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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?

#61

Post by carlossouza »

If the restaurant's idea is your idea, it is a good business.

But the real money is not on the monthly fee you will charge restaurants to update their menus. That you can give for free.

The money is in automating their purchases and delivery of ingredients they need to run their restaurants. If you already know what they serve and have a system running their backend, it's easy to do that.

And everyone in this business knows one of their main pain points is purchasing ingredients: it needs to be done frequently, fast, from a good supplier, preferably close to them, and at a good price. It's a hustle. They spend a lot of money, time and energy doing that.

There are fast-growing SaaS companies in Brazil making a lot of money in that area.

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

#62

Post by gigatexal »

create a landing page with a signup form (just an email is fine) and on the landing page state what you are offering, what your product is, what your SaaS will do, etc. Gauge interest that way. Bonus: Think of a price you think is fair, double it, then add it to the page and gauge interest.

Then post it to hacker news ;-).

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

#63

Post by iknowSFR »

will5421 wrote: post #51

Offer to keep the menus up to date for them yourself, for a price. Now you know how much they’ll be willing to pay for a solution, and you’re in a nice position to develop your product from (that will replace you).

This is the answer for step 1. Figure out if there’s a market and figure out what that product is worth. You doing it manually is like a prototype but it’s actually providing value to your customers more than just hypotheticals without you spending resources building anything.

This approach is also forcing you to interact with potential customers. The value to you of those relationships is both quantifiable in terms of revenue but also unquantifiable in terms of learnings. Do as much as you can to learn about your customers and your product before spending anything on building it. This is the definition of MVP.

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

#64

Post by zigman1 »

crisp wrote: post #9

After defining your target audience and doing a competitor analysis, build a quick landing page with a waitlist. Try to drive traffic there with social media posts (and maybe with paid ads). Loosely said, the more people signup your waitlist, the more they want to pay for your product. Anecdotal, I once planned to build a sports related mobile app with music platform integrations. I scraped together a BuyMeCoffee pag…

> Build a quick landing page with a waitlist.. I scraped together a BuyMeCoffee page and wrote an extensive Reddit post about the app idea.

That's a great idea, thanks for sharing

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

#67

Post by caseysoftware »

First, you need to find your people. Then you need to understand their pain.

To find them, find professional organizations, newsletters, chamber of commerce members, whatever where they go and attend. Learn how they describe their space and what problems they talk about. If the problem you're solving comes up regularly, that's great!

Then you need to understand their pain. Ask them about it. Ask them what happened & what they did last time. Ask them what the consequences, costs, and results were.

Do NOT ask them to predict the future.

I wrote this up a long time ago: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/the-problem-with-would

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

#68

Post by caseysoftware »

james-revisoai wrote: post #54
mindcrime wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative. This is one of those things that Steve Blank tries to address with the "Million dollar question." He suggests something like this (paraphrased from memory) 1. Ask your prospect (this assumes you've identified a prospect and…

What's your advice on doing this for products in rapidly changing markets? Example: Say you are an AI graduate who has worked in AI for a while before ChatGPT. Suddenly a competitor spins up something you were also developing - faster with ChatGPT - no problem, you launch it too. One month later, 20 more competitors have popped up, but none really gained too much share. It seems ok. Two months later, a competitor wit…

Your competitors almost never matter. Most products fail because they a) never ship or b) don't solve an important problem.

If you're paying attention to your competitors, you're probably not paying enough attention to your customers.

If your customers are really just turned on by the latest shiny object, they're not customers, they're fad followers. Don't bother with them.

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

#69

Post by germinalphrase »

scarface_74 wrote: post #36
jensneuse wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Did this arrangement work out for everyone?

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

#70

Post by ryanjshaw »

happytiger wrote: post #46
jv22222 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good book that helps deal with those issues: https://www.momtestbook.com/

Thank you for this one. Haven’t read it, but despite doing engineering and product work for decades I’m always grateful for books like this as there is always more to learn! Looks great! Any other must haves in this category?

The Right It: https://www.albertosavoia.com/therightit.html
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