Market research methods for startups - introduction

Let's start the new section Market Research A Guide for Startups. In this section, we're going to provide you with vital information how to do the research cheaply and how to use the methods in which you research the market, depending where you are and what is your target. Let me go first through a short introduction. So we're going to be talking about three groups of market research methods. First of them, consulting methods are the cheapest and the simplest methods, and they actually don't require that much data. They mainly require your understanding of the process of the customer and they are always a good first start. Then we're going to go also through the offline research, which will show you how to gather data from the real world, how to process it and how to draw conclusions and analyze it to improve your startup and to go for the right ideas, right features. And the last group would be online research, which is everything you can find on the Internet, how to use all available online resources in order to analyze your competition, analyze your customers and draw conclusions on the strategies and adjust your strategy to what's happening on the market and what is the required standard by your customers. Briefly, the the three groups. So in consulting methods, we're going to be talking about two approaches top down and bottom up. They are quite similar, but the difference is actually the starting and the end point. In offline, we actually have five groups of methods which we recommend using. First is obviously interviews the most popular one. Then there is also being where your customer is working for your customers. It would be the third one. And then last but not least, checks and mystery shopping. In the case of online research, the number of resources you can use is basically infinite. We would be mentioning here only the most important ones, and we would be adding to this section new ones as the time goes by. The online interviews is probably the option. You would be going as the first choice, but actually there are a lot of other resources which gives you faster and quite in-depth analysis. The first one, which is worth mentioning, is Facebook Audience Insights, which can help you segment and pinpoint customers you would be targeting. Then you can also analyze the profiles of the customers of chosen customers on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. For obvious reasons, keyword planner will be also important resource. Then, in order to understand better the competition and to understand better the customers, you should be for sure trying to use similar web branch sites, written reports, obviously SlideShare and YouTube and markets for applications. The last remark is about what to use and when. So the methods we presented to you on the previous slides are useful almost in each and every segment, but the usefulness depends really on the situation and on the market you are in. So in the existing market, you'd be doing a lot of offline and online research of your customers and competition because they exist. So you can actually go easily to them, check what they are doing and what is the products. Whereas when we are talking about re segmented markets, so niche and low cost variants, you would be rather concentrating again with offline and online research on chosen segments and competitors and you would be also looking at other markets, uh, which use the similar, let's say strategy. So if it's low cost, you would be looking at the other low cost on a similar market to know how they cracked, how they disrupt the market and to learn how to do it on the market you're targeting and to limit the extent you would be using also consulting methods in new markets. It's almost consulting methods at the beginning and then offline and online research of customers for connected markets. So if you are introducing chooses new, new new type of juice, then the the, the existing juices water Coca Cola and also you would be doing a lot of online and offline research for customers for similar business models. So if if it is a SaaS model, then you would be looking also at the SaaS models as well.