Most market research is procrastination with a spreadsheet. You don’t need three months and a $2 million report. You need one afternoon and a ladder — six rungs, ordered by cost, cheapest and fastest first.
Rung 1 — Google is a focus group. Type your problem into the search bar and don’t touch the keyboard. Autocomplete is a ranked list of what real people ask. Then search the exact complaint in quotes — the results page tells you who’s already monetizing that pain. If there are ads on it, someone’s already paying to be there.
Rung 2 — AI deep research. Hand the broad question to an AI deep-research run: market size, main players, pricing models, recent funding. One prompt, twenty minutes, and you get the skeleton an analyst would bill a week for. Treat it as a map, not the truth — every claim you’re about to bet money on gets checked by hand.
Rung 3 — Reddit is unfiltered pain. Reports tell you the market size. Reddit tells you how the market swears. Search your problem plus “site:reddit.com” and read fifty threads. You’re mining the exact phrases people use when nobody’s selling to them yet — that’s your future landing page copy, verbatim.
Rung 4 — Mystery shopping. Sign up for every competitor. Pay for one month of the leader. Go through onboarding, hit support with a hard question, try to cancel. In two hours you’ll know their real weaknesses — not the ones in their pricing table, the ones in the actual experience of using their product.
Rung 5–6 — Pro platforms and agencies, only now. Crunchbase for funding, SimilarWeb for traffic, G2 for reviews at scale, Statista for the one number an investor will ask for. And agencies are the last rung, not the first — hire them to verify a bet you’ve already formed, never to form it for you.
The deliverable is one page: who has the pain, in their own words. Who’s paying for something adjacent today. Where the actual gap is. What it costs to reach them. If you can’t fill that page in an afternoon, you’ve learned something bigger than any research finding — you can’t find the market at all, and that’s worth knowing before you build anything.
Autocomplete as a focus group
AI deep research
Reddit pain mining
Mystery shopping
Which rung have you actually run? Vote above — and if it’s none of them, that’s not embarrassing, that’s just Tuesday afternoon waiting for you.
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