Hey HN - Matt from FocusGroupIt here. Would love to hear feedback from the general HN community, and especially from Kevin Hale @ YC given his background in the survey software market at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey.

A direct link to sign up and participate in a demo focus group is here: https://focusgroupit.com/groups/cf966c0e

hey are there options to make the feedback someone gives private?

Yes. You can set any topic to "private," which prevents the participants from see what each other wrote for that topic. You can also set a group to be completely anonymous, which will assign a random username to each participant and no one (not even the moderator or observers) will be able to tell who the participants are.

I should add... Participants can also mark their individual replies as "private" if they aren't comfortable sharing something broadly with the focus group.

IMO I would add that (depending on dev time) I guess I should have asked if I was to participate could every action be anonymous.

Do you think this could be used in an academic setting like research studies?

makes sense. well ill keep playing with it, hopefully with more people to learn more about it.

if you have 6mins sometime let me know what you think about my project :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062700

Yes. In fact so far that's the biggest group of paying customers...