Why MFour Bets on Fair Data and Real Behavior

In this episode of the GreenBook CEO Series, host Lenny Murphy sits down with Chris St. Hilaire, founder and CEO of MFour, to explore what it means to go against the grain in today’s market research landscape. From launching one of the first research apps in the App Store to weathering Apple’s sweeping privacy changes, St. Hilaire has built a business on the belief that quality, transparency, and fairness to consumers must come first.

Chris shares the origins of MFour—from cold-calling the state legislature to building a behavioral data platform that validates real consumer experiences. He explains why MFour refused to play the router game, why panelist incentives matter more than ever, and how “fair trade data” became a cornerstone of their success. With AI on the rise and data commoditization threatening the integrity of insights, St. Hilaire argues that the industry must demand better—and MFour is ready to lead that charge.

Transcript

Leonard Murphy: Hello everybody. It's Lenny Murphy with another edition of our CEO series. Thanks for taking time out of your day to spend it with myself and my guest. Today I am joined by Chris St. Helair, founder and CEO of M4. Welcome Chris. How are you?

Chris St Hilaire: I'm great. Thanks for having me, Lenny. We are.

Leonard Murphy: It's good to have and especially early in the day for you, you're in sunny California, right? Yeah,…

Chris St Hilaire: But we haven't seen the sun so far this year. We've got clouds all day, but even when it's cloudy, it's like 68, 69. So there's not a lot of people feeling sorry for us.

Leonard Murphy: I'm not going to shed any tears for you, my friend. But it's great to have you and for the audience, Chris and I have known each other for a few years have definitely watching what you've been doing of M4. I think you've charted a very unique course which is a segue to kind of tell us your origin story personally and…

Chris St Hilaire: Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: the company just to kind of level set and then we'll talk about M4 itself.

Chris St Hilaire: It started gosh in college sitting on the couch watching an old show called Crossfire with my buddy who was on a different side of the political aisle than me and we started getting into argument and he said you're too stupid to ever work in politics and I said I'll show you. So, I decided to call the state legislature every morning at 8:00 a.m. and 12. They wouldn't take my call. And after two months, the chief of staff to one of the party leaders says, "God, you are a pain in the ass, but you deserve an interview, so let's do it on the phone." I said, "Can I fly up?" He said, I can't promise you anything." So, I flew up to Sacramento on sort of a whim, this 22 year old kid. And he was laughing during my interview. I didn't think anything was positive was happening when you're laughing. but I got paged at the airport on my way back and he said get back here and I was working in the state legislature the following year and I quickly decided that you're either good at policy or politics and I was better at the politics. So I ran campaigns for 15 years and that moved me to polling which moved me to communication which moved me to M4 and sort of that start of the smartphone where I thought I saw that Steve Jobs invention and said things are going to change and so we were one of the first apps in the app store. Our idea was that you put an app in everybody's going to want to take surveys on it. The entire market research will move immediately over and most business people if you knew what you knew when you started the business you wouldn't have started the business. So fast forward to today we're in good shape…

Leonard Murphy: Just kidding.

Chris St Hilaire: But it's a lot of business owners been a journey

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. I think what's been fascinating is you're one of the companies that you've charted your own course. so I have not seen you engage in the traditional channels of growth particularly when it comes to having kind of the integrated sample and data collection capability that so many broad competitors have done. It seems like you've had your vision on this is the right way to do things and this is what we're going to do period. and kind of slugging it out in the trenches to earn that business. is that a fair assessment?

Chris St Hilaire: Yeah, I think it's fair assessment. I mean, hindsight is so much easier than looking forward. So, when you look backwards, the Buddhists say when you look forwards, the past's always very crooked, but when you look backwards, it's a straight line and you can see what led to everything else. and how it was sort of meant to be. I say all the time, I don't get invited to a lot of market research dinner parties. because we've been a contrarian in the industry for a very long time and we've talked about that battle for data quality and the need for validation and the importance of paying fair incentives to consumers who are now called just panelists. and so that has made our point more expensive. It's prevented us from participating in the routers at the same level as everyone else. But in the end, I've had big conversations with a lot of the legacy market research firms who say, "We'll give you a $5 million contract per year, just lower your prices, your margins are still good." And I said, " that's less than we pay the consumer." and that has made us less popular.  But in the end, I genuinely believe it's that when you do the right thing, eventually you win. And for us at least, the right thing has been paying consumers fairly and validating their behavior. And that's given us other opportunities to monetize our app within the app store.

