Methodology

This page is for the reader who wants to know what’s actually under the hood before paying for anything. Skim it, stress-test it, send it to a friend who studies psychology — that’s the bar we’re trying to meet.

What the survey actually is

Thirty questions, ten to twelve minutes. The questions are not invented. They are adapted, with attribution, from five peer-reviewed instruments developed and validated over the past sixty-five years. Each instrument measures something specific and useful for the question we’re trying to answer: what kind of small business would this person actually find meaningful and sustainable?

We chose adaptation over invention because there is no shortage of bespoke “find your purpose” quizzes on the internet, and almost none of them have been tested for whether they measure what they claim to. The instruments we draw from have been translated into dozens of languages, replicated across thousands of studies, and stress-tested by independent researchers — including researchers who think parts of them are wrong. We tell you which parts later in this page.

The five instruments, in plain language

1. Self-Determination Theory — what energises you versus what drains you

We use four items adapted from the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS) to gauge how much your current life supports your needs for autonomy (acting from your own choices), competence (feeling capable), and relatedness (warm connection with others). SDT is the most empirically supported theory of intrinsic motivation in academic psychology — over four decades of work by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and thousands of independent replications.

Why this matters for a business recommendation. A business that maximises income but starves your autonomy will fail you within a year. A business built on relatedness when you scored high on autonomy frustration will feel like another job. The SDT scores act as a constraint filter on the recommendation, not a personality label.

Honest caveat. A 2022 paper by Sennott and colleagues argued that the “frustration” subscale of the BPNSFS may partly reflect item-wording effects rather than a distinct psychological construct.¹ We use the satisfaction items as our primary signal and treat frustration as a secondary diagnostic, not a scoring axis.

Sources: Ryan & Deci (2000); Chen et al. (2015).

2. Schwartz Theory of Basic Values — what you actually care about

Four items drawn from the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-21), the same instrument the European Social Survey has used in thirty-eight countries every two years since 2002. Shalom Schwartz’s theory identifies ten universal value orientations — self-direction, security, benevolence, universalism, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, power, conformity, tradition — that have held up across more than eighty national samples.

Why this matters. Values predict whether you’ll keep building something three months in, after the novelty fades. A high-universalism person selling fast-fashion knockoffs will quit. A high-security person betting their savings on a moonshot will burn out. The recommendation is screened against your top values before anything else.

Honest caveat. We sample four of the ten values at this tier (self-direction, security, benevolence, universalism) because thirty questions is the cap we’ve set for a ten-minute survey. We tell you in the report which six values we did not measure, so you can weigh the recommendation accordingly.

Source: Schwartz (1992, 2003).

3. Ikigai-9 and the Meaning in Life Questionnaire — whether meaning is present, missing, or being searched for

Two items from the Ikigai-9 scale (Imai et al., 2012, validated in English by Fido et al., 2020) and two items from the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ) by Michael Steger and colleagues. These two instruments answer two distinct questions: do you currently feel your life has meaning? and are you actively searching for more of it?

Why this matters. “I have meaning and I’m at peace with it” and “I have no meaning and I’m not even looking” sit at opposite ends of motivational readiness. Most people who buy a product like ours are in the third quadrant — meaning is low and the search is active. That’s the most fertile state for change, and we say so. We do not pretend everyone arrives in the same state.

Honest caveat. Both instruments rely on self-report at a single moment. A bad week can score the same as a structural problem. We name this in the report and frame the result as a snapshot, not a verdict.

Sources: Steger, Frazier, Oishi & Kaler (2006); Imai et al. (2012); Fido, Kotera & Asano (2020).

4. Holland’s RIASEC — the kind of work you actually want to do

Five items adapted from the public-domain RIASEC marker scales by Armstrong, Allison and Rounds, covering the six interest dimensions in John Holland’s vocational model: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional. RIASEC is the framework the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET system uses to categorise every occupation in the country.

Why this matters. Values tell us why you’d build something; RIASEC tells us what kind of building won’t grate against your wiring. A high-Artistic, low-Enterprising person can absolutely run a business — but they should not run one that requires daily cold outreach. The recommendation respects your top three Holland codes; the alternatives we include flex the third one.

