Testing in the Wild: How Orchard’s Real-World Research is Disrupting Traditional Surveys

In a research industry increasingly dominated by AI and traditional surveys, Rashed Chowdhury, CEO of Orchard, is charting a different path. In this episode of the Greenbook CEO Series, Chowdhury joins Lenny Murphy to share how Orchard is closing the say-do gap by capturing real consumer behavior in real-world environments—without relying on conventional surveys or synthetic data. From testing pineapple juice concepts on TikTok to partnering with major brands like P&G and Clorox, Chowdhury reveals how “testing in the wild” delivers predictive, high-quality insights that brands can trust.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of the CEO series of interviews. Thank you for taking time out of your day to spend it with myself and my guest Today is a first time conversation…

Rashed Chowdhury: Excited to be here.

Leonard Murphy: Which is always kind of fun and exciting. You never know what's going to happen. I am joined by Rashed Chowdery, the CEO of Orchard. So Shed, welcome. I'm glad to have So we always start these things out with kind of your origin story, your superhero background, right? Where did you get your special powers? So, why don't you tell the audience about you and how you got here?

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. I'll give you my quick life story or the summary version of it. So, was born and raised in Sweden, which most people wouldn't guess by looking at me, but yet lived in Sweden until I was about 14. whole family moved to the Chicago area and that's kind of been home ever since. I went to the University of Illino Illinois, studied finance and accounting and probably as most college kids had had no idea what I wanted to do as I kind of neared graduation. the one thing I knew I didn't want to do was going through the accounting program there. though someone had suggested if you don't know what you want to do consulting is a great place to start your career because every project is kind of a completely different job. So that's where I started my career in management consulting and had a chance to really work across tons of different industries CPG tractors all sorts of stuff across a lot of different types of business problems and I'd say the common thread across everything I did in consulting was really around  fact-based, granular data to make good business decisions. and that's kind of been a thread that I've brought over to the insight space as that's obviously very important. and a little bit more about how I ended up joining Orchard. Towards the end of my consulting career started doing more and more in primary research and really saw the power of the voice of the customer in terms of bringing the story to life beyond just financial analysis and financial data. but also had some jarring experiences in terms of the lack of quality data in some of that primary research. I remember one of my earlier survey experiences probably we were doing some research for a premium apparel brand and…

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Rashed Chowdhury: They were wanting to learn about younger individuals that are interested in premium apparel brands. So we ran this big survey study and we got the results back and I don't know 90% of the respondents were 65 plus older women in Florida who had somehow kind of gone into the survey and…

Leonard Murphy: No.

Rashed Chowdhury: Just given the situation we were in at the time that data was the only data we had And unfortunately decisions were still based on that data. So that kind of made me think of there has to be a better way. And that's what brought me over to Orchard in terms of a really unique and different way to think about research and really moving it out of the simulated research environments. Moving away from incentives and really creating experiments to then test and learn in a real live environment with the idea of capturing true behavioral data to better inform concept testing,…

Leonard Murphy: So that's really helpful.

Rashed Chowdhury: message testing. and so that's kind of what we're on a mission here at Orchard in terms of better data that's more predictive and ultimately solving the do gap that we often experience experience with some of the traditional methods.

Leonard Murphy: And I think many of us, you kind of fall into the industry. myself included. and I've been there, done that with the bad data experience. it's really tough to have that conversation with your clients. So I feel your pain.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Let's talk about orchard then. So as this approach to understand consumers in a different way as you said that that say do gap to kind of get more into behavior. Describe a typical project and how you go about it.

Rashed Chowdhury: So we've kind of coined it testing in the wild and what that really means is we're using a real world context and measuring real world behaviors. So the super simple example let's say you're Coca-Cola and you have 20 new ideas for different pineapple juices.

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Rashed Chowdhury: instead of going to a focus group, instead of going to a survey and asking how likely would you be to buy this product scale of one to one to five, we would take those and create digital prototypes.  So really translating the concept into social content that kind of shows up the way consumers are used to being spoken to and then we launch it in a very structured and scientific way onto platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook. and maybe sounds a little bit creepy, but the beauty of the test is consumers don't realize they're part of the test and it's showing up on kind of your normal feed and you would if you're not interested, kind of scroll by it, which also tells us something. Or if you're interested, you would engage with it. And from all of those metrics, we built a predictive algorithm that kind of would score all of those 20 pineapple ideas and be able to tell Coca-Cola, here are the three ideas that you should really invest in going forward.

Leonard Murphy: How do you and I love that approach. the dieh hard researcher in me also kind of bristles a little bit, …

Rashed Chowdhury: Right.

