for speakers
Find out where you lose the room — before the room
A talk fails quietly: people drift at minute eleven and nobody tells you afterwards. Rehearsing to colleagues gets you applause and a typo fix. ToughCrowd reads your abstract, outline or full script as four different audience members — the one selecting talks, the one live-tweeting it, the one who came for the beginner track — and reports exactly where each of them checks out.
Why the feedback you get now doesn’t help
- Your CFP abstract gets rejected with no feedback, and you resubmit essentially the same thing.
- You can't tell whether the middle third is too basic or too advanced until you're delivering it.
- The demo makes sense to you because you built it; nobody else has that context.
- Colleagues rehearse politeness, not the reaction of someone with no reason to like you.
your panel
Who reads your work
A suggested panel for this material. Each reviewer has explicit biases and instructions to be useful rather than kind — and they are free to disagree with each other.
Hana Kim · Conference Program Chair
Whether the abstract earns a slot against a hundred competing submissions.
Aisha Bello · Tech Journalist
Whether there's a quotable idea, or just a competent recap of things people know.
Priya Shah · Junior Developer
The jargon and assumed context that quietly lose half the audience.
Marcus Webb · Pragmatic CTO
Claims that sound impressive on a slide and collapse in a hallway follow-up.
How it works
- 1Paste your text, upload a PDF, or import a public URL.
- 2Pick your reviewers — or describe your audience and let ToughCrowd generate matching personas.
- 3Each reviewer writes an in-voice critique, scores a four-part rubric, and lists concrete fixes.
- 4A synthesis pass reports where the panel agrees, where it conflicts, and what to fix first.
faq
Questions
Should I submit the abstract or the whole talk?
Both work, at different stages. Run the abstract before you submit to the CFP; run the full outline or script once the talk is accepted and you're deciding what to cut.
Can it review my slides?
Upload the deck as a PDF and we extract the text. Slides with speaker notes get much better feedback than slides that are mostly images, since the panel reviews the readable content.
Does longer material cost more?
Yes, proportionally — each reviewer reads the whole thing, so a reviewer costs one credit per ~5,000 words. The exact cost is always shown before you confirm.
Try it on a tough crowd first
New accounts start with free credits, so you can run a real audit before paying anything.
Also for PhD candidates, founders, researchers, researchers · all use cases