Market Research for Startups

Today we are going to talk about researching your market for startups. Research, might seem to be a lot of unnecessary hard work. But if you are ignoring this, you are missing out on loads of actionable information.

Market research is not only important before starting up, but also extremely important while managing and scaling up your business. So how to do you exactly research for your startup? Well there are two types of research.

Secondary & Primary Research

Secondary research is done through collation and synthesis of information from already available research. While primary research is done by data collection through surveys, polls and questionnaire based field research. Primary research can give us a lot more granular and detailed information, but it is time consuming and costly. It also has a propensity to give biased information if the research is not executed properly, especially if the sample for study is not diversified enough.

So if your secondary research is good enough to get an understanding of your market you can rely on it for the planning purposes. However, primary research comes in handy for launching your product or services, as it gives you an opportunity to use your research sample as your first set of protential customers.

While planning or understanding feasibility for your startup you should focus on:

• Economic Trends of your Industry
• Customer needs and pain points
• Competitors Analysis in terms of their operations and pricing
• Analysing the opportunity of your business

You must do regular and periodic research even if you are managing your startups. In this case you should focus on:

• Competitors mode of engagement and pricing – This can be achieved through mystery shopping.
• Mystery shopping is done by you or your team pretending to be your customers client to gather information which is not there in the public domain.
• Disruptions complimentary to your business
• A focused group study of your current customers to understand how you can improve your product or services.

This is a structured process on how you can carry out your research:

If you require any help you can contact one of my ventures at BPlanExperts.com