Leonard Murphy: And I think importantly, I remember vividly when this happened when Apple changed their privacy restrictions a few years ago and a lot of people got shut down from an app standpoint,… but you did not. and I suspect that a piece of that was that you had a fair value proposition and a very transparent in process for your users compared to some of the other folks.

Chris St Hilaire: That's absolutely right. We actually spent gosh six hours in Certino sitting down with the head of app development. They shut us down too. They pulled us out of the app store and our entire model was right gone in a day. And so we got the meetings with the right folks and sat down and talked about legitimate use cases for market research. And what was interesting is they were not aware that there was a difference between market research and marketing. And so all of these apps got labeled as marketing apps and pulled from the app store. When we talked through legitimate use cases for, very respected companies who engage in market research, they said, "You're right." And so they put us back in the app store. They also eight months later gave us permission to collect iOS data from consumers with what we call fair trade data. So you've got fair trade diamonds, fair trade coffee. We've got fair trade data.  And that for us has been really a key to our success is the ability to collect behavioral data and combine it with market research data so that you get the behaviors which strengthen the validate the opinions and you get opinions which give color to the behavior because shoppers aren't single channel. And so you've got other companies that' location data or others that'll measure app data. None of them can give you opinions on top of it, but the omni channel is a 247 shopper now. So, you're in an app, you're on a website, you're in the store, sometimes all at the same time, and you have opinions about that. And the ability to combine all those things is where the industry really needs to be. And we're just going to stay that course and hope somebody listens.

Leonard Murphy: I hear you. I fought that battle off and on in various ways over the years. what I didn't have was the stick to itness that it seems like you've had.  Is that just pure Have you turned a character flaw of stubbornness into an asset?

Chris St Hilaire: Yeah. Yeah, you're But I mean, necessity is right is the key to invention. and so for us, I put my house on the line to start the company. And so failure means your kids don't have a place to live or at least right not the same one it did.  And so that necessity sort of dictated the fact that we stayed the course. We could have played this router game and I'm glad we didn't, Because I think you have in market research to some extent what happened in the mortgage industry. So, if you watch the big short, you'll see all these firms became dependent on one another and these bonds were all supporting the same underlying bad loans. And the bad loans today are AI and chat bots because one is going to spend an hour qualifying for a survey that takes a half hour and in the end pays them points that equal 20 cents in actual value. That's just not sustainable. And you could have all the fraud bots you want in the world, but when you start with a fundamentally flawed premise, there's nowhere to go from here because I would argue that it's virtually all fraud. And some would disagree with me, but we've stayed the course and I think in the end that better quality data for the right business decision, whether you're in entertainment or CPG, is going to win.

Leonard Murphy: I preach to the choir, my friend. and I think what's interesting.

Chris St Hilaire: No, you are.

Leonard Murphy: though so I do think things are shifting because of AI and the awareness that the risk of garbage in garbage out now is far greater than the benefit from a cost standpoint. when everything sat in silos one research study that may have had some variability to begin with from a quality standpoint that could be absorbed and not defending it but it could be absorbed it could be dealt with but as we're building models now that could in many cases replace primary research certainly that feed into more sophisticated capabilities from a prediction standpoint etc etc they go into this large pool of information the risk of contamination is greater than ever and I think that everyone is recognizing that now so therefore I think we've bottomed out on the commoditization component I think we've bottomed out on the tolerance for the risk tolerance for data quality issues and it is moving upstream in thinking that we must have higher quality data to drive the higher quality outcomes that we see the potential of now because of the enabling component of AI. Are you hearing that from your clients? are you detecting that trend now in the ecosystem? I think it's still early but I do think it's happening.  What do you think?

Chris St Hilaire: Yeah, I mean I sat in one of the largest panel providers offices gosh eight years ago and their head of data was saying that their data was wrong and getting more wrong every single day and that was eight years ago and now and I won't mention names still works within market research church at a very high level. and that is disappointing to me because somebody's got to stand up and say that quality is got to be number one. You start with a foundation of quality, everything goes from there. But the minute you start to play that game of cut this and cut that, then you get yourself into a pretty slippery slope pretty darn quickly. So, I appreciate that the industry is recognizing that. And we don't want to just provide, state problems. We want to provide solutions. And so, to your point, I think there's more recognition than ever. We can argue about why that recognition is coming, whether there's indictments or whether they're just saying now needs to be quality. I would argue that it's the former more than the latter, but that in the end, we need disruption and it's happening now. and you've got lots of startups in the space which I think is healthy and you have entrance coming from outside market research to play in this space and give the old guard a reason to look at their business models. The question for me is how do we get out of this commoditization game and how do you stop participating in routers when an entire infrastructure is built on sort of this mass collection of opinions that everybody plugs into from one, two or three sources.

