The Billion Person Focus Group® - Find the Truths Traditional Research Misses
Abi Awomosu
AI Research Leader •Ex-Meta, Uber, Apple
See what your market really needs — before it's obvious or too late.
Most practitioners don't struggle with access to data. They struggle with knowing what matters — and AI made it worse, not better.
Most AI research courses teach extraction: summarize quicker, automate the asking, replacing the human with the synthetic.
The Billion Person Focus Group® does the opposite. You use AI as a listening partner to access patterns from places where people actually gather and speak unfiltered— forums, communities, support tickets, sales calls, product data.
Triangulate across sources. Bring receipts. Then hand off what you find to surveys, interviews, or experiments.
Discovery first. Validation second.
This isn't "move fast and break things." It's see first—act once.
In two days, you’ll apply this to a real high-stakes decision and leave with:
Visual market landscape maps
3–5 decision-ready hypotheses
A ready-to-run Listening OS — agents, workflows, cookbooks — customized to your market
A validation plan you can execute Monday
And you keep everything — for the next launch, the next client, the next pivot. Stop renting insights. Start owning the capability.
What you’ll learn
This is not a course you complete. It's a practice you begin. The skill of hearing what your market needs before they have words for it.
Locate the sources of hidden insights where most never think to look: forums, communities, IRL, dark data, digital body language, and more
Distinguish Performance Spaces (curated identity) from Confessional Spaces (where unfiltered truth slips out)
Create visual market maps showing how people actually organize themselves — tribes, tensions, and territories
Spot when strangers across territories hack the same solution — without ever coordinating with each other
Notice when users keep fighting the same friction — that's a market gap hiding in plain sight
If a pattern doesn't appear in 3+ places, it's noise — learn to triangulate and bring receipts
Decode the layer beneath language — struggles, tensions, and desires that don't have words yet; the layer surveys and user interviews miss
Read digital body language hidden in your data like a pro: cursor hesitation, rage clicks, form abandons reveal what surveys can't reach
Upcycle insights from what you already own but don't use — support tickets, sales calls, product logs hide your next breakthrough
Assemble an A-team — domain experts, provocateurs — who debate each other to fix blind spots, shallow outputs, hallucination or bias
Create personas from real data that hold full, contradictory human reality — not demographic cutouts or sycophants
Bring your market into the board room — stress-test ideas or strategy with simulations before you commit resources
Analyze thousands of conversations in minutes — while retaining the nuance of sitting with one person
Filter out bots, AI slop, hallucinations and synthetic noise with built-in detection heuristics so you can trust the data
Practice ethical listening: master the art of using AI observation without scraping, extraction, or manipulation
Bring your data, your frameworks, your expertise — build on top of the methodology to make it uniquely yours
Leave with tested agents, prompts, prompt libraries, and expert feedback on your specific work
This isn't a course you finish. It's capability you keep and build on— repurpose again and again for the next launch, client, or pivot
Learn directly from Abi
Abi Awomosu
AI Research Leader • Ex-Uber, Meta • Bestselling Author of 'How Not to Use AI'
Who this course is for
Researchers & Insights Professionals. AI tools summarise fast but insights got thinner. You used to find the unexpected. This brings it back
Strategists, Marketers & Consultants. You're paid to see what's next but AI gives you what's already obvious. This is how you see first.
Founders, Product Leaders & Builders. You build for people but somewhere you stopped hearing their needs. This is the direct line back.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with AI tools — you've used ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or similar.
The course is taught primarily using Claude, but the methodology works across platforms. No technical skills required.
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Abi Awomosu in a real-time, interactive format.
The Billion Person Focus Group® Intensive (6 Hours Over 2 Days)
Join Abi for a 2-day practice intensive — Day 1: How to See. Day 2: How to Build. Move from understanding the Listening Craft methodology to building your own custom listening system. Leave with a working framework ready to deploy.
The Practice Lab (2+ hours)
For practitioners ready to make this methodology their own. See it applied live to real client engagements, then build your own system alongside other practitioners. Bring your context, your challenges, your stack. This is practice, not lecture — we stay until everyone's questions are answered.
Post-Intensive Self Study Content, Prompts and Agents
Go deeper on your own timeline with 40+ hours of immersive self-paced content. Access a complete library of 500+ ready-to-use prompts, data visualization cookbooks, agent tools, and proprietary frameworks. Everything you need to build and scale your listening practice.
Complimentary Repeat Access to Next Cohort
Immersive learning works best with repetition. Attend the next cohort at no additional cost to deepen your understanding, catch what you missed, and strengthen your practice.
Direct Access: 1:1 Coaching Session with Abi
Book a personalized session to get your specific questions answered or receive direct coaching on building your custom listening system. Apply the methodology to your exact business challenge with expert guidance.
Lifetime Access to 'The Village' Alumni Community
Join a curated community of practitioners — researchers, strategists, founders, creatives, and builders — who collaborate, share insights, hire each other, and build partnerships. Your network becomes your competitive advantage.
AI-Powered Custom BPFG Creation Tool
Your personal AI agent that helps you design and deploy a custom listening system tailored to your specific domain, clients, and business challenges. Pre-configured with the BPFG methodology—ready to scale your insights immediately.
AI Course Learning Companion (24/7 Access to support)
Your always-available AI companion and mentor that walks you through the BPFG methodology step-by-step. Ask your own questions, understand the reasoning behind each phase, and get personalized learning recommendations tailored to your goals.
