Alex Charlton

I've spent over 25 years in customer insight, brand strategy, and innovation – both client-side and agency-side. For most of that time, I was a managing partner at the two full-service insight agencies I co-founded: Essential and Craft.

I'm a fan of all research methods, but qualitative research is where my heart lives. I've personally moderated more than 1,000 group discussions, depth interviews, and consumer ethnographies, across every category imaginable.

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Why I built True Stories

True Stories began as a tool for my own work as a senior qualitative research consultant.

Using off-the-shelf LLMs for qual data analysis has many limitations for the professional researcher, and all the main AI analysis tools aimed at qual research are little more than glorified quote-finding engines.

So, as an experiment, I built a platform that combines the best commercially-available AI models with 200+ marketing, consumer psychology, and behavioural science principles, wrapped in a workflow purpose-built for qualitative research projects.

The result is a thoroughbred analysis platform which my customers tell me is hands-down the best qualitative analysis tool on the market.

I think they're right. But what I'm most proud of isn't the speed or the depth – it's that True Stories is built around the philosophy of combining human and artificial intelligence to create something greater than the sum of the parts.

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What I think it is

True Stories is not a summarisation engine. It's not a quote-finder dressed up in AI language. And it's emphatically not the AI slop you've come to expect.

It's a tool for experienced insight professionals who take the craft seriously – built to amplify their thinking, challenge their assumptions, and accelerate their work. The expertise stays with you. True Stories just makes sure no insight goes unfound.