Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

Hello HN,

I’m planning to build a product but how can i perform market research related to the product

Let’s say I’m launching a product for restaurant owners helping them ease some their operations for example here’s my idea.

I see a problem with restaurants keeping their menus up to date on delivery apps or even online sometimes and some restaurants aren’t tech savy so how about I build a simple product which can help ease this and help them easily update menu and publish them on all platforms

Also I want to thank everyone for commenting on this post as I have been reading each one of them and each comment is useful for me

If you want to create a B2B product, I would look for 1-star reviews in G2 and Capterra and see if you can solve these problems yourself.

You could also check what people are complaining about / asking help for in relevant subreddits and see if you can build a product around that.

Have you actually done this approach? If so, I'd love to hear more.

I ask because I often see the advice that people should look in the Shopify/Hubspot app stores for paid apps with lots of users/ratings and a low score, and while this sounds good, I've found very, very few apps that actually match these criteria. Typically a low score indicates a complaint that is outside of the technical scope that the app owners could address, and ends up being a weak signal imo.

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 page and wrote an extensive Reddit post about the app idea. The post got hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours — and three people even paid via BuyMeCoffee!

It was quite easy to tell I had hit a jackpot. The idea failed though because Spotify's et al TOS' are quite hostile when it comes to commercial apps.