The GTM Power of Letting Anyone Run a Study With Ballpark

Murat Mutlu, founder of Ballpark, is tackling one of the most persistent bottlenecks in modern product and marketing teams: how to make high-quality research fast enough, affordable enough and accessible enough to keep up with the pace of execution.

Ballpark offers a compelling lens into how evidence-based decision-making is being rebuilt for the AI era, from usage-based pricing that removes seat friction, to conversational AI that enables non-researchers to launch unbiased studies in minutes, to a forward-deployed customer model that embeds directly inside Slack and Teams. There are strong lessons here for buyers and operators around adoption, pricing alignment and what it takes to turn research from a centralized function into a daily habit.

As always, let us know what you think and please reach out if you have feedback.

- Dave

If you’re buying software in 2026, chances are you’ve run into the same friction over and over again: research takes too long, costs too much, and rarely keeps pace with how fast your teams move.

That’s exactly what Murat Mutlu [LinkedIn] is tackling with Ballpark: a platform built to democratize research so decisions are based on evidence, not gut feel.

In this conversation, Murat walks through:

• What buyers should expect when rolling out Ballpark: fast onboarding, transparent pricing, and visible ROI from avoiding bad decisions.
• Why usage-based, not seat-based, pricing is key to adoption (some workspaces grow to 30+ members instantly).
• The cultural ethos behind Ballpark’s customer development process: feature flags, constant iteration, and the mantra “no shame in trying.”
• Why his team embeds directly into Slack/Teams with enterprise customers, co-developing features “forward-deployed” style.
• How 82% of Ballpark’s users are not researchers but product managers, designers, and marketers running their own studies in minutes.

If you’re evaluating research tools, or just looking to sharpen your decision-making muscle, Murat’s perspective will give you new insights into what the next generation of evidence-based software looks like.

Introductions

Dave Ambrose (00:18.396)

Murat, thank you so much for being here. I’ve been really looking forward to this interview that we booked for some time. I think you’re going to have a lot of really interesting insights for the buyer community. Maybe before we get into the details of the questions, just share with the audience the background of what Ballpark is and more specifically the problem that you’re solving.

Murat Mutlu (00:45.368)

So background to Ballpark: we are a research platform and the problem we’re trying to solve is democratization of research. Our belief is that decision-making should be based on evidence, not opinion. The reality is that traditionally research has been too slow, too expensive, too complicated, and too locked away inside of research teams. What we’ve built with Ballpark is a platform that allows anyone in a company to launch a study in under 15 minutes, and often receive 50 responses in as little as 20 to 30 minutes.

Speed & Accessibility

Dave Ambrose (02:01.210)

Wow, that’s quick.

Murat Mutlu (02:03.112)

Yeah and to give you some perspective, 82% of our users are not researchers. They’re product managers, designers, marketers, founders. People who otherwise would never have been able to access research at this speed and cost.

Dave Ambrose (02:20.115)

So you’ve really flipped the dynamic here. Instead of needing a dedicated team, you’ve enabled research to happen everywhere.