know, we created this model, right? So, after random digit dialing and here comes the internet, we created a scenario where we’re asking people to join databases on the promise of making money.

Lenny: 00:16:30

Yeah. So much there. And sometimes I wish that our listeners could see the video when we’re talking because, you know, my head was just nodding. Kind of my neck hurts now from—

Kerry: 00:18:53

I totally agree. I mean, and so, like, the model that we’re deploying with Hivemind is that obviously the people that are participating in the research will be incentivized, but then the people that find them that ultimately are essentially advocates, not just for Hivemind as a brand, but advocates for the experience itself, are incentivized for finding the right person and the successful completion of the project, right? And so, you know, if you think about the motivators for trying to game the system, it’s often because, you know, they’re wasting a lot of time, right? So, the people that we’re asking to join us in these conversations, they waste time on redundant demographic questions, in hoppers where they’re getting directed from one study to another study to ano—or screener I should say. Screener, screener, screener, screener. You know, again, they’re getting taken through a 25-page, three-algorithm, qualitative screener.

Lenny: 00:22:10

You know, you mentioned social media platforms, and I’ve often thought that—remember, we were all terrified, right, when Facebook and Twitter and the big platforms emerged of, oh, my God, if they go after the research base, you know, we’re screwed, which is still a true statement [laugh].

Kerry: 00:23:26

Yeah, exactly. I mean, and I think, you know, Facebook is one example of, you know, social media, of course, but I think that, you know, what we had aim to do because of sort of the transition of, I would say, the broader public opinion on Facebook, you know, we wanted to move away from that, right? So, we started engaging. So, part of what we’re building with Hivemind, right, is this, you know, if you think about the people that are entering into that database and the opportunities that they’re given, if they’re able to go and post on their Nextdoor account, again, for hyperlocalized recruiting, and then they become advocates, not just for Hivemind but of the process and the experiences they’ve had before, that’s going to go a lot farther in getting people to engage because you’ve got an endorsement from, you know, a person that you appreciate. You know, the other side of that—or the other piece of that, I think, you know, if you look at platforms like Reddit, right, there are subreddits for every possible topic you can have about anything, from behavior to product.

Lenny: 00:26:14

Yeah. I’m just grinning, right as [laugh] as you’re talking. But wheels are turning in my head. Kerry. We will have another conversation offline about this. I think we flirted in the past with some collaboration, and you’ve just reminded me of, like, no, we need to quit flirting. Let’s just talk, right, and do something [laugh].

Kerry: 00:26:32

I want to get Jay Tye involved in the conversation as well because he’s our blockchain geek in the group, and he’s also our Metaverse geek, right? So, he already created an environment for Echo and then an additional one for Hivemind in the Metaverse. And it is, you know, starting to play with that. And you know, I mean—and it’s so exciting. And again, it’s like, you know, you think about Echo, our company is so fortunate to have people that are proactive in that, you know, that are just—they’re over, they’re already playing with it. He sends probably one or two articles a week about what brands are doing in it, and it’s just really exciting, you know? So.

Lenny: 00:27:08

So, I’ll put this lens up for the conversation. When we started Veriglif, we were going after panels. Not going after panels; we went to disrupt that ecosystem, right? Because of the volume, of course. You’d look at the TAM, right? Of course. That’s a big-ass target.

Kerry: 00:28:32

Yeah, yeah.

Lenny: 00:28:34

But not why. Not the why. And the future of the industry, I believe is that there will be effectively two sides. There will be a data-driven component that is surveys and passive data and those things that more and more look like part of kind of the analytics world—

Kerry: 00:29:15

Yeah, I think that you’re right. Building on that, I think that we’re seeing more and more hybrid methodologies, right, so that when you are engaging with a person and the you are looking for that deep level of information and almost like an anthropology experiment, right, you’re asking to let people into your life and things like, that we do have the technology to do that now in a way that doesn’t necessarily require—there is also an opportunity for passivity in data collection in that way, right? So, one of the things that we think about a lot—I mean, and qualitative has taken, I mean, obviously, many different iterations over the course of the years, and you know, I think even prior to, you know, Covid happening, there was a need for us to be thinking about it differently. I mean, well, look, it was coming for us anyway, right? It was coming, you know, with tech companies and online communities.

