What is your experience with doing initial market/customer research, prior to building a product?

Question

Junior Owolabi · Accepted Answer

@mia_pham Thanks, all you said mirrors my sentiments, after several customer interviews and polls I found that there seems to be a lot of confusion when attempting to do market/customer research https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/phsm33/what_are_your_struggles_with_doing_initial/

I have seen so many research tools that just aren't effective for early-stage startups and entrepreneurs, they just don't provide enough structure and normally require other tool integrations.

The best tools I saw to help startups and product managers were UserLeap (now Sprig), ProductBoard and DoveTails, but to me, they still aren't sufficient enough.

I developed a customer research tool that is laser-focused on the design thinking process and structured hierarchically but still flexible, forcing users to start on the:

problem hypothesis
-  buyer persona 1
-- conduct research to validate the problem/persona hypothesis
--- Ideation/prototypes
-- conduct research to validate the solution prototype
-  buyer persona 2
-  buyer persona 3

the research includes video interviews (that has screening questions, timeslots that can be re/booked by potentials customers and follow up questions, coding transcripts for themes), observations of potential/existing customers using the prototypes created, surveys (including unobserved usability testing).

So, I created https://www.prepxus.com to fix the confusion issue, as I said before it is based on the process of design thinking.

DJ Sanghera · Answer

@toshniwalakshay , you can also use InsightLab! Check out www.insightlab.ca

Mia Pham · Answer

@rilwan_owolabi1 Hello, thank you for the introduction. I will definitely raise Prepxus as a solution!

Mia Pham · Answer

Proper market research is essential. Not just a simple survey but one should understand the standard best practices for market research to be done. For example, most businesses struggle with putting on paper what the problem is and what is the research problem. They assume that the problems are one of the same thing and try to resolve them with a product when there are a plethora of problems as well as solutions, reasoning, they are not considering.

At my company, I notice survey data not bearing fruit due to proper research has never been conducted e.g. compiling secondary data, identifying the research gaps, understanding proper research methodology, anticipating bias, and categorizing limitations but rather jumping head on to a survey and wondering what went wrong. Though research methodology might seem time-consuming it is something worth investing in for the long run.

Akshay Toshniwal · Answer

Initial market/customer research is very important based on the product niche that one is building. A lot of time investment is needed but the return of this investment is quite rewarding.

The market/customer research phase starts when one finalizes the niche of the product. Once that is done, customer data and other statistical information are to be understood (on how people behave to such kind of niche-based product).

One can make use of surveys, one-on-one research interview calls to understand how the perception of customers/end-users is towards the idea (crux) of the product and accordingly all the findings can be well documented.

This entire process takes a lot of time but it is definitely worth it.

I hope this helps. Thank you!

What is your experience with doing initial market/customer research, prior to building a product?

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