Market Research Thread

We have an employment thread, how about one for small businesses? With a SaaS of $5 per user per month, you could make a comfortable living with less than 1000 customers. But programming is the easy part. First, you have to find out what people will pay for. What problems do they want to have solved? Do they even know what they want? Or do you go the other route: come up with a bunch of low-effort ideas and implement them all, then see what catches on?

There are marketplaces to sell projects. Best place to scout for ideas. You can just copy whatever seems like a doable good idea. 2-3 years ago there was some hype about flipping projects - you buy, bugfix, relist higher. Looked sus to me because if were in a soykafhole i would just list fake projects fishing for a gullible flipper. Given the years passed you could however review sites still alive and kicking vs dead. Websites seem to operate similar - you can buy sites and try to expand the existing business.

>>40429 Can you name those marketplaces please?

>>40433 didn't name anything cause i don't know whats good. https://github.com/marketplace might be interesting obvious one due githubs size anything big with a plugin/appstore attached could be a potential target to pouch ideas.

I can't claim to have a fool proof method, but I went into IT / Software Development / "DevOps" consulting, and from there, over a decade of work, I started noticing patterns in the needs of my business clients, and slowly, built a product that solves a recurrent problem related to business infrastructure. I then started offering this software as a subscription service to my old and new clients alike. My old clients trusted me considering our long work relationship, and they saw how my offering solves their problem, so they subscribed to it, and that gave me my first few recurrent monthly clients for this service, and later ones started coming easier because they know it is something that others also use to solve this peculiar problem. Now I have some 6 clients for my service, but it still is not enough to make me a living on its own, mainly I think because I low-balled the price. But hopefully as I get new clients I can push the price upwards. The lesson here is: don't guess. Instead, go out there, and _serve_, solve problems, open your eyes, see the world as it flows in the real seas of life, the nitty-gritty, get your hands dirty, and _serve_. Don't let your ego take you away from the chance to watch humans, to find the optimizations that you can later exploit, and the needs you can fill. The logical mind is proud; it wants to think that it has the eventual keys. That by thinking it through it will find the perfect answer. That the right idea will change everything, and all credit will go to the logical mind. But that is a trap. Markets, and life in general, are too massive and complex for answers to be found through the logic of a single hermit mind. And even if an example of such success can be found somewhere, it is more likely to be chance, than extraordinary genius. Massive investment companies and startup accelerators have the billions of dollars of excess to do "market research" and commit to hundreds of failed projects concurrently, in hope of hitting that unicorn startup idea. But _you_ can't. You don't have the money or manpower, you have but one life, one person, limited time. But you have an edge that they don't; you can go there and do actual things. You can be "on the ground", and you can notice the things that their spreadsheet analysis drones would never see from their high skyscrapers. They are too big to be human, they turn, nothing but rigid systems, but you are not. You can see, with your own eyes. On the other side, your strategy can't be the low hanging fruits, countless other people are trying that, and failing, every day. You don't hear about them because they fail, and the world is too big to hear about failures. You would be shouting at the void, expecting an answer, one that would never come. Of course that is not to say you shouldn't build 50 projects, and fail 48 of them, but that those projects have to come from you seeing other humans wishing for things, suffering from things, loving things, missing things, then you try to fill those holes. Oh, and don't let "someone else made that already" stop you from trying either. Thousands of people sell tomatoes. If everyone who saw a need for tomatoes said "someone else already sells tomatoes" we would have only one tomato seller in the world, and never enough tomatoes. If you choose to ignore what I said, and insist instead on the world of theoretical logic, then I would recommend two books: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, and The Personal MBA. They can give you a good head start on the theory. And when you're done with those, come back, open your eyes again, and remember... The essence is you, Lain, get out there, see the world, disconnect from the insidious realm of pure thought, connect with us, fellow humans, in our world, see our lives, our pain, our struggle, see our joy, our dreams, our dance, then you will find your answers, lain, all in due time.

P.S. Two random product tips, to be taken in spirit, not the literal examples: 1. If your service is a thing that allows clients to "compound" their investment in it over time, then your clients are less likely to leave over time. For example, if you provide a database storage service, then the more the client use you the less likely they are to leave you, because they are more and more invested. 2. You can make good money from having a markup over infrastructure that you build on top. For example, considering that same database service, if you give them the database only as a $1000/month subscription, then you are limited to that only, but if you also provide the storage of that database by using AWS storage behind the scenes, and then make them pay (AWS-price * 2)/GiB/month of storage, then the more the client use you, the more you make, even though you are providing the same thing; a database. AWS provides the storage, but now you're making extra money from AWS's storage.

>>40438 >But you have an edge that they don't; you can go there and do actual things. You can be "on the ground", and you can notice the things that their spreadsheet analysis drones would never see from their high skyscrapers. They are too big to be human, they turn, nothing but rigid systems, but you are not. You can see, with your own eyes. This, absolutely. When I was doing manual labor, the head of our company decided to optimize our work. They hired another company in hope to give us a new system; without going into details, we had to scan things, press buttons, etc, so the system can track what we were doing and tell us what do do next. Seems like a good idea if you're masturbating in front of spreadsheets all day long. In reality? Well, it only added useless steps in our daily work. Slowed us down. When the system crashed, it blocked everything. The system was essentially useless as it was telling us what we already knew to do next, and counting things we were already counting in our heads without having to stop what we were doing to press buttons. In the end, we never used that system again after only 2 months. Our company, who was planning to implant that same system at other locations, abandoned the project. What was supposed to be a big nationwide contract for the other company ended up being just a one-time thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they went to other company to sell their soykafty solution. But as someone who actually did the manual labor that solution was trying to optimize, I can think of a million things that can be fixed or changed that may have helped them to access to that nationwide contract. So yeah, >>40438 is right, go fix real problems, optimize real things, don't fall for the "i'm the next business genius who will revolutionize the industry" meme.

