About - Positly

Why does Positly exist?

Our mission is to improve research speed, quality, and affordability dramatically.

Our vision is a future where decisions are routinely based on solid data and sound reasoning.

We will contribute to this future by delivering researchers with high-quality participants with an easy-to-use interface.

How does Positly work?

Positly helps you manage research participants from recruitment through final results. We provide tools for targeting, messaging, retargeting, payment, and quality control.

Get up and running in no time – simply link to your research activity (or create one using GuidedTrack), decide how many people you’d like to complete it, and choose your target audience.

For more information about how Positly works, please read the detailed step-by-step guide or our Frequently Asked Questions.

Easy as 1, 2, 3!

Get up and running in no time – simply link to your research activity (or create one using GuidedTrack), decide how many people you’d like to complete it, and choose your target audience.

Create or link to your research activity

Use your favorite tool to create your research or use GuidedTrack (we’re biased since we built it, but we think it works best with Positly!). All Positly needs is a link and a brief description for participants.

Choose how many people you'd like to complete your research activity

We don’t have a minimum spend requirement, so you have the flexibility to hear from 10 people or tens of thousands!

Choose your target audience

Easily reach your target audience through our pre-defined attributes (e.g. their geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics), create your own custom attributes or retarget based on previous activity.

How Positly works

Who uses Positly?

Positly is used by academic researchers, startups, product designers, non-profit research organizations, commercial researchers, and even authors! If you care about making decisions based on data from real people, Positly is for you.

“I had to run a dozen small online experiments in a few months to finish my dissertation. With Positly, each study took less than 5 minutes to launch and I always got my data on the same day.”

Daniel Greene

Psychology researcher
Stanford University

“Using Positly has been a great tool for streamlining my workflow. It’s really easy to quickly collect high quality data. The technology is great, but the people at Positly are even better. They genuinely care about data quality, continuously make improvements, and are always willing to help troubleshoot to make my studies a success.”

Keri Szejda

Senior Consumer Research Scientist
The Good Food Institute

“I loved using Positly. It made my multi-stage study much easier and saved me several hours of tedious busywork. I would definitely recommend it to anyone doing online social research!”

Eric Gastfriend

CEO
DynamiCare Health

“Positly is a wonderful tool to recruit participants for online studies in an efficient way. It is easier to use than the alternatives and offers all the features I need.”

Lucius Caviola

Psychology researcher
Oxford University

“I get quality results incredibly fast. It’s both simple to use and highly customizable. I rave about it to everyone I know conducting research.”

Aislinn Pluta

Product Manager
UpLift

“It’s simple, elegant, fast, and a game-changer for social science. I’ve had three hundred responses in less than an hour. My days of hunting for participants are over – now I won’t use anything else.”

Peter Brietbart

CEO
MindEase

Who is the team behind Positly?

Positly is a Spark Wave company. Spark Wave is an evidence-driven research lab and startup foundry applying social science, iterative experimentation, and careful analysis to create socially beneficial software companies from scratch.

Our team is distributed across four continents and has significant experience in digital product design, online software development, primary human subject research, business, and marketing.

Leadership team

Dr. Spencer Greenberg

Chief Science Officer

Spencer is the founder and CEO of Spark Wave. He has been a serial entrepreneur since he co-founded Rebellion Research, a quantitative investment firm, in 2005. Spencer holds a PhD in mathematics from the Courant Institute at NYU, where he specialized in machine learning, and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, where he studied applied math and computer science. Spencer’s work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal, the Independent, Business Insider, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Fast Company, and the Financial Times

Rodman Henley

Chief Technology Officer

Rodman is a technologist, entrepreneur and software engineer with experience in the market research industry and several early stage products as a founder of both Storzzz and 8WeekApp. His previous experience includes building research participant management software at OpinionLab.

What is the story behind Positly?

For several years, the Spark Wave team has been focused on building software based on social science. Our goal has been to help people in many ways, from mental health (UpLift and MindEase) to improved decision-making (e.g., ClearerThinking). Along the way, it’s been essential that we know the impact of these apps by understanding precisely how effective they are. We must also be aware of any improvements needed to have an even greater impact.

To prove our methods, we worked tirelessly to find a way to get quality participants that would give us helpful feedback. Like many researchers we tried enlisting family and friends, our email newsletter list, used social media sites and reached out to niche communities.

After finding that these methods were slow, difficult, and error prone, we moved to using microtasking sites like Mechanical Turk. These sites proved to be faster and more scalable but needed a lot of finessing to get reliable results. After all, they weren’t designed for research.

We couldn’t find what we were looking for so we set out to build it ourselves. It needed to be fast, simple, intuitive and capable of recruiting and managing large numbers of high-quality participants with reliable results – it’s no small task!