Lenny: 00:34:19

Yeah, and technology exists now to make all of that easier, right?

Kerry: 00:34:29

Yeah. So, you can build in the video articulation question, and on the back end of your survey software, you’ve got sentiment analysis, right? So, you don’t even have to process it. So, now it doesn’t even have to be multiple steps, right? So, you know, we really do aim to try to leverage, you know, the different technology pieces out there, and also really work with the tech companies that we support in helping to figure out sort of different ways to productize what they’re doing, you know, because it benefits us because we get the services from it, right?

Lenny: 00:35:14

Yep. I think that’s all just brilliant. And you and I definitely need to have more of a conversation offline, but we will bore listeners with that. But stay tuned, guys.

Kerry: 00:36:14

Yeah, well, I mean, look, you were actually—and I’ve told you this before, but I think it’s good for the listeners to hear—you know, a person that when I took the job of getting Dub, which is now Further, established in the US and I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, like, literally none. Never had a sales role. Never had a business development role. Didn’t know anything about it. I pinged you, and I was like, “Hey, Lenny, can you help me, you know, figure out how”—I think it was probably even our first conversation, like—“How do you talk to people about stuff when they don’t know who you are?” You know?

Lenny: 00:38:19

Agreed. At the end of the day, we may have stumbled into this, but it was the happiest… well, the happiest accident was meeting my wife. The second happiest accident was [laugh] was stumbling into this industry.

Kerry: 00:38:31

Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. It’s always great to talk to you.

Lenny: 00:38:34

Oh, you as well. So, I know you’re busy, obviously, [laugh] you kind of have a lot going on. Is there anything that you wanted to bring up that we didn’t touch on?

Kerry: 00:38:44

Yeah, I think the only thing that I wanted to bring up was—and we had talked about this going back and forth on email a little bit, and I’ve got some people that are interested in participating in this, but it is that standardization of questions that we ask participants once they complete a project with us. And I’ve got, you know, several people that are on board with this, but I would love to put out, you know, a call to other companies that are interested in standardizing the questions that we ask once people are done completing a project, and sharing that data with each other in a way that allows us to not just categorize what kind of research people are participating in, how long surveys are, what devices they’re doing, that we collectively can create this body of data and then pulled together a best practices, right? You know, the Insights Association has been doing a great job of creating the Toolkit for Data Integrity and I think that there could be another toolkit that is adjacent to that, that data collection companies could put together by standardizing the questions and sharing the results. And so, that’s my one big plug is, like, if you’re interested, you know where to find me. And I am going to reach out to the people who have already expressed interest and start getting that ball moving forward. But I think it could be really, really powerful in how we set up the next, you know, five to ten years and really moving the needle, not just on data quality and data integrity, but participant experience because those things are obviously intrinsically linked.

Lenny: 00:40:13

Yeah. No, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, hell, every other industry has an internal benchmarking component across organizations, and so why shouldn’t we?

Kerry: 00:40:23

Yeah. We should. Let’s do it [laugh].

Lenny: 00:40:28

[laugh]. All right. Well, so you mentioned people know where to find you, but tell them where to find you.

Kerry: 00:40:32

Okay, so you can reach me at our website is www.echo-mr.com. We are also hivemind.zone, and very soon we will have Spaces by Echo. We’re in the process of building out our first residential Observational Research Facility in Austin, which is very exciting. And then, of course, my email is kerry@echo-mr.com.

Lenny: 00:40:56

There you go. All right. Kerry, always a pleasure.

Kerry: 00:41:00

Thanks, Lenny. I appreciate this, the opportunity greatly, and always love our conversations.

Lenny: 00:41:05

Well, thank you. So, good. That was the bet at the beginning whether you would still, you know, be looking forward to it. I’m glad that we carried that through. So, I didn’t wear out my welcome.

Kerry: 00:41:39

How long does it take any one of us to wear out our welcome [laugh]?

Lenny: 00:41:46

All right. Oh, goodness.