Mike Taylor

Mike Taylor is the CEO & Co-Founder of Rally. He previously co-founded a 50-person growth marketing agency called Ladder, created marketing & AI courses on LinkedIn, Vexpower, and Udemy taken by over 450,000 people, and published a book with O’Reilly on prompt engineering.

Articles by Mike Taylor

Showing 1-9 of 16 articles

Synthetic Research: The Secret Ingredient is People

October 31, 2025

Ask Rally evolved its AI research tool from purely generative models to a system grounded in real human data. Facing issues like AI-sounding responses, bias, and a lack of nuanced preferences, they refined AI personas using diverse data and real human examples. Key developments include "survey boosting" and "GenPop," a virtual panel built on authentic human interviews. This approach ensures realistic responses, reduces hallucinations, and makes market research more accessible and insightful. Real people are the "secret ingredient" for authentic AI personas.

How We're Making Enterprise Pricing Research Cost Less Than Your Domain Name

August 05, 2025

Most founders guess their pricing using intuition or competitor benchmarks, unknowingly leaving massive revenue on the table or scaring away customers. Rally uses AI to make professional-grade Van Westendorp pricing analysis accessible for just $50, helping startups price smarter, faster, and without the $5,000+ cost of traditional market research.

Optimizing to Remove Political Bias from AI Models Removes Other Types of Bias Too

July 23, 2025

Optimizing AI models to reduce political bias can also reduce other forms of systemic bias, making responses more aligned with real-world distributions across domains like climate, education, and energy. This cross-domain correction suggests that even targeted optimizations, when properly applied, can generalize to improve overall model realism and reduce misleading consensus in AI outputs.

What’s Predictive in a Persona?

June 24, 2025

To predict the future, we must track what people actually do and the job they urgently need done.

My Co-Founder Proved Me Wrong

June 17, 2025

When your proposed change to the homepage CTA sparks hesitation, you can lean on synthetic research using AI personas to validate the idea quickly and without risk, even without the traffic for traditional A/B testing.

The ‘Dutch Chris’ Problem

June 16, 2025

Reconstructing personas solely from aggregate statistics can mash together incompatible traits—what we call the “Dutch Chris” problem—causing synthetic research to hallucinate unrealistic individuals and skew insights. You can combat this by using LLMs’ real-world knowledge of trait correlations as scaffolding and an iterative calibration process, raising the fidelity of virtual audiences toward the 70–80% accuracy needed for reliable, cost-effective studies.

AI Broke Entry-Level Hiring

June 09, 2025

AI has decimated traditional entry-level roles, leaving recent graduates stranded without a foothold in the job market. But by using advanced simulations to replicate real-world challenges, we can create new pathways for skill-building and hiring—restoring opportunity in a workforce increasingly shaped by automation.

The Intention-Action Gap

June 04, 2025

AI market research often mirrors human biases, replicating stated intentions rather than actual behaviors. However, by carefully selecting and calibrating AI models, synthetic research can bridge the critical gap between what consumers say they'll do and their real-world actions.

How To Replicate Tim Ferriss's Famous Title Test Using AI Personas

May 28, 2025

Tim Ferriss turned a rejected book title into a data-driven naming experiment that birthed “The 4-Hour Workweek.” and sold millions of copies world wide. Today, AI persona testing lets anyone speed-run that same market-validation magic for pennies.

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