Build your profile
Your profile is what we search when a client brings us a research question. Every field does a specific job.
Your current role and company tell us what decisions you make and what tools, vendors, and budgets you touch. Your industry and company size narrow the audiences you fit. Past roles matter as much as your current one, since a good portion of research targets people who ran something five years ago rather than whoever holds the title today.
A thin profile still works. It just gets found less often, because most research briefs are written around a fairly specific combination of role, sector, and seniority.
Confirming your background
Before you take part in your first project, we confirm you are who your profile says you are.
Clients come to NewtonX because they want answers from real professionals with the experience they asked for, and they pay accordingly. Verification is what protects that. It keeps the community made up of people who can actually speak to the topic, and it's the reason an invitation you receive reflects your genuine experience rather than a loose keyword match.
Related: Getting Started as a NewtonX Expert
Getting matched
Most research firms maintain a standing panel and send every study to all of it. We work the other way around. When a client brings us a question, we recruit against that specific question and go looking for the professionals whose experience fits it.
That's why you won't get a steady drip of invitations for things you have no opinion about.
Why some people hear from us more than others
Invitation volume follows what companies happen to be researching. Certain industries and functions draw sustained client interest, and professionals in those areas can expect to hear from us regularly. Others sit in quieter corners of the market where a well-matched project comes along less often.
Neither says anything about the quality of your profile. A cybersecurity buyer at a large enterprise and a plant manager at a mid-sized manufacturer are both valuable; one of them is being researched more heavily this quarter.
What you can control is whether we find you when demand does appear in your area. Keep your role, company, and responsibilities current. Profiles that have gone stale get matched to projects the person left behind years ago, which wastes everyone's time.
What an invitation looks like
Invitations arrive by email and tell you what you need to decide with: the topic, the audience the client is looking for, roughly how long the project takes, and the reward.
The client's name is usually withheld, and that's deliberate. Companies commission this research because they're working through something they haven't announced, so we describe the study without identifying who's behind it. An invitation might explain that a large technology company wants to hear from IT decision makers about how they buy cloud computing capacity. You learn what the conversation is about without learning who's asking.
Making sure a message is really from us
Our emails come from newtonx.com addresses. We also run some studies through established survey platforms, so an invitation may arrive from a partner domain such as invite@decipherinc.com. Those are legitimate.
If a message looks off, forward it to professionals@newtonx.com before clicking anything and we'll confirm.
The screener
Nearly every project opens with a short set of screening questions, usually a couple of minutes' work. The screener confirms that your experience lines up with what this particular client needs.
Answer it straight. Screeners aren't a test to pass, and clients build their research on the assumption that everyone in the final sample genuinely fits the criteria. Stretching an answer to qualify undermines the study and tends to surface later anyway.
Being screened out is common and it isn't a judgment on your background. Client criteria are often narrow to the point of being specific about which vendor you use or how many people report to you. Not fitting one brief has no bearing on the next.
Ways to take part
Projects come in several formats. Some take fifteen minutes on your phone; others are ongoing engagements.
Surveys: 10-25 minute time obligation, typically in the form of an online questionnaire you complete on your own time.
Qualitative Interviews: 30-60 minute time obligation, typically in the form of a scheduled call with the client.
AI-moderated Interviews: 20-40 minute time obligation, typically in the form of a conversational session you complete on your own time.
AI Training & Evaluation: Time obligation varies by project, typically in the form of structured tasks in a review interface.
Advisory Engagements: Time obligation varies by project, typically in a format that is arranged on a case-by-case basis.
Surveys
The most common format. You answer a structured questionnaire covering things like tooling decisions, budget ownership, vendor preferences, or how a process typically runs in yoru experience. Most are built for a phone screen.
Read the questions closely rather than pattern-matching. Survey questions in B2B research often turn on a distinction that looks minor and isn't, like whether you influence a purchase or approve it.