Leonard Murphy: But wait, what about controlling for the sample? yeah, I can get over that one. but there is an interesting question though in that kind of institute live AB test type of model for lack of a better term how do you separate out variability advertising effects right is this a cooler concept than others right I mean all of the distraction that occurs in a real feed from just having tons of different content etc etc. is there a model that you have in place to deal with that piece of things like cat video coke video that type of thing to just understand the appeal to different audiences or the impact of length or of content as factors in the actual engagement component of things.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yep. Yeah. So the way we would structure the test, we would try to control for all the possible variables to really understand what's driving the performance. I will say the kind of cluttered social feed is part of the beauty of the approach…

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Rashed Chowdhury: because it is literally showing up in a cluttered space and that is kind of the best environment from our point of view to test if there's actual interest because if you can't grab that interest in the first few seconds you might not have something that's going to resonate with a consumer especially as we're making more faster decisions as we shop online. Kind of that hook part is almost just as important as the idea Sure.

Leonard Murphy: So the other concern would be now I'm going to date myself here but back in the day when I first was founded my first research company there was tons of interest in digital magazines for instance right so testing ads creative in the context of a fully fleshed digital magazine kind  the same idea, right, of how does that capture and with heat maps and all types of good stuff. The never really took off primarily because of the barrier of production, It was just a pain in the butt to create that digital replica and get the product in there, etc. I would imagine in the era of AI that a lot of those things are being dealt with now. So the ease of just creating that content to test is now a lot simpler, cheaper than it was a few years ago because of AI tools. are you seeing that? Okay.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah, I think there's definitely truth to that. We have not fully started leveraging AI, so I do think that that's a big opportunity for us. I will say our creative process and the tools we use allow for a lot of efficiency and agility. so our typical creative process is one to three days. And an important distinction is we are creating content for testing not content that is going into a multi-million dollar campaign.

Leonard Murphy: Right.

Rashed Chowdhury: And we do end up collaborating with creative agencies from time to time. but that mindset mind shift can be hard for them to hey, I'm just going to create the test creative versus a super high fidelity creative. but in terms of if you're truly doing it for testing, we've kind of figured out the right threshold where you still get plenty of consumer engagement without kind of the months of investment in terms of creating the content.

Leonard Murphy: More than a storyboard, but not you haven't hired Brad Pitts to do a voice over or…

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Anything. Yeah.

Rashed Chowdhury: And I mean that's another way we actually end up controlling some of the variability is that the creative is templated depending on the category type of stage of product just so that it's more comparable to our history of benchmarks and…

Leonard Murphy: Got it. Okay. Sure.

Rashed Chowdhury: That also helps the efficiency. So yeah…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, that makes sense as Yeah, absolutely. So, what's been the market response? I mean, you're kind of disrupting the traditional survey type of approach. I know from experience other companies that have tried to do that have had mixed results. so what are you guys seeing?

Rashed Chowdhury: I mean the traction has been good and the hook that is really catching people's interest is the fact that we don't use surveys and we don't use AI and we're really disrupting methodology versus I mean I don't get me wrong AI is amazing …

Leonard Murphy: Right. Yeah.

Rashed Chowdhury: but a lot of what it does is efficiency creates automation but does it actually solve the sad gap does it actually solve data quality? Because I think that has really allowed us to stand out in terms of leading with a transformative methodology and then we also have the technology and are adding AI into our process etc etc to really build around that methodology but it's really leading with a real world methodology that has kind of hooked people in the Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: No, I mean I would be the first to argue that real real world if I can get my mouth to work appropriately tests are superior in many ways to the artificial components of kind of traditional server methodology the AB test for example which can be done at scale I mean Google great example To launch a large AB test via Google Ad Networks is simple and cheap and will give you maybe not all of the metrics that you would get in a very controlled type of test,…

Rashed Chowdhury: Yep.

Leonard Murphy: But you're certainly going to get a lot. so if you've bridge that gap to find kind of the best of both worlds, then that makes an awful lot of sense. So yeah, that's very cool. so we've mentioned kind of, AI and that you're using it from a practical standpoint of where it makes sense within to create process efficiencies. but yet we are in this buzz arena now of, AI is going to change the world. and I would argue that the possibilities of that are true. The potential long-term implications and…

Rashed Chowdhury: There.

Leonard Murphy: and long-term doesn't mean what it used to mean. I think long-term may just be, five years, not 10 are pretty amazing. So, it's an interesting time to bring a new company to market. You're a relatively young company. what's that been like to kind of navigate, hey, we're charting our own path and trying not to get caught up in the hype of any of these things. Has that been one am I right in kind of that assessment and two has that been part of your messaging that has been successful? don't bucket us over here and over here. We're our own thing.

