Most consumer companies are still making seven-figure decisions on focus groups, gut, and demographic personas that read like fan fiction. We've watched too many launches fail not because the work wasn't smart, but because the work was structured to validate the decision after it was made instead of testing it before. We built Simulatte to fix that.
I'm Iqbal Ahmed. I started Simulatte after spending years watching strategy work — agency, consulting, in-house — produce decks full of confident insight that turned out to be confidently wrong. The pattern was always the same: the research didn't predict outcomes, it gave the team something to point at when the launch underperformed.
The tools we had were not designed to be calibrated. They were designed to feel rigorous.
Simulatte is the opposite. Every decision we run through it produces a forecast with a confidence interval, a scope statement that's honest about where the calibration holds and where it doesn't, and a hit-rate counter that compounds with every engagement. We'd rather be honest about what we don't know than impressive about what we do.
Iqbal writes about prediction, AI, and behavioural science at Déjà Vu →
Simulatte builds calibrated synthetic populations — decision-ready agents structured with 133 correlated attributes, an immutable Core Memory, a volatile Working Memory, and a cognitive loop that perceives, reflects, and decides. Brands route consequential decisions through these populations before committing real budget: ad concepts, pricing, positioning, packaging, launches.
The output is a Decision Artifact — a recommendation, a forecast, a calibration card. The full mechanism lives at simulatte.io/method.
In the last three months we've shipped:
It's a small body of work for now. We'll publish the full calibration index publicly as it grows. The empty seats are the point — receipts you can audit beat numbers you can't.
Calibration is live in the US (88.7% distribution accuracy on Pew benchmarks) and India (85.3% — first at population scale). We're expanding into EU and LATAM as engagements ship. Our buyers are challenger CPG brands in the US and India, and the independent strategists and consultancies who serve them.