In this episode, Brian and Andrew sit down with Dan Entrup, co-founder of AggKnowledge, to talk about one of the most overlooked drivers of the data quality crisis: the respondent experience nobody is actually fixing.

Dan tracked every research outreach he received over 15 months and turned it into a SampleCon presentation. The numbers were brutal. 137 times asked his age. 57 dental requests sent to someone who has never been a dentist. An inbox so flooded with irrelevant surveys that even a motivated expert panelist nearly quit. His point is sharp: bad targeting is not just inefficient, it is actively killing the panels we depend on.

The conversation gets into what AggKnowledge is building to solve it upstream, why free-text profiling and stale data are quietly sabotaging research operations at scale, and why identity verification and workplace verification are not the same thing. There is also a candid take on the M&A and funding landscape, who is well-positioned, where the yellow flags are, and why human knowledge only gets more valuable as AI takes over everything else.

Key Takeaways:

• Why bad targeting is a fraud accelerant, not just a waste of budget

• What 15 months of tracking his own respondent experience revealed about how broken outreach really is

• Why the gap between identity verification and workplace verification is where embellishment hides

• How upstream profiling data can reduce fraud before a screener is ever sent

• Why companies beating on revenue are still seeing their stock drop, and what that signals for the research industry M&A

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