Leonard Murphy: We're not going to solve the infrastructure and systemic issues of the industry during this interview. I share your disdain for routers while also understanding the benefits from a pure business practicality standpoint, And I think those are the tensions, Super cheaper path to better, right? Always what is the path to that? I'm not going to argue ever that the idea of programmatic of routers didn't serve the cheap and…

Chris St Hilaire: All right.

Leonard Murphy: Fast drivers. Of course they did, which is why they happened. the challenge has been the mitigation against and I think that that is what we have to get to now is understanding that better and in this definition I would say is better quality. foundationally that is supreme but we still need to optimize for cost and speed. so is there a world where we've got either M4 or you become, the unicorn, that just has so many people that you're driving everything maybe? Or is it you and 50 60 other companies playing in an ecosystem that is still using some variation of programmatic from a scale standpoint but off of high quality data right and we get rid of routers because we're leveraging existing data to target efficiently and effectively I mean routers were a reflection of we don't know who the hell we're talking to so right so you go through all these screening questions I would argue that companies like you and others say we don't need to ask those questions anymore. We know who we're talking to and we have massive amounts of data to target them efficiently. Programmatic is just a way to help bring that into, to scale to combine, multiple solutions. And maybe that's the world that we're heading to. I don't know. Mhm.

Chris St Hilaire: I think what you're saying I mean I think what you're saying makes a ton of sense. but if we unpack it, that you're talking cheaper, faster, better is always what people strive toward, in business. And they found the cheaper and faster. They didn't find the better. They found the worse. And so, you've got to start with your client understanding your client is the consumer to some respect. And so, you've got to respect them.

Leonard Murphy: Sure.

Chris St Hilaire: And it better. It's actually not faster for a consumer who spends an hour trying to qualify for a single consumer of survey, right? And so, if you look at that from the consumer perspective, they've gotten cheaper. I guess I'd agree with that, but they haven't gotten faster or better. And what it's lent itself to are a lot of click farms and with AI, to your point, it's getting even more difficult. The path out is to your point, and you've been saying this for a long time, is to integrate behavior to validate opinions and integrate opinions, which are still fundamentally important product decisions into behaviors to contextualize them. people went all shopping on this day to this store, they don't know They don't know how that experience was. And those opinions are fundamental, but geo validated opinions, when they leave the store are fundamentally better because they're at the point of emotion. they're closer to the experience. They're validated, and you can combine the demographics. So, you can take a half-hour survey and make it 15 minutes. And that's what I believe the future of market research is. That's what we've stayed that course on and hopefully people have paid attention. We've grown quite a bit. We could have grown a lot faster and I'm glad haven't because we haven't played that same router game as everyone else. And I think the industry is coming around. I think that market researchers you looked on LinkedIn they're asking those questions. They want to know where their data is from. And I think once they open the door to geo validation and…

Leonard Murphy: Agree wholeheartly.

Chris St Hilaire: Visit pattern targeting, which is knowing their app behavior, and then asking about it, you can get so much richer and you can actually expand this industry.

Leonard Murphy: Wholeheartly. And I think that we're moving into the vision where the way I kind of break up the marketing life cycle is to engage, understand, activate. I think that's just the big chunks of how that happens.  And that's a cycle. we've always had partitions between those things. I think those partitions are coming down. Part of that is technology that's allowing us to do that. But in that world, which we are rapidly moving into from a marketer's perspective, it's platforms and approaches like yours and other people for everybody else listening. M4 is not the only game in town. There's other people doing it as well. although I think you've been doing it longer and have stuck to your guns longer than anybody else and I want to give you props for that. For sure I think we're moving to that a world where that virtuous cycle of leveraging data to optimize the experience of the consumer who ultimately is the customer is becoming more more and understanding that it is a real consumer and not a bot is more important as well. Although we're not going to go too far off on this, but if there's also a world where it's selling to bots, right? So, you as consumer have an agent and…

Chris St Hilaire: Yeah. Yeah.

Leonard Murphy: That agent is making decisions and we've empowered it to do engagement with other agents. I don't know what the hell happens in that world. …

Chris St Hilaire: And it's happening faster and faster, right?

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, it really is. I mean, I have not adopted a Lenny bot yet. and I don't know that I'm going to, but I certainly could see the benefits of it. And but my kids would probably do it tomorrow if I'd let them,  So, yes. Right.