Related: Tips for Taking Research Surveys
Qualitative interviews
A scheduled conversation between you and the client, typically 30 to 60 minutes. You'll know the topic in advance. The client asks questions and follows your answers wherever they get interesting, so these run more like a discussion than an interrogation.
You don't need to prepare a presentation. Skimming the topic beforehand and thinking about two or three specific experiences you can speak to concretely is enough. Saying "I don't know" when you don't is genuinely useful to the client.
Related: How to Prepare for a NewtonX Engagement
AI-moderated interviews
A conversational session led by an AI moderator instead of a live client. It asks follow-up questions the way a human interviewer would, and it runs whenever you're free rather than requiring a calendar slot. The client reads the results afterward.
These suit people who have the expertise but not a free hour that lines up with someone else's schedule.
Related: What to Expect in an AI-Moderated Interview
AI training and evaluation
A newer stream of work for professionals with deep subject-matter knowledge. You review and rate AI outputs in your field, help build high-quality training data, and flag the edge cases where a model gets things subtly wrong. It rewards people who can tell the difference between an answer that sounds right and one that is right.
Advisory engagements
Occasionally a client wants to work with someone over a longer period rather than for a single conversation. These are arranged individually, and the scope and terms are agreed with you upfront.
What you can and can't share
You take part as an individual drawing on your career. Not as a representative of your employer, and not as a channel for anything your employer considers confidential.
Three lines matter:
Material non-public information is off limits. Unannounced earnings, an acquisition in progress, a product launch that hasn't been made public. Our terms prohibit sharing it, full stop.
Your existing obligations still bind you. If an NDA, employment agreement, or client contract covers something, this doesn't override it. You're the only one who knows what you've signed, so you're the one who has to hold that line.
Speak from experience, not from internal documents. The value is in your judgment and what you've seen firsthand. A client wants to understand how procurement decisions really get made in your sector; they're not asking you to hand over your company's vendor contract.
If a question crosses a line, say so and move on. That happens, and it's a normal part of these conversations.
Related: Compliance & Legal for NewtonX Experts
What the client sees
Projects are anonymous unless we tell you otherwise at the outset and you agree to it.
For most research, the client sees your responses alongside a general description of your professional background — the kind of role you hold and the sort of company you work at. They don't see your name, your contact details, or anything else that identifies you.
Everything you share is covered by confidentiality on the client's side as well. They're contractually restricted in how they can use it, and they can't pass it on.
We verify your identity so clients can trust the data. That's a separate thing from showing it to them, and we don't.
Getting rewarded
Once you complete a project, your reward is sent to the email address on your account through our payment partner. You redeem it for a gift card of your choosing.
In most cases the reward is available right after you finish. Occasionally it takes a little longer, usually when a project needs its responses reviewed before rewards are released.
If something hasn't arrived, email payments@newtonx.com with your full name, the email address on your account, and the survey link. Including the original link matters, since it carries a code that lets us trace what happened.
After your first project
Once you're in the community, you're in the pool for everything you're a fit for. What follows varies. You might hear from us twice in a month and then not for a while, depending on what clients are researching.
Declining an invitation costs you nothing. There's no scoring system that penalizes you for passing, and no obligation to explain. Take the projects that interest you.
The one thing worth doing is updating your profile when your job changes. New role, new company, new scope of responsibility — all of it changes what you're a good match for, and a profile that reflects your current work gets found for current research.
Common questions
Do I need to tell my employer? You participate personally, on your own time, drawing on your professional experience. Whether that requires disclosure depends on your employment agreement and your company's policies, which is something only you can assess. Plenty of professionals in the community are in full-time roles.
Can I decline a project after accepting it? Yes. Let us know as early as you can so we can find someone else before the client's deadline.
What if I'm partway through and realize I'm not the right person? Say so. Ending a conversation that isn't producing anything useful is better than filling the time, and it doesn't affect future invitations. This happens occasionally even with careful screening.
What if I don't want to be contacted anymore? Email professionals@newtonx.com and we'll update your preferences or remove you entirely, whichever you prefer.