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Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

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Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#31

Post by acjacobson »

Another thing to consider is the scope of the problem. While it may be true restaurants don't keep their menus up to date - you need to understand if that matters and how much. One way to assess this is to interview restaurant owners and ask them broad questions like "How do you keep your menus up to date?", "How much time does this take you?", "Who is responsible for doing this?", "Have you had an customer complaints due to inaccurate menus?", "Have problems with order items caused you to lose business? if so, how much?", "What solutions have you looked for already to solve this problem".

This last one is especially useful because if they never looked for a solution its a signal this isn't a real problem. There are millions of problems in the world and most of them are not worth solving because they don't actually matter that much. That's an important angle to think about.

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#32

Post by mock-possum »

What do you consider your competition? If a problem exists, there are a ton of people out there with some kind of solution they’re already using. You can likely beat the competition on one of three broad areas: price, quality, and availability. You can sell yours cheaper, yours can be better, or yours can be easier. Once you have that, you need to demonstrate that value to other people.

There are a ton of people who currently pay for your competitor’s product, and would gladly switch to yours. You need to find those people and demonstrate your product’s value to them. They will pay you instead of your competitor - that slice of the market now belongs to you, as long as you can keep it, because bear in mind there will always be a ton of people who can make a cheaper, higher quality, or more accessible version of your product.

You might also get lucky enough to stumble across a problem no one has solved yet, or else you might be clever enough to create a problem that your product solves. Those are once in a lifetime type opportunities, big risk versus big reward. Those are the things everybody dreams about that.

But you also don’t need those to get by - if you enjoy solving problems, you can get paid for it, and not invent the microchip or split the atom or chart the sea or the sky.

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#34

Post by scarface_74 »

mock-possum wrote: post #32

What do you consider your competition? If a problem exists, there are a ton of people out there with some kind of solution they’re already using. You can likely beat the competition on one of three broad areas: price, quality, and availability. You can sell yours cheaper, yours can be better, or yours can be easier. Once you have that, you need to demonstrate that value to other people. There are a ton of people who…

> There are a ton of people who currently pay for your competitor’s product, and would gladly switch to yours

If I’m a business owner, I’m not switching from “a well known piece of software that meets my needs” to a product built by a random indy developer to save money.

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#35

Post by scarface_74 »

It’s not just about building a product. If you can build the product, there are probably 50 people that could build the same product that are reading your question.

What is your “unfair advantage“? What do you bring to the table that hundreds of other developers couldn’t do?

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#36

Post by scarface_74 »

jensneuse wrote: post #15
jensneuse wrote: post #14

I know you didn't ask this way but I can tell you how NOT to do it and how to avoid a lot of pain. Don't just build the product in the hopes that people will come to you. Aside from doing market Research et Al, it's equally important that you figure out if you will be able to "market" the product. If you don't have a thoroughly planned GTM strategy that's peer reviewed by people who understand your market, you might…

An example would be if you target enterprise but know that enterprises would never buy from you because you're too small or not trustworthy, you need a way to overcome this hurdle. Or, you're targeting individuals but there's a competitor with $300M funding who owns all marketing channels. You might not be heard in the noise.

I once was the dev lead working for a mid size non tech company. The company found the perfect product to meet their needs. It was built by an Indy developer. If we signed the contract with him, we would represent 60% of his revenue.

The director of IT and CTO were reticent to base their entire data capture system that was going to be rolled out to thousands of field workers to him.

I suggested that they only sign the contract if the developer was willing to put their entire codebase in escrow and agree that we had a non exclusive right to the code under license.

Everyone agreed and the lawyers talked and made it happen.

I led a quarterly validation of the code in escrow. He would come onsite and I would watch him download the code from the escrow company and build it from scratch and deploy it and I would do a smoke test.

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#37

Post by jillesvangurp »

Come up with a list of questions and topics that you need to know more about that you would ask if you had access to key people in your target market. Instead of setting up interviews and meetings, run those by chat gpt (use gpt 4 for better results).

Take the answers with a grain of salt of course but mostly you might learn a thing or two as it is trained on a wealth of published articles and market research that you'll never get around to reading even a tiny percentage off. You can even ask it to suggest some follow up reading.

I recently had to figure out the airline industry as they are a potential customer for our product. My questions related to understanding what kind of cost bottlenecks they are facing in their operations and how our product should be best positioned to address problems they have. So I simply asked chat gpt about common causes for flight delays and other cost factors, top n cost bottle necks, etc. I was able to get some very detailed insights out of it fairly quickly. So, when we did talk to our potential customer, we already knew a lot about their business.

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#38

Post by scarface_74 »

samplank2 wrote: post #26

I built a tool that lets you chat with 375k user software reviews and ask about user pain points. I put in a version of your question: What should I build for restaurant owners to help them ease some of their operations? And here is the first part of the answer it gave back: 1. One of the major pain points that restaurant owners face is the difficulty in managing and tracking orders from multiple delivery platforms.…

I asked the following question - “What should I build to help consultants who know AWS to people who are willing to pay to dollar”.

How is the answer I got from your service different than the answer I got from ChatGPT?

Since anyone can enter the same question for both, I won’t bother posting the replies.

Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

#40

Post by ilikerashers »

jensneuse wrote: post #14

I know you didn't ask this way but I can tell you how NOT to do it and how to avoid a lot of pain. Don't just build the product in the hopes that people will come to you. Aside from doing market Research et Al, it's equally important that you figure out if you will be able to "market" the product. If you don't have a thoroughly planned GTM strategy that's peer reviewed by people who understand your market, you might…

The counter to this is "analysis paralysis". Better to get good at building stuff than spend all your time trying to come up with the perfect product.

I've seen people invest 100k+ and years in products that never had a market but I've also seen people invest no money and years in talking about "stuff".

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