Honest caveat. A 2007 study by Deng, Armstrong and Rounds found Holland’s six-type model does not capture the full range of modern occupations as cleanly as it did in 1959. We use it as a directional filter, not a job-prescription engine.

Sources: Holland (1959, 1997); Armstrong, Allison & Rounds (2008); Nye, Su, Rounds & Drasgow (2012) for the meta-analytic evidence linking interests to performance.

5. Three open-text questions and a constraints block — the parts no scale captures

Validated psychometrics will not tell us that you spent eight years caring for a parent with dementia, or that you can give a project five hours a week and not fifteen. So we ask directly: what’s pulling you toward this; what do you know more deeply than most people around you; what does a good week look like; how many hours, how many dollars, how visible. These answers are quoted back to you in your report, verbatim, where they apply.

How thirty answers become one recommendation

The scored profile is matched against a curated library of business concepts we’ve researched, characterised, and continue to maintain. Each concept in the library has been mapped onto the same dimensions your answers produce — what the work actually involves day to day, what values it honours or strains against, what minimum time and money it demands, and how visible the founder needs to be.

Your stated constraints are treated as constraints, not preferences. If you said five hours a week, nothing requiring fifteen will be recommended, no matter how well it fits otherwise. If you said you want to stay anonymous, nothing requiring a named founder will be recommended. What remains after the constraints is ranked against your values, interests, lived experience, and the verbatim answers you gave us. The closest fit becomes your primary recommendation. Two near-misses become the alternatives section, with notes on why they didn’t win this round and the conditions under which they might.

We do not publish the matching logic itself, the size of the library, or its composition. That work is what you’re paying for — both the research that built it and the ongoing curation that keeps it useful. Everything above this section is the what and the why of the survey; the matching is the how, and it’s the part that stays ours.

What this methodology does not claim

We do not claim to predict your income. We do not claim a personality test can reveal a single true vocation. We do not claim our four-item adaptations of these scales have the same precision as the full forty-item versions used in academic research — they do not, and we say so in the report. We do not claim that every recommendation will land. We claim something narrower: that grounding the questions in instruments designed and tested by serious researchers gives you a better starting point than a quiz built on someone’s intuition, and that being honest about the limits of that starting point is part of the offer.

We also don’t hide that some of the tools recommended in your report are linked through affiliate programs. Most of those tools are tools we use ourselves — many of them to build this exact product. The recommendations are not influenced by which vendors pay commissions. Where there is no affiliate relationship and a vendor is genuinely the right fit, that vendor still appears in your report. The full list of how affiliate disclosure works lives in our Terms of Service.

Sources

1. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
2. Chen, B., Vansteenkiste, M., Beyers, W., Boone, L., Deci, E. L., Van der Kaap-Deeder, J., et al. (2015). Basic psychological need satisfaction, need frustration, and need strength across four cultures. Motivation and Emotion, 39(2), 216–236. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9450-1
3. Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65.
4. Schwartz, S. H. (2003). A proposal for measuring value orientations across nations. Chapter 7 in the European Social Survey Core Questionnaire Development. (Source of the PVQ-21 used in every ESS round.)
5. Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(1), 80–93. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.53.1.80
6. Imai, T., Osada, H., & Nishimura, Y. (2012). The reliability and validity of a new scale for measuring the concept of Ikigai (Ikigai-9). Japanese Journal of Public Health [Nihon Koshu Eisei Zasshi], 59(7), 433–439. PMID: 22991767.
7. Fido, D., Kotera, Y., & Asano, K. (2020). English translation and validation of the Ikigai-9 in a UK sample. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 18(5), 1352–1359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-019-00150-w
8. Holland, J. L. (1959). A theory of vocational choice. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 6(1), 35–45.
9. Holland, J. L. (1997). Making Vocational Choices: A Theory of Vocational Personalities and Work Environments (3rd ed.). Psychological Assessment Resources.
10. Armstrong, P. I., Allison, W., & Rounds, J. (2008). Development and initial validation of brief public-domain RIASEC marker scales. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 73(2), 287–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2008.06.003
11. Nye, C. D., Su, R., Rounds, J., & Drasgow, F. (2012). Vocational interests and performance: A quantitative summary of over 60 years of research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 384–403.

This methodology page was last reviewed on 28 April 2026. We update it when we change the survey, the cluster library, or the scoring logic, and we keep a public changelog.