You Won’t Find Your Future in Focus Groups...
To Find Game-Changing Insight, You Need to Look for Game-Changing People: The Rebels, the Outsiders, the Freaks. So, Who Are You Learning From?
The Insights That Will Help You Outthink, Outmaneuver, and Outgrow Are Hiding in the Hearts and Minds of Passionate Outsiders That Traditional Research Casts Aside.
Ready for What’s Next?
“Our work requires deep exploration of a subject area to synthesize unique brand relevant opportunities for future growth and to enhance our guests lives. David’s ability to learn across multiple disciplines, get hands on and synthesize with a keen eye, enabled us to move quickly from exploration to opportunity identification.”
Joe Santry, Senior Director, Futures Innovation, lululemon
Traditional research traps you in an echo chamber of familiar voices saying Get me out of this f*cking focus group type things. In today’s market, the riskiest thing you can do is limit your own potential with conventional research that is only capable of delivering you conventional thinking.
The Old Way
Cookie-Cutter Recruitment
Low quality respondents, who have nothing better to do at 3pm on a Thursday, cycle through your research giving you answers they think you want to hear so they can make a few bucks.
Backward-Looking Research
Studies that hopelessly chase growth and innovation through conversation with everyday consumers who embody the status quo. Insights built only through the lens of past experiences.
Shallow Exploration
Familiar and surface-level answers from respondents who have no meaningful connection to your topic of interest. No passion, and no skin in the game. No depth of perspective or expertise.
Momentum-Killing Research
Over-engineered projects lag behind the pace of your business, delivering insights too late and leaving the door open for unnecessary debate and confusion.
The New Way
Obsession-Driven Recruitment
Authentic and passionate people, hand-picked because your topic isn’t just something they occasionally think about - it’s what they obsess over and have built their lives around.
Future-Focused Research
Insight built from people who are actively shaping tomorrow instead of passively consuming the present. Anticipate opportunities before the mainstream even sees them coming.
Deep-Dive Dialogue
A collision of informed perspectives. Quickly get right to the heart of things, as respondents collaborate and explore your burning questions from their diverse vantage points.
Momentum-Building Research
Research that delivers exactly what you need, when you need it. No time wasted. Just enough research so that you can confidently continue to innovate and grow.
Qualitative Research Meets Strategic Foresight
Navigate Thorny Challenges
Explore your critical yet out of reach questions from multiple, highly-informed perspectives that provide you with deeper understanding.
Anticipate Change
Forward-looking insights that allow you to anticipate and capitalize on emerging trends before they become mainstream.
Command Attention
Rally your team and capture the attention of your internal stakeholders with powerful stories from compelling and authentic respondents.
Disruptive Innovation
Identify stronger innovation opportunities and find competitive advantage through deeper insight into what is happening in the world around your brand.
Quick Wins & New Points of Differentiation
Move rapidly in response to challenger brands, or find quick wins in product categories where you need to make an impact.
Faster Insight to Action
Maintain your momentum with agile research designed to get you insight quickly, so that you can focus on moving forward and pursuing untapped opportunity.
We built Faster Horses for teams who want research that leads, not lags. For signal strong enough to shape what’s next, and imaginative enough to inspire bold moves.
“We Shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.”
The tools of traditional research were designed for another era. They force you into over-simplified and surface-level conversations that aren’t up to the task of delivering the insight needed to succeed in today’s environment.
Our approach is different.
We bring together panels of highly-qualified respondents, who have a lot to say because they have skin in the game.
Through iterative rounds of structured debate and dialogue, we tackle complex issues, offering up nuanced and forward-looking insight into your most pressing challenges.
A Proven Method
Our approach is based on the Delphi method, which has been used in forecasting and policy-making for decades to develop nuanced views on topics, even where there is controversy or ambiguity.
Diverse Perspectives
We deliberately bring together diverse groups of people to explore your topic from different, highly-informed vantage points: Content creators. Edge Cases. Experts. Prosumers. Rejectors. Superfans.
Confidence and Foresight
Academic research has shown that the method we use has a 5:1 accuracy advantage compared to other approaches to forecasting. Our team also relies on cross-impact analysis and foresight-based tools to give you a truly forward-looking perspective.
We’ll talk about your unique business challenge, and how we’d approach it.
Then, we’ll follow-up the conversation with a sampling of people we’d recommend recruiting into your bespoke panel.
How it works:
Whether you’re grappling with a declining brand, looking to understand change in the world around you, or seeking new innovation opportunities, every project comes together in four steps:
1 Framing the Study
We’ll begin with a workshop to dig deep into your business challenge, your working theories about what’s behind it, as well as your hunches and hypotheses about potential paths forward.
The purpose of the session is to frame our exploration, and to make sure we come away with a comprehensive understanding of what you need to uncover and want to do next.
2 Assembling the Panel
We identify and recruit a diverse panel of people, with highly-qualified opinions about the change or topic you’re looking to understand.
Whether it's content creators, prosumers, or superfans, the goal is to find people with a lot to say, because your topic is deeply connected to who they are as people, what they’re obsessed with, or passionate about.
3 Facilitating the Panel
Three or more waves of conversation between panelists about your topic of interest.
Respondents first provide their individual perspectives on an initial question set.
In each wave that follows, a facilitator provides an anonymised summary of responses from the previous round, the reasoning behind peoples’ judgments, and follow-up questions to help further develop the people’s perspectives.
4 Insight to Action
As the panel moves forward, people revise their individual responses and challenge one another, based-on the debate and dialogue.
As the project comes to a close, we move toward a nuanced collective view of your topic and critical questions.
Our team assembles an comprehensive and actionable report that helps you take a forward-looking deep dive into your challenge and key questions.
Pricing
The Future-Focused POV Plan
For clients who need a focused perspective on where things are headed, without too many bells and whistles.
Framing session to define your research question and hypotheses
Three-round panel, with up to 5 carefully-selected participants
Detailed reporting outlining the collective view of the panel on your topic and key questions.
Deep-dive into areas of tension and disagreement.
Cross-impact analysis & Future-focused POV
Opportunity Assessment & Recommendations
Starts at $15K USD
The Inspiration & Provocation Plan
For clients who need assets that inspire and provoke thinking internally and across the organization.
Framing session to define your research question and hypotheses
Three-round panel, with up to 10 carefully-selected participants
Detailed reporting outlining the collective view of the panel on your topic and key questions.
In-Depth Portraits of Study Participants and Their Unique Perspectives.
Deep-dive into areas of tension and disagreement.
Cross-impact analysis & Future-focused POV
Opportunity Assessment & Recommendations
Starts at $35K USD
Brands I’ve helped explore and activate their futures:
Hey, I’m David. I started Faster Horses because I couldn’t keep doing it the old way.
After 15 years in agencies and consultancies, I started to feel like research had drifted too far from the real world. It was doing the opposite of what it was meant to: Flattening complexity, ignoring uncomfortable truths, and reinforcing old assumptions. So I left, and started doing things differently.
I remember the moment that did it for me. For the fifth time in a year, the same respondent showed up in a group I was moderating. Five different brands. Five different categories. I remember thinking: how could this one average Joe possibly be worth this much time and money?
Faster Horses is what happened when I chose curiosity over cynicism. Creativity over caution. And committed to honoring the eccentricity and weirdness that research too often smooths into something safe and palatable.
The world is more complex and more interesting than most research gives it credit for. The future belongs to those brave enough to actually explore and try to understand it.
If any of that hits home, I’d love to hear from you.