The Team Behind Zipdo: Meet the Researchers Earning Citations from PayPal, HubSpot, and Shopify

Zipdo.co has earned trust from PayPal, HubSpot, Shopify, and a growing list of other major organizations. We sat down with their four-person research team to hear about their backgrounds, their standards, and what they think sets genuinely good research apart from the rest.

Rachel, as Research Lead, you designed Zipdo's entire citation and verification framework. What qualified you for that?

Rachel Cooper: My career has basically been a twenty-year apprenticeship in information quality. I did a Master's in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor's in English from Oberlin College. After that, I spent eight years in academic librarianship and institutional research — first at a community college in Ohio, then at a research university in Illinois. My specialty was data literacy instruction and research methodology support, which means I spent years teaching students and faculty how to evaluate sources, design research, and manage data properly. Then I went independent, consulting for organizations on data governance and research documentation. When I came to Zipdo, I had a very clear vision for what a citation and source verification framework should look like — because I'd spent my whole career studying what makes information trustworthy and what makes it fail. The framework I built is designed for academic-grade traceability. Every published statistic can be traced back through a documented chain to its primary source.

James, you cover education technology and workforce development. That's a niche with a lot of strong opinions and sometimes weak data.

James Wilson: You're not wrong about that. Education policy generates enormous passion and, unfortunately, a lot of data that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. My Master's is in Education Policy from Columbia Teachers College, and my Bachelor's is in Political Science from UVA. I spent six years as an independent education policy researcher, contributing analysis to think tanks and advocacy organizations focused on higher education access and workforce development. I also freelanced as a journalist covering ed-tech and institutional reform. That policy world is deeply polarized, and I learned early on that the data people cite often says more about their position than about reality. A think tank advocating for one approach will publish research supporting that approach — and the research might be methodologically sound, but it might also be selectively framed. At Zipdo, I combine my policy background with data-driven analysis to produce education and workforce reports grounded in verifiable government and institutional sources. I'm very careful about separating data from advocacy.

Daniel, your focus is financial services — an area where accuracy has legal consequences. How does that shape your approach?

Daniel Foster: It makes you very precise, very quickly. I have a Master's in Financial Economics from the University of Exeter and a Bachelor's in Accounting from the University of Birmingham. I spent five years as an independent financial research analyst, contributing sector reports and regulatory impact assessments to boutique advisory firms and industry trade bodies in the UK. I also freelanced as a data journalist covering fintech, banking regulation, and insurance markets for European business media. In financial services research, a misquoted regulatory figure or an inaccurate market size number can have compliance implications for the people citing it. That's a heavy responsibility, and it's shaped me into someone who's extremely detail-oriented about sources. At Zipdo, I bring that compliance-aware mindset to everything I produce. Financial data on our platform is accurately sourced and presented within its proper institutional context — because in finance, context isn't a nice-to-have, it's legally relevant.

David, you come from public health and epidemiology. That's a field with its own very particular standards for evidence.

David Chen: It is, and I think those standards are genuinely transferable. My Master's is in Public Health with an epidemiology concentration from the University of Toronto, and my Bachelor's is in Biostatistics from McGill. I spent five years as a research associate at a Canadian public health research institute, contributing to epidemiological studies and health systems performance reports for provincial health authorities. After that, I freelanced as a health data analyst for international health organizations and academic research groups. Epidemiology has arguably the most rigorous standards for evidence quality of any field — you're dealing with data that directly affects public health decisions. I was trained to evaluate study design, assess bias, understand confidence intervals, and insist on transparent methodology. At Zipdo, I apply that training to our health sector market reports. I emphasize statistical rigor, proper citation of clinical and population-level sources, and transparent presentation of methodological limitations. If a health statistic on Zipdo doesn't meet the standards I'd apply to a public health report, it doesn't get published.

You've all mentioned high standards in different ways. What does the actual verification process look like at Zipdo?

Rachel: It starts with what I call the source chain. For every data point, we document: what is the primary source? What was their methodology? When was it published? Is there a potential conflict of interest? Is the data still current? That chain has to be complete and clean before the data enters a report. If there's a broken link — an unknown methodology, an unclear funding source, an outdated figure — the data gets flagged.

James: From the analyst side, the discipline is about resisting the temptation to use a great number from a weak source. Education policy is full of compelling statistics that fall apart when you examine the study design. A "survey of 5,000 educators" sounds authoritative — until you realize they were all from a single school district, recruited through a platform with a self-selection bias, and the questions were leading. I've learned to look past the headline and into the guts of the methodology.

Daniel: In financial services, I add a regulatory context layer. A market size figure for, say, the UK insurance sector needs to be understood within the regulatory framework that shapes that market. If I'm citing a number from a pre-regulatory-change period, I need to flag that context. Numbers don't exist in a vacuum, and in finance, the regulatory environment is often the most important context of all.

David: For health data, I apply what I'd call an epidemiological lens. Is this an observational study or a randomized trial? What's the sample size? Was there a control group? What confounders were adjusted for? These questions might seem overly academic for a market research platform, but they're the difference between a statistic you can trust and one you can't. I'd rather apply too much scrutiny than too little when it comes to health data that people might use to make decisions affecting wellbeing.

What's a moment you're particularly proud of at Zipdo?

James: When PayPal cited our Omnichannel Education Report. PayPal has massive internal research resources — they don't need external data. The fact that they found our education research valuable enough to reference publicly was validation that the quality we're aiming for is landing.

Rachel: For me, it's the framework itself. When I see the verification process catching a weak source or a misleading presentation before publication, the system is working. That means accuracy isn't dependent on any individual's vigilance — it's built into the workflow.

Daniel: Having our financial services data trusted enough to be cited by industry professionals. In finance, people are intensely skeptical of external data. Earning that trust means our sourcing standards are meeting a very high bar.

David: When a health policy researcher contacted us to say they'd used our data as a starting point for their own analysis and found our sources reliable upon independent verification. That's the ultimate compliment — someone checking our work and finding it holds up.

Zipdo.co publishes over 3,000 free research reports across dozens of industries. Explore the full library at zipdo.co.