Acid Test
Book demo

What We Believe

Intelligence proves itself when its predictions come true. A correct forecast is the strongest evidence that you actually understood something. People are unreliable narrators of their own lives and minds: they misremember what they did and guess wrong about what they will do.

This is why we predict human behavior, and don't care what people say in surveys. Brands launch ads and products on those survey answers anyway, and the gap between what people say and what they do is one reason CMO tenures are so short.

Acid Test models audiences that skim, anchor on price, miss the main claim, and are busy with the rest of their lives. The bad surprise shows up in a test instead of after launch, while the work is still easy to change. Other tools conjure sycophants and feed you back your own biases and delusions. We simulate respondents who behave like people, and make forecasts we expect to be graded against reality.

Great marketing is hard to measure, sometimes close to ineffable. We tie the quality of your work to the outcomes it drives, so customers reward the best with their wallets.

We exist to help companies win the buyers their work deserves.

How it works

  1. Upload your work: Ads, concepts, or messages.
  2. Acid Test builds and runs your panel: Synthetic respondents grounded in real behavioral data, distinct from each other, each labeled with its share of your target.
  3. Analysis and recommendations: Segment-specific objections, the language your audience really uses, and hypotheses worth chasing. You see who ignores you and who misreads you. Acid Test then ties your creative quality to short- and long-term revenue forecasts, modeling the sales spike now and the brand uplift that compounds.

Founder

I'm Drayton D'Silva. I've spent 10+ years forecasting human and market behavior, turning qualitative signals into numbers. At Goldman Sachs, I built revenue and asset-pricing forecasts by connecting fundamentals, sentiment, positioning, and narrative to financial outcomes. At DRW, I priced how markets would react to events. My main takeaway from these experiences is that the winning moves model behavior by seeing reality honestly and rigorously, while getting high on your own supply gets you fired.

Most recently I ran marketing finance at Wander.com, a venture-backed travel company spending tens of millions on customer acquisition. Knowing which creative worked, and why, stayed murky no matter how much we spent on data vendors and how many new attribution tools we bought.

I built all my expertise and experiences into Acid Test.