Lifetime Access to All Course Materials & Recordings
Revisit the masterclass recordings, workbooks, slides, and all resources whenever you need them. Your learning investment never expires—reference the methodology for years to come.
Certificate of Completion
Earn a recognized credential from Maven that demonstrates your mastery of the BPFG methodology. Share on LinkedIn, your website, or with clients to establish credibility and attract opportunities.
Maven Guarantee
This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.
Course syllabus
3 live sessions • 10 lessons
Week 1
Mar
28
Billion Person Focus Group® Intensive - Day 1: How to See
Day 1 Agenda: How to See
Mar
29
Billion Person Focus Group® Intensive - Day 2: How to Build
Day 2 Agenda: How to Build
Week 2
Apr
5
The Practice Lab: Live Follow Up Session
Free resources
Schedule
Live sessions
6 hrs / week
Session 1: 3 hours (Saturday morning/afternoon) Session 2: 3 hours (Sunday morning/afternoon)
Sat, Mar 28
4:00 PM—7:00 PM (UTC)
Sun, Mar 29
3:00 PM—6:00 PM (UTC)
Sun, Apr 5
4:00 AM—5:00 AM (UTC)
Projects
2 hrs / week
Homework: 2-4 hours (Saturday afternoon/evening, at your pace)
Post Masterclass Self-Paced Content
2-3 hrs / week
40+ hours of self-paced content that can be done on your own timeline.
Why the Billion Person Focus Group® works.
The insights that matter have no words yet.
Your customers already showed you everything. You're just not listening.
Traditional research asks people to name what they want. But people can't name needs that don't have words yet. So you get the same insights as everyone else — and by then, so has your competition.
Most research measures the wrong layer.
The real signal lives in 2am Reddit threads, visual memes, dark data you already own (rage clicks, form abandons, support tickets), and the void language people use when reaching for concepts that don't exist yet.
Same internet. Same data. Different method. Different results.
This methodology doesn't replace validation — it tells you what to ask and where to dig before you waste resources on the wrong hypotheses.
Research should listen to what people already feel — not interrogate them into categories they didn't name.
Discovery first. Validation second. See first — build once.
If your research tells you what you already know, this is the fix.
See what others miss.
Traditional research captures what people can already articulate. But the biggest opportunities exist 12-18 months before anyone has words for them — in the places where people are quietly hacking together solutions to problems no product has named yet.
That's where this methodology listens.
The Underground AI Creativity Revolution
https://insightmate.github.io/ai-creativity-viz/
Traditional market research would have told you: "Creators use AI for productivity."
The BPFG methodology found: Six creator archetypes. 120 distinct use cases. Four survival territories. This is what the underground creator economy actually looks like — not what tech companies build for.
The Emotional AI Dark Web
https://insightmate.github.io/emotional-ai-network-dataviz/emotional-ai-network-dataviz.html
Traditional research would have told you: "70% of users use AI for companionship or therapy"
The BPFG methodology found: 100+ use cases from "3AM Crisis Companion" to "ADHD External Brain" — patterns that existed in authentic conversations months before they showed up in surveys or market reports. Every node is a product opportunity. Every cluster is a market waiting for someone who actually listened.
Bring your market into the room.
Most research ends in a slide deck. Yours can become an interactive system your whole team can interrogate.
Build AI-powered tools that let stakeholders talk directly to your findings:
Virtual focus groups that simulate diverse perspectives
AI Persona explorers that reveal gaps between assumptions and lived reality
Messaging testers that pressure-test copy against real behavioral patterns
No code required. Build directly in Claude artifacts, or go deeper with Claude Skills and API.
Ask your research:
"What's the 2am worry our product actually solves?""How would this segment react to our new pricing?" "What objections will our sales team hear that we haven't prepared for?" "Which of these three taglines lands — and why?"
Turn static insights into living systems your team can query again and again.
Try it: The Virtual Roundtable
A free tool that assembles 15 simulated perspectives on any question — revealing who gets amplified by default and whose voice gets drowned out. Try it now.
Use it to stress-test assumptions, identify blind spots, and see what your research might be missing.
Move beyond tools. Build capability you keep.
Most research ends when the report lands. Insight decays. The consultant leaves. Six months later, you're starting from scratch.
This is different. You're not renting a method — you're building infrastructure you own.
The intensive teaches you how to see. This library gives you everything to keep seeing — on your own, for any market, again and again.
What's inside:
Where to Listen: Which platforms and sources contain honest signal — and which are noise
500+ Ready-to-Use Prompts: Organised by platform and purpose.
Pre-Built Agents & Claude Skills: AI assistants that run your research workflows — working systems you customize and extend
Working with AI: Building personas, filtering hallucinations and bot contamination
Visualization Recipes: Turn findings into maps, personas, and deliverables your stakeholders will use
Platform Navigation: Find communities and spot authentic signal across Reddit, Discord, TikTok, and more
Portable Templates: Package what you build into a reusable system for the next project or client
Practitioners who complete the intensive don't stop. They build listening practices for their clients, industries, and join a growing community. This is where the practice begins.
The Listening Craft.
You already know something is broken.
The data industrial complex promised more insight from more data. Instead the insights got thinner as the tools got faster. Dashboards that flatten. AI that summarises what was already obvious. Research that tells you what you already know.
This is for people who refused that story.
Craft over tools. Listening over extraction. Discovery before validation.
Join 200+ practitioners already building from a different place.
Frequently asked questions
$897
USD