What is Solsten and How Does it Work?

Solsten is the leading audience intelligence platform that helps companies deeply understand any audience and know what will resonate with them. Using AI-powered assessments and patented psychological clustering technology, Solsten measures and analyzes human motivations, personalities, values, and behaviors to provide actionable insights that drive better business decisions.

Since 2018, Solsten has enhanced the experiences of over 500 million users, building the world’s largest psychological database in the process. Companies across various industries, including gaming, entertainment, fitness, online retail, as well as the public sector, use Solsten’s insights to build and test new products, optimize existing experiences, improve marketing performance, and discover untapped market opportunities.

The Solsten Difference: Understanding the “Why” Behind Behavior

While traditional audience research focuses on demographics (who people are) and behavioral analytics (what people do), Solsten goes deeper to uncover the psychological drivers that explain why people behave the way they do. This psychological understanding is the missing piece that enables companies to create truly resonant experiences.

Solsten measures audience psychology across seven key dimensions:

1. Personality Traits: The most stable characteristics that define how people interact with the world
2. Intrinsic Motivators: The fundamental internal drivers behind people’s engagement
3. Values: What’s important to people and what principles guide their decisions
4. Cultural Attributes: How a person relates to different social groups and systems
5. Usage-Based Emotions: The emotional states that typically lead to product engagement
6. Affinities: Current interests and preferences that influence choices
7. Behaviors: Specific actions within particular products or environments

This comprehensive understanding allows companies to go beyond simply knowing what happened to understanding why it happened — and more importantly, predicting what will happen next.

Learn more about our seven-dimensional psychology framework here.

Solsten’s Core Products

Navigator

Navigator is Solsten’s on-demand consumer insights platform that provides instant access to psychological data about virtually any audience. It’s like having a compass for understanding people at scale.

How Navigator Works:

• Access the world’s largest psychological database representing over 3.4 billion people
• Search for and analyze audiences based on games, brands, interests, demographics, and more
• Discover detailed psychological profiles of your target audiences
• Identify market opportunities and understand competitive landscapes
• Generate actionable insights for marketing, product development, and user experience design

Navigator helps companies answer critical questions like:

• Who is our ideal target audience and what motivates them?
• What psychological needs are not being met by current products in the market?
• How do we create marketing that resonates with our target personas?
• Which new markets or audience segments offer the greatest potential?

Get started with Navigator for free today!

Traits

Traits is Solsten’s psychological assessment tool that helps companies deeply understand their existing audiences. It distributes adaptive psychological assessments to gather first-party data about a company’s specific users.

How Traits Works:

• A scientifically rigorous, adaptive assessment is distributed to users in-game or in-app
• The assessment dynamically adjusts questions based on previous responses, maintaining high accuracy while minimizing user fatigue
• The collected data reveals users’ psychological traits, motivations, values, and more
• Companies receive detailed insights about their audience through an intuitive dashboard
• Solsten’s experts provide guidance on how to apply these insights to improve the user experience

Traits helps companies answer questions like:

• What psychological traits define our most valuable users?
• Why are players churning from our game?
• How can we design features that better align with our users’ motivations?
• What drives purchasing behavior among different user segments?

Unlike traditional surveys that present everyone with the same fixed set of questions, Solsten’s adaptive assessment technology only asks questions that are most relevant to each individual user. This results in shorter assessments with higher completion rates and more accurate data.

Request a demo to see how Traits can transform the way you understand your audience.

How Solsten Collects Data

Solsten’s data comes primarily from adaptive psychological assessments conducted through their proprietary technology. This data is collected in several key ways:

1. In-product assessments: Solsten distributes their psychological assessment to users within games and apps via interstitials or prompts. This happens in contexts where users are naturally engaged and motivated to participate.
2. Adaptive questioning: Unlike traditional fixed surveys, Solsten’s assessments adapt in real-time to each respondent, selecting the most informative questions based on previous answers. This approach allows Solsten to gather high-quality psychological data with fewer questions.
3. Scientific validation: The data undergoes rigorous validation and quality control, with algorithms that automatically check for randomized answer patterns and other survey manipulation techniques to ensure data integrity.
4. Privacy-focused approach: Importantly, all information is de-identified, allowing Solsten to process millions of psychological profiles without compromising user privacy.

The resulting database encompasses psychological profiles for audiences across over 40,000 brands, 200,000 games, 100,000 movies and IPs, and 40,000 interests, making it the largest psychological database in the world.

You can explore this entire database in Navigator. Try it for free today!

How is Solsten Different From Traditional Market Research?

Solsten provides deep psychological insights about audiences across multiple dimensions, going far beyond traditional market research and demographic data. These insights include:

1. Personality Traits: The most stable characteristics that represent general tendencies in how people interact with their environment and others. These foundational traits remain largely consistent throughout people’s lives.
2. Intrinsic Motivators: The fundamental internal drivers that shape how people naturally want to engage with the world, revealing the “why” behind behaviors rather than just the observable outcomes.
3. Values: What’s important to people and what principles guide their decisions. These remain fairly stable but can change in response to major life events.
4. Cultural Attributes: How a person relates to and participates in various groups and social systems, which can vary based on the context of the product or experience they’re engaging with.
5. Usage-Based Emotions: The emotional states a person typically experiences before using a specific product or service, providing insight into what compels consumers to engage.
6. Affinities: Interests and preferences that can change over relatively short time periods, reflecting current attractions and inclinations.
7. Behaviors: Specific actions and reactions within particular products or environments, which become more predictable when understood in the context of more stable characteristics.

Solsten’s insights enable companies to:

• Understand the top motivators of their target audience
• Identify new market segments for growth
• Uncover purchase drivers for different audience segments
• Translate psychological traits into marketing actions and creative design
• Determine which features or content will resonate most with different personas
• Optimize customer experiences to increase engagement, retention, and monetization
• Develop more effective targeting strategies in a privacy-first world
• Validate product concepts before development

These insights are delivered through interactive dashboards with actionable recommendations, helping companies make data-driven decisions that drive measurable business results across marketing, product development, and customer experience.

Explore our detailed methodology.