The Best Market Research Hack You Probably Forgot Existed
And how to make decisions from this data using philosophy and mathematical theorems.
Regardless of if you are starting a new venture, in the middle of your current hustle or already riding the wave of upward momentum, continuous market research is integral.
Why? Market research and competitive intelligence keep you current — your general awareness broadens and allows you opportunities to catalyze innovative ideas based on learnings from those around you.
Much like your weekly grocery run, consistent market research allows you the opportunity to restock your mental repertoire with fresh ingredients that can be combined in new and creative ways.
But no matter how you slice and dice it, both can feel like chores.
Keeping a constant finger on the pulse of your environment can seem like a “need to do” rather than a “want to do” for a number of reasons:
- Time: Staying up to date requires effort. These days, between meetings, heads down work, email, news and “the next big trend,” concerted time spent reading is dotted with distraction.
- Reading comprehension: Along with time, how do you distinguish signal from noise? How do you parse through the fluff to harvest what law students call the “ratio decidendi” — the most salient piece of information upon which decisions are made?
- Analysis Paralysis: Once armed with all of the ever-changing information, how do you know what to do next?
Therefore, while market research is important throughout your company/project lifecycle, it can be most beneficial when starting.
Generally, when curious minds enter a new space, it can be overwhelming trying to distill the vast troves of information into useable, actionable nuggets.
Further, as a scrappy entrepreneur, bootstrapping your way to success, it can be hard to justify spending the $50+/month leveraging the help of top market research firms such as Gartner, Tracxn, Mattermark, or DueDil.
Enter the lost art of Free Consultations.
Free Consultations are one of the best ways to get your feet wet in a new space. Here’s why:
- High Quality Data: The people on the other line are subject matter experts in this space. They’ve done the reading so you don’t have to. By giving you the 30,000ft view, you are now armed with the freedom to pull whichever thread aligns best with your goals.
- Time: Consultations are positioned to give you the most important information you need quickly. They give you the “what” with the goal of hooking you into paying for the “how.” But order of operations is important here and there is no “how” without a “what,” so use this to gather momentum.
- Metadata: Whether you are on the phone, video, or in person, consultations allow you greater visibility than email responses because you can hear tone shifts and track facial expressions/body language that may be better determinants of the direction you go in next. If you sense hesitation or excitement, follow their lead to better understand the mind of someone who dedicates 10x brain space to this particular space than you have to date.
By arming you with a high level outline of the field of interest, free consultations are a resource-friendly way to help you draw your map.
The next question: how does one find free consultations?
The key here is that consultations are usually available for services.
Therefore, you should be able to format your high level ask into a “How To” question.
If you want to learn about the general biology behind mRNA vaccines, consultations are not going to help. The broader the ask, the more you should rely on literature, tutorials, and coffee chats with selected experts.
But let’s say you are putting together an application to graduate school, creating a stellar pitch deck, or building stronger communication with your cofounders/team.
This is where free consultations allow you to “try before you buy.” Think of them as the Costco samplers of professional and personal development.
Now that you know who to call, how do you prepare most effectively for the short meeting?
This is the most important part of the market research hack. Come prepared.
Generally, these consultations are between 30–45 minutes long and aside from perfunctory introductions and an overview of the consultant’s offerings, you are free to lead the conversation.
Along with a general overview of the space itself, use your time to identify market trends. Ask what they are seeing and how that differs from what they’ve seen in the past.
These kinds of questions are essential in helping you form a baseline upon which to gauge deviations from.
Then you want to describe your interests and ideas so that this person has a semblance of a frame of reference and can better personalize responses.
You need to do this to build rapport. Remember: this person is giving you their time for free with the sole purpose of converting you from observer to payer.
One caveat is not to ask for advice or opinions because again, you are a potential client. Therefore, keep your questions objective and trend-oriented — utilize personal detail as extra color in the picture.
Finally, make sure to ask the opposite of a few of your questions. Sometimes, when you are struggling to define the best path forward, it can be helpful to frame a condition that is opposite from your ideal outcome.
It can be illuminating learning the “negative case” because it can better help you define the positive case.
Take for example: “What impact will quantifying my market size have on investors?”
If you are struggling to answer this, try reframing with the opposite case: “What impact will not quantifying my market size have on investors?”
In some cases, this might be simpler to answer. In this scenario, failing to provide this critical piece of information may break an investor’s confidence in you and your team’s ability to scale.
Once you have an identified this outcome, you can work backwards to your original question. You might realize that the impact you are hoping to have on investors is to prove your team’s ability to achieve hockey-stick growth and quantifying your market is one building block in helping you get there.
What To Do With This Information
Ultimately, free consultations are a wonderful place to start to help delineate the trees against the greater context of the forest.
These building blocks will enable you to stress test the concepts you have learned about, dive deeper into specific areas you are less familiar with and even adapt your product as needed.
While market research is important to build into your habits, try to reframe the importance of this ritual as a component of your identity: You are someone who is curious about the ever-changing landscape of your field of interest.
As a final note, it matters just as much what you choose to do with your new artillery of information and resources.
In exploring a new direction, pressure test your true motivations frequently with the “5 Whys” experiment to really drill down to the root.
Ex. “I want to make passive income.” Why?
“So that I have more disposable money.” Why?
“I want to be able to travel to a variety of places.” Why?
“I am drawn to new experiences and novelty.” Why?
“Exposure to different cultures is important to me.” Why?
“These new experiences foster my creativity and the opportunity to cultivate diverse friendships provides meaning in my life.”
Aha. Five “Whys” later, we have identified that a diversity of experiential inputs is an important catalyst for creativity and the spontaneity of these relationships contribute to a sense of purpose.
Now we have enough of an understanding to reevaluate which inputs will get us there and if passive income is truly the optimal path or just perhaps a path.
Lastly, armed with your aggregate learnings from SME’s, you can now perform more than just the “opposite question” experiment.
You might completely geek out and leverage mathematical theorems to stress test what you believe to be “true.”
Let’s leverage the art of conditional statements.
Say we hold the following hypothesis to be true: “If it is raining, then there are clouds in the sky.”
The converse is: “If there are clouds in the sky, then it is raining.”
The inverse is: “If it is not raining, then there are no clouds in the sky.”
The contrapositive is: “If there are no clouds in the sky, then it is not raining.”
It is universally believed that if the first statement is true, then so is the contrapositive. If the converse is instead true, then so is the inverse.
This is a wonderful exercise to quickly assess base cases and then test for edge cases that may poke holes in your assertion.
By leveraging exercises in philosophy and math, you are able to grow confidence and conviction built from the basic and ever-evolving information foraged from market research.