Rashed Chowdhury: And again, I'm not naive to say AI isn't going to change the world. and I do think it will be a part of the orchard offering. it's just not what we would lead with. it's more of a enhancer to what we're doing. from an eff from the types of ideas we end up testing the way we bring the creative to life. But we would still lead with real world context and getting real world behaviors from real consumers type of thing.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. where do you think what's next for the business over the course of the next few years? are you looking at expansion of more use cases? Is there a product roadmap that is going to look at different types of features functionality without giving away the competitive secret sauce but what do you think that looks like for you

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah, it's a good question. So we raised a little bit of growth capital at the end of last year and I mean we've had some good traction with enterprise brands like Proctor and Gamble, Clorox etc. So we feel good about the product market fit. but there's not enough people who are aware of us in the market. So, our initial focus is really amplifying the Orchard brand and what we do and then continually kind of building the products and really improving our analytics. because that's where we get probably the most of the curiosity or skepticism around this is interesting but what gives the analytics credibility. I think we're very aware of that and continuing to invest in making the analytics increasingly predictive.

Leonard Murphy: Are you tapping into the data fire hose of the platforms you test on? Let's say for instance Tik Tok.

Rashed Chowdhury: So we're primarily on Instagram, and Tik Tok.

Leonard Murphy: Okay.

Rashed Chowdhury: And the technology platform we built basically plugs directly into the platforms. So another piece of the road map, Google is probably the next platform we're looking at. but the vision would be to be across all the social platforms beyond connected TV. And again, the more behavioral data we're capturing, the more predictive we're going to be able to make the outcomes and the results. Yep. Exa.

Leonard Murphy: Are you leveraging programmatic ad networks as the delivery system is? All right. So that's your sample cost effectively.

Rashed Chowdhury: Exactly. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Okay. All right. that's interesting.  Sure. Yep.

Rashed Chowdhury: And I mean the beauty of it is I mean some of the targeting on these platforms we're repurposing it as our panel essentially. and there are more and more challenges with the targeting as privacy and compliance and all that kind of continues to evolve. But the targeting continues to be pretty robust in terms of the type of personas you can reach and the volume of people you can reach and that's not just in consumer segments. we do a bit of work in the B2B space as and when you think about it I think the latest stat is 75 to 80% of the US population is on social media. So, you're going to be able to reach most of your target consumers through social media.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. Obviously are you doing LinkedIn then for the B2B same approach.

Rashed Chowdhury: We've done a little bit of LinkedIn as well. but the B2B targeting on Facebook and Instagram is quite strong as well.

Leonard Murphy: And I mentioned to you before we started that even this series we have found that YouTube is actually generating more audience growth for B2B content, right? It's not just people doing random searches. we are seeing YouTube as a B2B discovery engine being very effective and…

Rashed Chowdhury: Interesting. Right. Right.

Leonard Murphy: For Greenbook because we're kind of in that same business, so it's interesting the lines are blurring these platforms we think of solely as consumer platforms obviously people have jobs too and…

Rashed Chowdhury: Right. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Are and…

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Are using them in a variety of ways so it's we good  here. Sure.

Rashed Chowdhury: I was going to say Reddit is actually another platform that's becoming more and more interesting and I kind of had the same reaction as you initially. But now I'm finding myself looking for on Reddit, the best accounting software, and there are things I'm learning on Reddit that I'm not finding through other resources. So, yeah, these platforms are great to learn across tons of different categories.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. I would raise the concern though and not specifically about your methodology but the problems with bots and all that exist as much in those platforms as they do within the sample. I would argue that a lot of the problems within the sample industry, particularly from the marketplace, is to come from programmatic to recruiting,…

Rashed Chowdhury: Right. Right.

Leonard Murphy: River sampling. It's the same damn thing, right? are you trusting for the platforms to weed out the bots or do you have a component as well s similar to what we have to do within surveys to identify nope that's a 6old woman in Florida not the 20-year-old fashion influencer they were trying to identify Okay.

Rashed Chowdhury: There's still a component of that that we have to do. And for our audience targeting, we partner with thirdparty data providers. So Neielson's one of our partners experience another and some of the mechanisms they have in place kind of filters out for the box as well versus solely relying on the social platforms and then anyone who engages with our content is taken to a secondary page where we can measure additional behaviors and on those pages we're able to kind of put some mechanisms in place to filter bots out as well. Right.

