Concept testing software: how it works
By Mayank Mehta, Founder and CEO, Gather · Published August 18, 2026 · Last updated August 18, 2026 · 5 min read
Short answer: Validate the idea before engineering commits, using monadic designs that compare cleanly. At Gather it runs on a Customer Intelligence Model post-trained on your own corpus, so every study makes the next one sharper instead of starting from zero.
Table of contents
- What it does
- How it works
- When teams use it
- What you get back
- Pricing
- Methodology
- Frequently asked questions
What it does
Validate the idea before engineering commits, using monadic designs that compare cleanly.
Capabilities:
- Monadic and sequential monadic designs
- Ranking and constant sum for trade off elicitation
- Qualitative probing on why the winner won
- Base sizes and significance reported with every result
How it works
- Brief it in plain English. Tell Emma the business question in Slack, on the web, or in Teams. No survey builder, no research training required.
- We design and screen. Screener, quotas, and instrument built to the question, reviewed by research experts before anything fields.
- It fields. Real respondents from a 60M+ verified panel, profile checked and spam scored, or grounded synthetic personas where the audience is hard to reach live.
- It comes back packaged. Not a data dump. A readout with the evidence, base sizes, and significance, plus the assets that come off it.
- It feeds the model. Everything folds into your Customer Intelligence Model, so the next question starts from what you already learned.
More on the platform.
When teams use it
- Screening product concepts before roadmap commitment
- Testing packaging or flavor before a run
- Choosing between campaign ideas
- Killing a bad idea cheaply
By market, see industry pages. By job, see use cases.
What you get back
A packaged readout, plus whatever downstream work you want generated from it: report, landing page, social and exec posts, ad creative, battlecards, lifecycle email. All grounded in what real buyers said and testable with buyers before you spend.
See sample reports for the shape of the output.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| B2B pilot | $8,000 one time | 100 real interviews, four weeks |
| B2B Starter | $50,000 / year | 650 credits |
| B2B Growth | $100,000 / year | 1,400 credits |
| B2B Scale | $200,000 / year | 3,300 credits |
| B2C pilot | $8,000 one time | 400 real interviews |
| B2C Starter | $25,000 / year | 1,250 credits |
| B2C Growth | $50,000 / year | 3,000 credits |
| B2C Scale | $100,000 / year | 7,000 credits |
| Customer Intelligence Model | $25,000 assessment, then $100,000 / year | 1,500 credits, model built, maintained, hosted |
One credit is one real interview or four synthetic interviews. Additional credits come in $25,000 packages.
Methodology
I did not rank these from a feature matrix someone emailed me. Here is how this was put together.
- Public sources only for competitor claims. Pricing, positioning, and capability claims come from each vendor's own site, their G2 and Capterra listings, and published documentation, checked in August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish pricing, I say so instead of guessing.
- Traffic and authority data from Ahrefs, pulled the week this was published. Domain Rating and referring domain counts are point-in-time and will drift.
- Category placement over feature counting. Two tools with the same feature list can solve completely different problems. I care more about what you still have to do after the study lands.
- My bias, stated up front. I run Gather. I have tried to be accurate about where competitors are genuinely stronger, and I name those cases. Verify anything that matters to your decision.
Something wrong or out of date? Email me and I will fix it: mayank@gobeheard.com
Frequently asked questions
What is concept testing?
Validate the idea before engineering commits, using monadic designs that compare cleanly.
How is Gather's concept testing different?
It sits on a Customer Intelligence Model post-trained on your corpus rather than being a standalone tool. Results feed the model, and the model feeds the next study, so accuracy improves instead of resetting each project.
How fast is it?
Hours to days rather than the four to twelve weeks a traditional agency cycle takes. Research and design experts review every output before it reaches you.
What does it cost?
Included in every plan. B2B starts at an $8,000 pilot for 100 interviews, then $50,000 to $200,000 a year. B2C starts at an $8,000 pilot for 400 interviews, then $25,000 to $100,000.
Is the output defensible to a board?
That is the bar we design to. Screened and quota controlled samples, significance reported with base sizes, and every claim traceable to the verbatim, respondent, study, and date.
Can we start small?
Yes. Run one real question, compare the output to what you get today, and decide from there.
Try it on one real question
You do not have to replace anything to find out whether this works. Add Emma to Slack, ask her one question your team has actually been arguing about, and see what comes back the same day.
Add Emma to Slack or book a working session.