Grateful Research

The people your research keeps failing to reach.

Longevity practitioners, wellness founders, operators and creatives who are adopting AI inside real businesses and real bodies. They are members of a community they co-own, not professional respondents, which is why our first wave closed in six days with every field filled and nothing abandoned.

Who runs it

Forty years of research rigour, pointed at a community that answers.

A panel is only ever as good as the person designing the instrument. Ours is run by Bruce Friend, who has spent his career on both sides of this business and has sold the syndicated products he is now building here.

Bruce Friend

Founder, Friends Consulting Group · President, Wordibly

  • Forty years in global strategic insights, client side and agency side.
  • Built research for HBO, MTV, Nickelodeon, The Disney Channel, Telemundo and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
  • President of the media and entertainment divisions at OTX, Ipsos and Vision Critical.
  • On the senior teams that sold OTX to Ipsos in 2010 and Vision Critical’s insights services division to Primary Capital Partners in 2016.
  • Most recently Chief Data Monetization Officer at a leading Hollywood data intelligence company.
  • Past President of the Market Research Council of New York.

Wordibly, his transcription and ethical-data company, is why voice comes back from a wave as usable, documented data rather than a folder of recordings nobody opens.

What a wave actually produces

Three findings from wave one. None of them are what we expected.

Fielded 5–11 August 2026 to the Grateful Giraffes membership. Every number below is from that wave, computed on full response strings rather than on split text, which is the usual way multi-select survey data quietly becomes wrong.

Finding 01
This is not one audience. It is two, sitting in the same room.

Adoption does not taper off the way a maturity curve says it should. Four in ten are still circling, three in ten already ship, and a product built for the middle serves neither of them.

Curious — mostly asks it questions19%
Dabbling — emails, docs, images22%
Building — workflows they use28%
Shipping — apps, products, agents12%
Teaching — others use what they make19%

n=58. Furthest stage each respondent selected, so a person who picked both Curious and Building counts once, at Building.

Finding 02
Demand is concentrated, and creative work is the floor, not the ceiling.

Agents and operations run away with it. The assumption that a wellness and creative community would rank creative AI highest is exactly backwards, and it is the kind of thing you only learn by asking.

AI agents82%
Automating operations76%
Digital products64%
Health + longevity60%
Community building58%
Discernment + judgement42%
Creative work30%

n=43-50 per topic. Share rating each topic 8 or higher on a 1-10 scale.

Finding 03 · the one worth paying for
The further along someone is, the more intensity they want — and the less support.

Beginners ask for a teacher and a hand to hold. The people already shipping want to be thrown in a room for a weekend. Both groups want the same small-group core, which is the only thing that holds across the whole panel. Nothing in a topline would have shown this; it only appears when the answers are crossed against who gave them.

Curious + Dabblingn=24Shipping + Teachingn=18
Small group, same people71%67%
Weekend intensives38%61%
Live virtual workshops42%56%
Large class, teacher up front46%28%
One-on-one support54%33%

Early = Curious + Dabbling (n=24). Late = Shipping + Teaching (n=18). Multi-select, so shares sum past 100. Subgroups are small and are reported as direction, not as precision.

See the full sample reportVerbatims and the raw set are available under NDA, never on a public page.
Who is in the panel

989 profiles. 526 with stated expertise.

Members write their own professional profile when they join, which is why we can field to a segment rather than screen for one. Counts are members whose stated title and expertise place them in each group.

234Founders + operators
105Creative + media
93Health + longevity practitioners
68Coaches + facilitators
54Finance + legal
45Marketing + growth
40Technical + engineering

Concentrated in Los Angeles, with New York, San Francisco and Austin behind it. 83% want to be in a room in person at least some of the time, which is unusual for a population this deep into AI, and it is why we can put you in front of them rather than only in front of their answers. We will say plainly when a question needs a geography or a cell we cannot serve well yet.

If you would otherwise

The alternatives are good. They are good at other things.

Expert networks

GLG, AlphaSights, Guidepoint

You get one screened stranger at a time, and the recruiter matching you has never met them.

You get the population and the person. We have known them for years, and you can see the number they sit inside before you take the call.

Recruiting marketplaces

Respondent, User Interviews

You rent professional respondents. People who take studies for a living answer like people who take studies for a living.

Members of a community they co-own, answering for their own people. Wave one closed with every field filled and nothing abandoned.

General-population panels

Prolific, Cint, Dynata

Enormous scale, and still no way to assemble 93 longevity practitioners who are also building with AI.

That is the whole panel. The hard-to-reach cell is not a screening problem here, it is the room.

Your own user list

the free option

It can only tell you about people who already bought. It cannot tell you about the market that did not.

A population adjacent to your customers who have no relationship with your product and no reason to flatter it.

We are not bigger than any of them and we will not pretend to be. When your question needs national scale on a general population, one of the panels above is the right call and we will tell you so.

How to work with us

Start with one wave. Grow into the licence.

Start here

The First Wave

$7,500

One custom wave. Your questions, our panel, ten days.

The way in, and the way to find out whether this population can answer your question at all. You define the segment, we write and field it with you, and it comes back as clean tables plus the voice behind them. The full fee is credited against anything annual you do next.

The Grounding

From $30,000 / year

Licensed access to the panel corpus, refreshed quarterly, voice included.

For teams whose product needs real human ground truth underneath it. Synthetic audiences and behavioural models drift without a real substrate to hold them steady. Annual licence, quarterly refresh, and the corpus keeps compounding while you hold it.

The Tracker

$6,000 / year

The quarterly read on how this population is actually adopting AI.

What they use weekly, what they quietly abandoned, what they would trust with something that matters. Four waves a year with full data access. Proprietary questions can be added to any wave and stay yours.

The Table

$900 / hour

An hour with a named practitioner or operator from the panel.

For when the number raises a question only a person can answer. Matched from 526 profiles with stated expertise, they keep half the fee, and you can see the background before you book rather than after.

How a wave runs

Ten days, and the first one is a conversation.

01

You tell us the decision

Not the questionnaire. The decision underneath it. Half the value of a wave is asking the right thing, and that is the part we do together.

02

We write it with you

You see the instrument before it fields. Anything proprietary to you stays yours and never appears in a syndicated report.

03

It fields in ten days

Straight to the panel, in text or in voice, with a live count you can watch. No recruiting lag, because the panel is already here.

04

You get data and people

Clean tables, the raw anonymised set, the voice, and the option to speak with anyone who agreed to be spoken to.

Provenance

Consented at the source, and the people get paid.

If this data is going anywhere near a model, provenance stops being a values question and becomes a liability question. Ours is documented per person and per wave, and we will walk you through the chain before you sign anything.

  • Explicit opt-in, per member

    Nobody is in a wave they did not agree to be in, and opting out costs them nothing.

  • No personal information leaves

    Anonymised and aggregated. Names and contact details never appear in a deliverable.

  • Members are paid

    Cash per completed response, and a share of every subscription this panel earns. They can see what their data sold for.

  • Community first, always

    We will turn down a wave that treats our members as a resource rather than as people.

Tell us the decision you are stuck on.

Twenty minutes, and we will tell you honestly whether this panel can answer your question. Sometimes it cannot, and that is a faster answer than a proposal.

Grateful ResearchA Grateful Labs company, powered by the Grateful Giraffes community.Los Angeles