Market research
The Market Research Questions to Answer Before You Launch
Not “do market research” — the actual questions, and what a real answer to each one looks like.
“Do your market research” is advice with no shape. Here are the specific questions that advice is standing in for, with what a genuine answer to each one actually looks like — not a topic to research, a question to answer.
Is anyone looking for this?
A real answer: a search-volume number for your core terms, with a trend direction (growing, flat, declining) over the past 6–12 months. Not “people seem interested” — an actual figure with a direction attached.
A weak answer: “I think people want this” based on friends' reactions or a handful of social media likes. Friends are polite; likes cost nothing.
Is that number big enough to matter?
A real answer: a bottom-up estimate of the reachable market — not the whole category, the slice you could actually serve given your channels and geography (see our market sizing guide).
A weak answer: a huge top-down industry figure with no path from that number to your actual business.
Are they willing to pay, and roughly how much?
A real answer: what they currently pay for imperfect alternatives, what advertisers spend to reach this audience (a real proxy — sustained ad spend means the clicks convert), and any direct pricing signal from conversations with real prospects.
A weak answer: a number you picked because it felt right, untested against anything they currently spend.
What specifically frustrates them about current options?
A real answer: recurring, specific complaints pulled from where people actually discuss the problem — forums, reviews, community threads — quoted in their own words, not paraphrased into something vaguer.
A weak answer: a general sense that “the current options aren't great,” with no specific, sourced complaint behind it.
Who already serves this market, and how well do they hold it?
A real answer: who ranks for your core search terms, how concentrated the field is, and what their public reviews say their weaknesses are (see our competitor analysis guide).
A weak answer: a list of three companies you already knew about, with no sense of whether that list is complete or how hard they'd be to compete with.
Why would someone switch to you specifically?
A real answer: a specific gap between what current options deliver and what the complaint evidence says people actually want — stated plainly enough that it could be wrong, and therefore testable.
A weak answer: “better service” or “lower price” with nothing underneath it — every competitor claims both.
Why this list, and not a longer one
Every checklist-style market research guide adds more questions the deeper it goes — pricing tiers, brand positioning, channel strategy. Those matter eventually. These six come first because they determine whether the rest of the work is worth doing at all. If the honest answers to these six are weak, no amount of downstream polish on positioning or pricing fixes the underlying problem. For the fuller method these questions sit inside, see our market research guide.
Signal & Demand · $129 per idea
A Signal & Demand report answers questions one through five directly, with sources, for a specific idea.