Market research and building the right product

Every founder has instincts about what customers want. The mistake is treating that instinct as proven fact. Market research exists to test the guess cheaply, before the guess is tested expensively by the market itself.

A useful litmus test for real demand: would the customer prepay, put down a deposit, sign a letter of intent, or at minimum agree to a trial? Polite interest without any of these is not yet validated demand.

Primary research is direct contact with your actual or potential customers — interviews, surveys, watching them use a product, focus groups. It's slower but tells you the truth about your specific market.

Secondary research pulls from what already exists — industry reports, government data, competitor filings, news. It's fast and free, and it's the right place to start before spending money on primary research.

Good products come from a sequence, not a flash of genius: build empathy with the user, define their real problem precisely, generate many possible solutions, build a cheap prototype, then test it on real users and iterate.

The defining move is the 'define' stage — asking 'why' repeatedly until you reach the root cause, not the surface complaint. A customer who says they want a faster checkout might actually be short on time in their whole day, which points to a different, bigger solution.

A traditional ('pipe') business creates value in a straight line: make the product, sell the product. A platform business creates value by connecting two sides — buyers and sellers, riders and drivers, hosts and guests — and earns from the connection itself.

Platform businesses often own none of the underlying assets. The largest accommodation network owns no rooms; the largest ride-hailing service owns no cars. This is worth asking about your own business: could a version of you connect existing supply to existing demand, instead of owning and running everything yourself?

Customers don't separate 'the product' from 'how they were treated while buying and using it' — the experience is the product. A single act of unexpected care, at the moment it's needed most, creates loyalty that advertising cannot buy.

The compounding version of this is anticipation: solving a problem before the customer even complains. That's a higher stage than fast complaint resolution, which is itself higher than having no complaint channel at all.