Leonard Murphy: Okay. That makes sense. that's cool. Seems like you've thought of all of the things that we have to do to make that effective. That's fantastic. So I want to be conscious of your time as well as the listeners. what lessons have you learned as a leader through your own journey here as CEO of Orchard? What lay your wisdom on our listeners as a young CEO things that you have captured?

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah, good question. And I'll frame it from the perspective of someone who is a recovering overthinker. and I crave the perfect data to make the perfect decision. But learning and accepting that all information is imperfect can be very freeing and perhaps it sounds a somewhat contradictory to someone who's in the insight space. but all the reality is all information is going to have imperfections. So, it's getting comfortable making decisions based on imperfect information or the best information available. and as a leader, learning to trust your gut. and the hole you can kind of fall into when you're overthinking stuff.

Leonard Murphy: Yep.

Rashed Chowdhury: You're six months down the line and you didn't make a decision at a early stage company, that's going to hurt you more than making a mistake. it's bad for momentum that the team notices it. They're looking for kind of more quicker decisions and learning fast. I'd say trust learning to trust your gut. That's why you're a leader. And learning how to work with the information you have, knowing that there's always going to be imperfections in the information.

Leonard Murphy: That's sound sage advice and I would agree actually the older I get the more I focus on intuition not as the first level but of decision-m but it does play a role and…

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: And trusting that more and more. does that come with experience or whatever? I can look back at my own life and think, if I listen to my intuition in my 20s, I probably would have done better if I had not, so I'm not sure that that is only an experiential thing. I think there is something that just comes with that trusting your gut. and it's something we don't talk about, probably enough.

Rashed Chowdhury: And I think I mean part of it is realizing the cost of not making a decision is sometimes the most costly thing.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yep.

Rashed Chowdhury: And to move at the right pace and move fast. Yeah. you have to learn to trust your gut. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: Absolutely. So, Rashelle, is there anything that you want to talk about that you want to make sure to get across to our audience or share with me or get off your chest, whatever?

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah, a good question. I mean, I guess the other thing I'll say one of our company values that some people poke fun at is have fun. And so that would be my advice to everyone and leaders. U if you're not having fun, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. And I think we've done a very good job. with that at Orchard in terms of chasing this bigger mission, but also making sure that we're c creating opportunities that are fun for the team and that our day-to-day is fun and we like being around each other. We like the customers we're working on. and I think that's really important. Exactly.

Leonard Murphy: I agree as So, life's too short not to Yeah, we can't be heedenists and just only do that. But the older I get, the more intolerant I am of doing things that I don't want to do with people I don't want to do it with.

Rashed Chowdhury: Right. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: So, they can't be a hard and fast rule, but, …

Rashed Chowdhury: And we're kind of at a fun size right now where we can make a lot of decisions experiment and if we're not having fun we're missing out on a huge opportunity. so that's really really important for me and the team at Orchard. So you can go to our website at insights.com and…

Leonard Murphy: That's great. So, where can people find you? Yeah.

Rashed Chowdhury: We'll be on the conference circuit this year. we're have the pleasure of participating in the insights innovation competition at IEX hosted by Greenbook at the end of April. so we'll be getting our Shark Tank pitch ready ready for that. and that's the next conference we're looking forward to. and if you find yourself at the conference, definitely come check us out.

Leonard Murphy: I would agree and I will say that reviewing all of the entrance I'm not a judge. you were the only nonAI entrant out of the 46 entrance in this wave. You were the only one that was non AI. So, I think that that did stand out for the judges.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: And yeah…

Rashed Chowdhury: So, for now, we won't add AI at the front or at the end of Orchard at least for now. So, right.

Leonard Murphy: It carries some weight. wait. You're not AI. Okay, let's take a second look at these guys. Hope that best of luck to you.

Rashed Chowdhury: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Leonard Murphy: All I think that is it unless there's anything else that you want to share.

Rashed Chowdhury: And appreciate u you inviting me to this and it's my first podcast as I mentioned to you. was really fun. thank you.

Leonard Murphy: I'm glad that we have fun component of this.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. There you go.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, that's good. It would not be good if you got off this man, I never want to do that again.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yeah. 

Leonard Murphy: That sucked. So, I'm glad I didn't. All right. thank you so much for best of luck in the future, to our listeners. Thank you for taking time out of your day to share it with us. And big shout out to our producer, sponsors, and everybody else who makes, this something that we do. because we did have fun. All right, that's it.

Rashed Chowdhury: thanks honey.

Leonard Murphy: Thank you everybody.

Rashed Chowdhury: Take care.

Leonard Murphy: Take care. Bye-bye.

Rashed Chowdhury: Yep. Bye.