Presentation Poll Builder for Science and Research Teams

Academic presenters at conferences and lab meetings face a specific problem: general-purpose audience response tools like Poll Everywhere are built for corporate and classroom use, not for the workflows of science and research teams. During a conference talk or a weekly lab meeting, a researcher wants to gauge which interpretation of a result the room favors, capture structured feedback on a hypothesis, or run a quick methods sanity check with the audience. Existing tools treat these as generic multiple-choice questions and export flat spreadsheets that do not map back to the underlying research artifacts.

Enter Poll Deck (working name), an interactive polling and audience Q-and-A layer built specifically for academic conference presentations and lab meetings. Poll Deck slots into the presentation itself and lets the presenter run live polls, threaded Q-and-A, and structured audience data collection, then export results in the tabular and spreadsheet formats researchers actually work with.

The solution centers on three things generic tools underserve: research-native question types (Likert confidence scales, ranked hypotheses, before-and-after opinion shifts), clean tabular data export that researchers can drop into their analysis pipeline, and a Q-and-A layer designed for the give-and-take of academic discussion rather than corporate town halls.

The MVP is deliberately narrow: a web-based poll builder plus an audience-join screen (QR or short link), three or four research-oriented poll types, live results display embeddable in slides, and CSV or spreadsheet export. No LMS integrations, no enterprise SSO at launch.

Revenue is a per-presenter SaaS subscription with a free tier capped by audience size, converting heavy users (frequent conference speakers and PIs running regular lab meetings) to paid. Departmental and lab-group plans follow.

Go-to-market starts bottom-up through individual researchers, seeded in communities that already discuss crowd-sourced tabular data collection and audience polling mechanics. Growth loops come from the audience-join moment: every attendee who scans a poll link sees the product and can become a presenter, and exported datasets carrying a footer or shared link spread the tool across collaborators and departments.