Chris St Hilaire: And what we see honestly is synthetic data which to some extent right is just an extrapolation. It's just a com the combined data and sort of extrapolating from a 100 interviews. the issue we've got is those 100 or 200 or 300 interviews need to be real people. because if you're expanding on fraudulent data that synthetic data it just makes it x% worse and…

Leonard Murphy: Yes. Yes.

Chris St Hilaire: So I think you need to start with proprietary data to your point in this commoditized world that's getting more commoditized with AI you really need proprietary data and good judgment you need to ask the right questions of good data and then there's maybe a role for synthetic but the bigger firms tend to use synthetic as a way to cut costs even further because they're experiencing those same price pressures that a lot of us in the industry are.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris St Hilaire: And we're just haven't played the game at the cost of growth percentages. but it's going to pay off in the end because I think more and more people are commenting on the need to understand where their data source is coming from.

Leonard Murphy: So one point that I actually just had a thought that I want to make sure we get to your point, we also have to recognize that, the science of AI has shown that training off synthetic data creates, severe mental illness in the LLMs...

Chris St Hilaire: Absolutely.

Leonard Murphy: This doesn't work. It's weird stuff. so the need for fresh real data actually is fundamental to the development of you can't train LL off of existing data. it has to be new stuff. so you had recently this year announced a deal. I think it was an investment I believe from Semrush which I thought was really really interesting. I'm sure that you can't go into significant details but I suspect it's in the same neighborhood of the ideas that we're talking about on what kind of drove that relationship.  What can you tell us about that?

Chris St Hilaire: Yeah, thanks for asking. The investment happened mid last year, so it hasn't quite been a year yet. so you're right, it's been within a year. and they're an SEO company, publicly traded, that sees a big opportunity in market research. And so, they've been the incumbent player for SEO strategies, getting your website better ranked for a very long time. they see that market as expandable, but market research and insights to accompany those behaviors as part of their future. And so we are their entrant into this space which is fantastic on a lot of fronts because I think new money coming into this space and a new paradigm with a large player is a good idea and when you look at their behaviors and adding opinions it's not far off from what our core value is is let's take those attitude let's take those behaviors and add opinions to validate one and give context to the other. That's a fantastic thing for the industry. Our goal is to get everyone using geo validator or some form of validated data as a basis to launch their research and seen some buys off on that value prop. So, our sales force went from, 12 people to 112 people virtually overnight. and that's a good thing. I think for the industry at large, especially the smaller players like us…

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, that's very cool.

Chris St Hilaire: Where I'd put us in that camp …

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. Chris, I want to be conscious of your time as well as the listeners. We're trying to keep the CO series relatively short, although there's a lot more to unpack and we could talk for a lot longer and I'm sure that we will again in the future. what do you want to cover that we haven't covered? Is there anything you want to make sure that we get to?

Chris St Hilaire: I like the focus of the industry on demanding to know where their data sources is. And so the future of all of us is, we're fighting individually as companies, but there's a collective fight as well, which is the validity of our professions. And so I would encourage everyone to know your data source whether it's us one of the smaller players in sort of the behavioral data or the validated data space. I would encourage everyone to do that. I'd also encourage them to stay in I know you've been at the forefront of pushing this topic. So I would encourage them to stay involved here as well. we're going to start pushing harder within market research and getting more involved and presenting more white papers and speaking to anyone that'll listen. So we appreciate the time today.

Leonard Murphy: Very cool. I appreciate it. Where can people find you, Chris?

Chris St Hilaire: M4.com nice and easy mfo.com. I would encourage you just to really if validated one time try it because you're going to like the quality of the data. You're going to like the fact that you're getting longer responses and the fielding times quicker because we're incentivizing consumers to be more involved.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah. I also, this sounds promotional, but I don't mean it that way, but I always like that you were paying an annuity, a monthly fee to some subset of your panel for usage of some of the data, which I thought was very cool as well. is that still the case it's not transactional.

Chris St Hilaire: It is and our plans are to launch internationally the end of this year beginning of next and that model of treating people if you treat people they come back. It's like any friendship partnership or marriage. I've got 27 years of just being thankful my wife hasn't left me yet. and that, that I think pays dividends because I like her, And when you treat each other then it's a success for a longer term relationship. and that's how we treat our panel. there's still time.

Leonard Murphy: Yeah, I hear we just celebrated 30 years of her not killing me. So I understand exactly what you mean. So, I mean, we're young, So, that's what keeps us on our toes. all right,…

Chris St Hilaire: That's right. That's right.

Leonard Murphy: It's great. to our listeners. Thank you to our ponsor we will be back with another edition of the CEO series real soon. Everybody, take care. Bye-bye.

Chris St Hilaire: Thanks, honey.