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SurveyCircle is the international community for better research. Because great research shouldn't fail due to small sample sizes.

What is SurveyCircle?

SurveyCircle.com is an international research platform that helps researchers recruit participants for academic studies and market research surveys.

SurveyCircle introduced a world-first concept: Community members help each other recruit participants. By participating in other members' studies, they earn participants for their own study in return.

As the pioneer in this field, SurveyCircle operates the world's largest and most active research participant exchange community.

About SurveyCircle

Founded: 2016
Founder: Jonas Johé
Headquarters: Mannheim, Germany
Focus: Recruiting participants for online studies
How it works: Community-based participant exchange
Business model: Freemium – comprehensive free starter plan with optional upgrades
Top disciplines: Business Administration with more than 50,000 and Psychology with more than 40,000 listed studies
Explore research: Current studies in USA | Canada | UK (England) | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand

Facts and Figures

Who is SurveyCircle for?

SurveyCircle for students and researchers
SurveyCircle helps students and researchers find study participants for academic research surveys and online experiments—most commonly for bachelor's theses, master's theses, or doctoral dissertations.
Thanks to SurveyCircle's international community, you can recruit study participants beyond your own university, city, and even country.

SurveyCircle for people interested in research without their own study
SurveyCircle enables people interested in research from around the world to take part in current research projects in psychology, business, sociology, and many other disciplines. Anyone can easily participate in ongoing studies, experience science in real time, and actively support research.

SurveyCircle for founders, startups, and small businesses
SurveyCircle helps founders, startups, and small businesses conduct market research. Collecting feedback on product ideas or business concepts is easy with SurveyCircle—without expensive research panels.
If you've only relied on feedback from friends and family so far, SurveyCircle helps you reach much more representative samples beyond your own bubble.

How SurveyCircle works

SurveyCircle is based on mutual support: The more often you participate in studies from other community members, the more study participants you receive in return for your own study. This means that the most helpful community members receive the most participants.

To ensure this fair concept works reliably in practice, every study on SurveyCircle is listed in the Survey Ranking, a point-based ranking of all studies. Every survey you complete on SurveyCircle earns you points. The more points you have, the higher your own study moves up in the Survey Ranking.

Here's the clever part: As your study climbs the Survey Ranking, it automatically becomes more attractive to potential participants because studies ranked higher reward other community members with more points for participating.

Since points are the key to success on SurveyCircle, everyone has a natural incentive to participate first in the studies at the top of the Survey Ranking that offer the most points. This rewards the most helpful community members—because their studies are the ones ranked at the top of the Survey Ranking.

Three steps to finding study participants on SurveyCircle

Post your study on SurveyCircle.com
Participate in studies from other community members
Receive participants for your own study (automatically)

Reasons to use SurveyCircle

Get more meaningful research results with larger sample sizes
Conduct high-quality research without a budget or with only a small budget
Support for academic research and market research
Recruit participants across universities and countries
A fair and reliable concept based on mutual support
Promote your study via the website, social media, and email
Compatible with all survey tools
Privacy-first approach: separation of survey tool (external) and participant recruitment (internal)
"Delayed Reciprocity" option: Help the community today and benefit from others' support next year
Research that would otherwise have remained "hidden" becomes visible to everyone
Anyone can take part in real research and actively support it

The Founding of SurveyCircle

The idea for SurveyCircle.com emerged directly from academic practice. While persuing his master's degree at the University of Mannheim, founder Jonas Johé faced the same challenge many students encounter: He needed a large sample for the online study that was part of his master's thesis. As it turned out, this was a time-consuming and frustrating process. Convincing hundreds of people to help a complete stranger with a master's thesis by completing a twelve-minute questionnaire is anything but easy.

This experience inspired the idea of creating a global community where people could support one another with their research. The goal was to ensure that the most helpful members of the community would also receive the most participants for their own surveys. The idea behind SurveyCircle was born.

With the launch of SurveyCircle.com in 2016 and the platform's international growth, it became much easier for researchers around the world to reach large sample sizes and achieve meaningful research results. The key to this success is an active community and a sophisticated point-based incentive system called Smartrank®, which encourages fair mutual support.

Quotes from the Founder

Jonas Johé about SurveyCircle:

"In one sentence: SurveyCircle is a website where students, doctoral researchers, founders, and startups can find participants for online surveys."
"What makes SurveyCircle unique is that you don't buy study participants, as you do with traditional research panels. Instead, community members support one another to achieve larger sample sizes. Nothing like this existed before SurveyCircle."
"Another major advantage of SurveyCircle is that you find participants who are not part of your own circle of friends or your own degree program."
"SurveyCircle.com is more than a survey pool where you post your study and then wait passively to see whether someone might participate. SurveyCircle is a research community where you actively help others and reliably receive help in return."

Jonas Johé about entrepreneurship:

"It's simply great to invent something that didn't exist before and that helps people help each other."
"Sometimes it's incredibly valuable to be able to turn a new idea into reality overnight."
"During my master's degree, I started a list where I collected every new business idea. No matter how absurd an idea seemed, it went onto the list first."

Jonas Johé about recruiting study participants during university:

"It's frustrating when you have to fight for every single study participant and still end up finding only a handful of additional participants."
"I came up with the idea for SurveyCircle while writing my master's thesis, when I was looking for study participants for an online experiment."
"The idea for SurveyCircle came to me in the university library when I was actually supposed to be working on my master's thesis. The core idea was to develop a fair, point-based system that systematically encourages mutual support in participant recruitment while remaining easy to use."
"With this approach, we primarily target people who want meaningful research results but cannot afford expensive research panels. This includes students, doctoral researchers, founders, and small businesses."

Short Descriptions of SurveyCircle

One-sentence description (137 characters)
SurveyCircle is an international research platform for recruiting study participants and is ideal for academic research projects and market research surveys.

Two-sentence description (268 characters)
SurveyCircle solves one of the biggest challenges in empirical research: finding engaged study participants. Based on a globally unique concept, researchers and students support one another by participating in each other's surveys, making it possible to reach the required sample size free of charge or at low cost.

Longer description (649 characters)
SurveyCircle is the leading platform for recruiting participants for online surveys. The core principle behind SurveyCircle is based on something people have done for thousands of years: helping one another.
If you're looking for participants for your own research, you first participate in other people's surveys. In return, you receive participants for your own study. This community-driven concept enables students, researchers, and founders to achieve larger sample sizes and, therefore, more meaningful research results. At the same time, the platform creates more diverse samples because SurveyCircle is used not only by researchers from around the world but also by people without their own study who want to support research by participating in studies.

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Press Contact

Jonas Johé
Glücksteinallee 47
68163 Mannheim
Germany

Phone: +49-621-16601666
Email: jonas.johe@surveycircle.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonas-johe/

Last updated: July 2026