Moving to production

To move your integration from staging to production, complete the following steps.

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1. Staging Implementation Review

Provide a comprehensive screen-recording demo of your integration in our Staging environment. We review this demo to confirm that your integration implements the required flows and meets our quality standards. We want to confirm your product can drive the Respondent API end-to-end. Every required action should be demonstrated by:

1. Triggering it from your product UI — the same surface your end users would see.
2. Showing the resulting state in your product UI — so we can see your integration handled the response.
3. Showing the same state change in Respondent’s UI — so we can confirm the API call had the intended downstream effect.

For step-by-step instructions on what to record and how to submit, see the Demo video checklist.

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Recording your demo

• Tool — any screen recorder is fine (Loom, QuickTime, OBS, Drive upload). Narration is encouraged but not required.
• Test participants — seed participants in staging via POST /v1/profiles; see Staging Environment. You can sign in as those participants here to apply to your own project and reply to messages.
• Some items don’t need video — confirming auto-pay is on, listing which study types and screener question types your integration supports, and sharing your staging organization, team, and project IDs can all go in the email body. We’ll cross-check against your staging org.
• Token hygiene — keep API tokens and secrets off-screen. Staging tokens are still credentials.

Once these flows are validated, you’ll be cleared for Production credentials.

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2. Execute the API Partner Master Services Agreement (MSA)

• Review and sign the MSA to formalize our partnership and credits
• Return the fully executed document to our Sales team.

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3. Production Organization, Team and API User Setup

Production credentials belong to one researcher account (your API user) on one team in your production organization. Every project you create through the API is created by that user, in that team. We can only issue credentials once the account exists and has the right access, so complete the steps below first. Staging and production are completely separate. Accounts, organizations, teams and credentials in staging do not carry over, so you set these up again in production, even if you want an API user with the same email address.

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3a. Set up your production organization and team

• If your company doesn’t have a production organization yet, sign up as a researcher and create one. If it already has one, use that.
• Consider a dedicated team for API projects. Projects created through the API, and your webhook, belong to the team your credentials are issued for, so a dedicated team keeps them apart from any studies your researchers run by hand. Note that separate teams don’t share credits, but you can transfer them between teams as needed.

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3b. Create your API user and add it to the team

1. An owner or admin of your production organization invites the API user’s email address from the invite page in your organization settings. In the invitation, set the role to Admin and add the API team.
2. Open the invitation email sent to that address and follow its link to create the account (or to sign in, if that address already has a Respondent researcher account). Use the exact address that was invited; a different address won’t accept the invitation. Using the invite link to sign up avoids the usual researcher onboarding that asks you to create a new organization.
3. Check your organization’s member list. The API user should appear as an Admin of the organization and as a member of the API team.

If your organization uses SSO, there’s no invite form. Create the API user by signing in through your SSO provider with its address. An owner or admin then sets its role to Admin in the member list and adds it to the API team from the unassigned users list. If you get stuck, contact partnersupport@respondent.io.

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3c. Request your production credentials

Email partnersupport@respondent.io with:

• your production organization and API team (their IDs if you have them, otherwise their names)
• the API user’s email address

We’ll issue the production credentials for that user and team, and fund the account with incentive and recruiting fee credits appropriate for the volume of recruiting you intend to conduct.

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4. Migrate your integration to production

Staging and production are separate environments, and nothing carries over between them. Before you go live, read Staging vs production for what to change, such as lookup IDs and webhooks.

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5. Test your live integration in production

Once your integration is running against production, test it end to end before real participants see your projects.

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Published projects start paused for final production testing

A project you publish through the API in production starts with its projectRecruitingStatus set to PAUSED, so it doesn’t recruit from our participant pool while you test. Staging doesn’t do this.

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Invite your internal testers

Production has no test participants (POST /v1/profiles only works in staging), so test with people from your own company:

1. Open the project in the Respondent platform and select Invite.
2. Copy the invite link and send it to your testers.

Testers need a Respondent participant account. The invite link lets them apply while the project is paused, and skips the targeting check that decides who can apply. A tester who finds the project on their participant dashboard instead goes through that check. The invite link doesn’t change qualification. A tester’s response is only qualified if they pass the screener and match the project’s age, gender, ethnicity, education and location settings, and only qualified participants can be invited. To invite a tester who doesn’t match, qualify them first with Qualify participant. Audience quotas still apply.

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Start recruiting

When a project is ready to recruit, unpause it with Resume recruitment on the project page, or send { "paused": false } to Pause a project.

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Finished testing? Disable auto-pause

Once you’ve finished testing, ask partnersupport@respondent.io to stop pausing newly published projects for your organization. Questions? Reach out to partnersupport@respondent.io