# Simile can model a market, not just its customers

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/simile-can-model-a-market-not-just-its-customers/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Joon Sung Park](https://realalpha.app/people/joon-sung-park/) · Joon Sung Park is cofounder and CEO of Simile.
- Host: [Molly O'Shea](https://realalpha.app/people/molly-oshea/) · Founder, Sourcery · Ex-Upfront Ventures investor; has interviewed Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey.
- Show: Sourcery
- Episode: [The $2B AI Startup Simulating Human Behavior with 85% Accuracy](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/), Oct 26, 2026
- Moment: 15:44 to 18:25 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/simile-can-model-a-market-not-just-its-customers/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/?t=944

## Quote

> “sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars over many years, we can run them in simulation basically **almost instantly**.”
> — [Joon Sung Park](https://realalpha.app/people/joon-sung-park/) at [16:35](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/?t=995) · Sourcery

## Takeaways

1. Concept and conjoint studies can run in simulation almost instantly.
2. Choices depend on the environment, including alternatives and price.
3. Simile models the market context as well as individual behavior.

## About this segment

Simile runs concept and conjoint studies far faster, then models the options surrounding customer choices. That helps teams test how price, availability and alternatives shape demand.

From “The $2B AI Startup Simulating Human Behavior with 85% Accuracy”, Oct 26, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[15:48](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/?t=948) how does this then become the business of Simile? So Simile is a company that is creating foundation model of human behavior. That basically can take as input. a description of a person or a group of people and then simulate what these people might do in different contexts so today simple use cases would actually go into things like surveys experiments many of the insights team have a lot of studies they were meant to run now what similar can do is actually run them but in a much faster pace you know with much less resources so So that's obvious use cases when we do concept testing and in more complex cases we do conjoint analysis, max diff analysis.

[16:35](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/?t=995) The traditional analysis that researchers had to run today that would have taken them sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars over many years, we can run them in simulation basically almost instantly. They are just a quarry away. So that's the use cases today. but at the same time the users then come to us and ask okay it's great that we can now do these studies can we then do something that our studies couldn't do what would people actually do how they actually react to different stimuli so this is where simulation really is about also creating model of the environment not just the people so imagine that we have customers just dumb example here. Imagine you're trying to sell water. It's actually quite interesting.

[17:26](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/?t=1046) If this as a behavior question is actually quite interesting, imagine there's only one source of water, then that particular person can likely charge us a million dollars to just have access to water. But the reason why that cannot happen is because of the optionality, because there's a context around the water source where it is everywhere, right? It's about packaging. It's about, of course, the right stream, but at the end of the day, this is widely available, that there are other optionalities in this space. So we want to actually be, we want to, we want to model that.

[17:59](https://realalpha.app/v/-6Kg5N7JL7I/?t=1079) We want to model that environment. What are the other options? What are the other alternatives? Given that as the context, can we then expose our agents to this decision-making? At what price would you actually buy this water, given all these environmental factors that goes into this? So it really is about modeling people and their behavior, but it's also about modeling the environment and everything that surrounds them.