Market Research

Make research that helps decisions, not research for show.

When to Use

• Researching a market, company, investor, or tech trend
• Building TAM/SAM/SOM numbers
• Comparing competitors
• Checking investor fit before outreach
• Testing a thesis before building

Process

1. Pick the Research Type

Figure out which kind of research the user needs:

• Investor / Fund Check
• Competitor Check
• Market Size
• Tech / Tool Research

2. Run Investor / Fund Check

Get:

• Fund size, stage, check size
• Portfolio companies that matter
• Public thesis and recent deals
• Why they fit or don't fit
• Red flags

3. Run Competitor Check

Get:

• What the product really does (not marketing fluff)
• Funding and investors
• Traction if public
• How they get users and what they charge
• Strengths, weaknesses, gaps

4. Run Market Size

Use:

• Top-down from reports
• Bottom-up from real customer numbers
• Show your math. Every guess should be clear.

5. Run Tech / Tool Research

Get:

• How it works
• Trade-offs and who's using it
• How hard to set up
• Lock-in, security, and risk

6. Write It Up

Structure every deliverable as:

1. Quick summary (2-3 sentences)
2. Key findings
3. What this means
4. Risks and caveats
5. What to do next
6. Sources

Rules

• Every big claim needs a source.
• Use recent data. Flag old data.
• Include the bad news too. Show risks.
• End with a decision, not just a summary.
• Keep facts, guesses, and suggestions separate.
• All numbers have sources or are marked as guesses.
• Old data is flagged.
• The suggestion follows from the facts.
• Someone can make a decision from this.

Gotchas

• Top-down TAM is lazy and always wrong. "10% of the $X billion market" is not analysis. Bottom-up from real customer numbers or go home.
• Analyst reports have built-in bias. Reports from vendors (like AWS sizing the cloud market) overstate their own segment. Use independent sources.
• Revenue proxies are unreliable. SimilarWeb traffic estimates can be off by 5x. Combine multiple signals: hiring, social, Crunchbase, app store rankings.
• Don't confuse market size with addressable market. The CRM market is $80B, but if you're building for freelancers, your market is a fraction of that.
• Recency matters. A market growing 40% in 2024 might be flat in 2026. Always check the latest data points, not just the headline number.

Output

Save to the project's 02-research/ folder.

Format each deliverable with: quick summary, key findings, what this means, risks and caveats, next steps, and sources.