What running a survey community taught us about about mutual support

Over the last decade, we've spent a surprising amount of time thinking about something we never expected to become experts in: How do you convince complete strangers to help each other?

That wasn't the original question, of course. The original problem was much simpler: people needed survey participants.

Students couldn't finish their theses because they were missing another 50 responses. Or 150. Researchers spent weeks emailing people. Founders wanted customer feedback but had no audience. Everyone had the same problem, regardless of what they were working on.

The obvious solution was to pay participants or work with (too) small samples. We didn't. Instead, we built SurveyCircle around a very simple idea: if you participate in other people's surveys, you increase the incentive for others to participate in yours.

On paper, it sounds almost too simple. In practice, it has generated millions of survey participations over the years.

Looking back, we don't think SurveyCircle is really about surveys. It's about incentives and honest mutual support.

People often assume that if you want strangers to do something, you either have to pay them or rely on altruism. Neither turned out to be true.

Most people aren't unwilling to help. They just don't want to feel like they're the only one helping. Reciprocity is a surprisingly strong motivator. If people know that completing someone else's survey directly helps their own project, spending ten minutes helping no longer feels like a favor. It feels like a fair exchange.

One thing that surprised us is how different communities are from marketplaces. In a marketplace, people mainly care about getting the best possible deal. In a community, people care a lot about whether the interactions feel fair. Those aren't the same thing.

If someone asked us what SurveyCircle does, we'd probably say: "We help people find survey participants."

Technically that's true. But after watching this community evolve for years, we think that's only half the story. The real product is a system where thousands of people, all working on completely different research or market research topics, can cooperate without knowing each other. Surveys just happen to be the context.

We've been building SurveyCircle for a decade now, and only recently did we realize that many of the things we've learned have very little to do with surveys and a lot to do with building a community with shared values and fair incentive systems.