The modern focus group has a strange interior life. A participant appears in a video tile. Another types in a chat. Someone in the virtual backroom highlights a sentence while a moderator nudges the conversation toward the awkward question everyone has been avoiding. Later, the recording is clipped, the transcript searched and the finding placed beside responses from a survey. What once required a room, a one-way mirror, a video crew and several heroic spreadsheets can now happen inside a browser tab. CMNTY Corporation helped build that tab.
Pronounced “community,” CMNTY makes software for organizations that want to listen to people with more texture than a score can provide. Its platform combines discussion forums, private journals, co-creation challenges, questionnaires, moodboards, heatmaps and live interviews. Researchers can recruit participants, assign activities, watch completion, probe an answer and move the results into analysis without rebuilding the audience in each new tool.
That combination places CMNTY in a useful but crowded corner of the market. It is part survey platform, part private social network, part digital focus-group facility and part research operations desk. The customer is not usually the person answering the question. It is the insights manager, agency researcher, marketer or product team trying to understand what those answers mean.
A survey can count. A community can remember.
The problem CMNTY solves begins with fragmentation. A conventional research project might use one service to find participants, another to survey them, a video tool for interviews, cloud storage for recordings and a spreadsheet to track who completed what. Every handoff strips away context. The analyst can see that 42 percent preferred Concept B, but not immediately find the diary entry that explains the preference or the follow-up exchange that complicated it.
CMNTY’s answer is continuity. A participant can respond to a poll on Monday, post a photograph on Tuesday, debate a concept on Wednesday and join a live session on Friday. The research team sees the sequence, not four anonymous data deposits. This matters most when the work is exploratory - early product development, brand positioning, customer experience, media habits - where the next question depends on the last answer.
One published study makes the advantage concrete. Future of Food Institute and EIT Food wanted to understand trust in the food system across 13 European countries. The work involved 178 citizens, 40 mini-assignments, forums, photographs, polls and five live co-creation sessions. The researchers had allowed as much as two weeks to configure the platform. They reported finishing the initial setup in a single afternoon.
“The versatility of all the modules combined allow[s] many different types of tasks without losing context.”Eva Hoogstins, researcher, Future of Food Institute
The product was hiding inside the first business
CMNTY did not begin as market-research SaaS. Founder Maxim Schram started Redesignme in 2007, when crowdsourcing still sounded like a piece of internet folklore. The business assembled an online pool of roughly 10,000 designers and charged companies to connect with them. By 2014, the crowd was no longer the whole story. Schram renamed the company CMNTY Corporation and shifted attention toward the software that made such a network possible.
It was the classic platform pivot: the machinery proved more repeatable than the marketplace running on top of it. CMNTY expanded to the United Kingdom, then opened a New York office in 2015, close to early American customers. By then its tools worked in more than 13 languages and served communities of consumers, employees and experts.
A major 2019 release clarified the research proposition. CMNTY Pulse gave moderators a central view of comments, ideas, member activity and task completion. The platform could support a short study, but the more interesting possibility was “always on” research - a branded group that returned over months rather than disappearing after one project.
The unglamorous work is part of the product
A research platform lives or dies on jobs that do not photograph well. Participants forget passwords. Incentives must be distributed. A respondent vanishes halfway through a diary study. A client asks for one more segment after fieldwork has begun. CMNTY treats that administrative layer as product territory.
Its task list and completion matrix show moderators who has done what. Points and badges can encourage long-term participation. Yesty handles gift-card incentives. A Forsta Decipher integration brings survey screener results into participant profiles. Most consequentially, a 2020 partnership with Dynata added access to a global recruitment pool. MarketResponse’s current materials cite more than 62 million potential participants.
The services wrap is equally important. Licenses include onboarding, a branded setup, a final platform check and a dedicated success manager. Customers can also buy recruitment, research-design review, content setup, participant management and moderation. The business model is therefore software plus optional human help, with plans scaled largely by project duration. Public list pricing has given way to a downloadable rate card and sales consultation.
The clever feature is not the moodboard or the focus-group clip. It is the participant who remains recognizable when the method changes.YesPress analysis
A home inside MarketResponse
In October 2021, the Dutch UmbrellaBrand Group acquired CMNTY. The buyer wanted a software house for marketing solutions and a route into the American market; CMNTY brought both. The product now appears as “CMNTY by MarketResponse,” paired with a wider organization of researchers, data scientists, developers, brand strategists and customer-experience specialists.
That ownership makes CMNTY easier to understand. A pure software vendor must persuade a research team to do the methodological work. A full-service agency does the work but may not hand over the controls. CMNTY sits between them: a do-it-yourself platform with a nearby bench of people who can step in. Customers can keep the analysis and outsource the setup, or hand off recruitment while moderating the community themselves.
The customer cases also show that “community” can mean more than a panel of shoppers. Carhartt Workwear EMEA used the platform to sharpen its view of customer groups. RTL maintained contact with Dutch millennials to understand viewing behavior. Futures Housing Group used it for resident engagement. Škoda Auto CZ turned it into a shared space for dealers, placing updates, documents, polls and themed discussions where feedback could be structured instead of lost in email. The common thread is not industry or audience size. It is a group whose accumulated experience becomes more valuable when the organization can return to it, ask a better question and keep the earlier conversation attached.
Competitors come from every edge of that diagram. Qualtrics and QuestionPro approach from surveys. Recollective, Alida and Toluna bring dedicated insight-community products. Forsta and Liveminds cover parts of the qualitative workflow. Generic community software can be cheaper when a forum is all that is needed. CMNTY’s case rests on breadth without forcing the researcher into an enterprise suite, and on support without requiring a fully managed engagement.
Its public reviews capture the trade-off. Capterra and GetApp show a 4.6-out-of-5 rating from 35 reviews, with recurring praise for versatility and support. Older G2 reviews are more mixed, pointing to pricing, manual work and limitations in some research logic. Those criticisms are useful. All-in-one software is always negotiating with its own promise: every added method creates another place where a specialist tool might go deeper.
What teams can steal from CMNTY
The first lesson is to design the sequence, not just the questionnaire. Start with a quick signal. Ask a participant to document the behavior behind it. Put the surprising answers into a group conversation. Return with a concept and watch reactions change. Mixed methods are not a buffet; they are a chain of evidence.
The second is to plan for engagement. A continuous community produces nothing if members drift away. Expectations, reminders, varied tasks and appropriately chosen incentives are not decoration. They determine who participates and therefore what the organization learns.
The third is to build the path to a decision before collecting data. Decide who will watch the live session, where clips will go, which completion signals matter and how the final evidence will be shared. CMNTY’s lasting contribution is the idea that research operations and research insight belong in the same room.
The company itself has changed shape - from design crowd to software vendor to acquired product - but the underlying instinct has remained steady. People reveal more in a relationship than in a form. The work is to make that relationship manageable, searchable and useful without sanding away the human oddities that made it worth studying in the first place.