>>40438 Does "market research" have some other cursed meaning among professionals? To me it implies the exact opposite of guessing. I especially don't understand why you are recommending a marketing book. >those projects have to come from you seeing other humans wishing for things, suffering from things, loving things, missing things, then you try to fill those holes Completely agree. >You can be "on the ground", and you can notice the things that their spreadsheet analysis drones would never see >over a decade of work, I started noticing patterns If this level of insider experience is really the only way, that's very discouraging indeed. Is it truly impossible to notice things via the Wired, either by observation/eavesdropping or direct communication? Is it any different for B2C?

>>40448 > Does "market research" have some other cursed > meaning among professionals? Market research means using "scientific methods" to guess what the market wants. Global markets are extremely complex dynamic systems, and so market research requires a lot of data, advanced statistical works and models, running user group studies and surveys, large enough samples sizes (typically hundreds, if not thousands, of people), data analysis on quality data, projections, graphs etc. In the world of software services, low-hanging fruits seem rare, mostly because of the Wired's tendency to centralize, and follow the power-law (burrito distribution). In the "real world" market analysis is limited by geography, which is good. It is not too hard to isolate a geographic area and do research to understand whether opening a bakery in a location would be profitable or not. But in software, the market is typically the entire world. Everything obvious is already contested, unless you have access to special sources of information that sets you apart. Most useful analysis work devolves into big data analysis, finding trends, paying for access to analytics data, frequently through privacy invading sources. > To me it implies the exact opposite of guessing Market research is mostly statistics, and statistics are educated guesses; you are trying to take a sample of a snapshot in time of a complex, chaotic, and dynamic system. You may have every indicator pointing something out, you implement it, and find that your hypothesis was wrong, you missed some confounding factor or another, there was bias in your research somewhere, or the world changed from underneath you in the time between making the decision and your product actually hitting the market, etc. How skilled and experienced your researchers are, how much resources and access and data they have, how adaptable your organization is, and how fast it can pivot to follow market changes, all play big roles in market research being actually useful. But most of the time market research is nothing but biased statistics, lies, and damn wishful thinking. Most big investment firms understood this about the software world long ago, and thus their focus on venture capital, startup accelerators, and such. They are basically funding hundreds of small teams to outsource the market discovery process to those people on the ground, enlisting them to be the expendable eyes of the big corporation. > If this level of insider experience is really the > only way, that's very discouraging indeed. I find it very encouraging; to know that, at least so far, having access to thousands of data scientists, and petabytes of data on billions of humans, in real-time, does not give massive corporations absolute total monopoly on the free market. An individual who goes into the depths can still have a chance at making something that sells. Yes, this means a green kid just out of school has low chances of success at building a successful profitable small business. It's not surprising, and has never been different in the history of business. For higher business success probability you need correct information on the state of the market. Direct industry experience is a great source of correct information on the market of that industry. Of course, you can know nothing about anything and try to sell tomatoes on a random street in Rome. That might work, and you might end up being a rich tomato merchant for the rest of your life, but that might also not work at all, because you didn't know there was a super market that sells the best and cheapest tomatoes nearby, and you had no chance of competing with them directly. Many people work that way, maybe even most successful small business do; they try things again and again based on slight intuitions, until something "sticks" for a small minority of them. This is much harder to do the bigger the target market is. You can do this with IRL projects, and you are likely to succeed with /something/ after maybe half a dozen tries, but with global markets, like the Wired software market, everything is done and consolidated by someone else already. So, barring a stroke of creative genius, you will most likely not penetrate into massive markets even on your 25th try. Your best bet is to slice the market into smaller and smaller segments, until you have a tiny focused niche, then you gain good knowledge of this niche, to find a need to fill, leaning on the advantage of being small. Finding a need to fill will likely happen through interacting with the humans within this niche, because typically, they will have more experience than you; you likely don't face their problems yourself yet, but you can feel for and understand their problems because you're "in" on them enough. > Is it truly impossible to notice things via the > Wired, either by observation/eavesdropping or > direct communication? Nope. Not impossible. There are many "possible", even if unlikely, ways to reach a sustainable market. My recommendation was based on what I've experienced to be a reliable method, anecdotally, and from learning from IRL people who built successful small businesses. If someone asks me how to find software ideas to work on, I tell them to go learn some second skill, gain some experience in it, interact with people who practice it, in multiple contexts, and then you will find patterns, things to fix or improve, and there, you have a handful of product ideas that surely have a market, with a high likelihood of success. The essence of what I'm saying is to basically not waste time on "market research" as a single individual on the Wired; if you want a small business that's likely to work out, then go gain direct experience, and observe people and the market on the ground. That doesn't imply leaving the Wired. It only implies "doing things" and talking to people doing the things, instead of theoretical thinking. But mostly if the thing itself is of Wired nature. For example, you might get to the niche of electronic music production online, but you would never get the niche of parachuting being on the Wired. You will find successful ideas for parachuting software by being around those people, experiencing what they experience, having "insider experience" within their world. > Is it any different for B2C? It all is human2human in the end. If you want to build a B2C product, some software to help skiers or something, then go learn skiing, talk to diverse skiers, and you will find paths to explore, if you want to build a B2B product to help software startups with expense accounting, go learn accounting, be in software startup environments, talk to diverse software startup accountants, and you will paths to explore. Most, in my experience, for example, struggle with the predictability of "pay as you go" cloud services, because most cloud providers don't care much to provide such information ahead of time, in clear and intuitive ways. There might be a business idea lurking there somewhere. I wouldn't have noticed it had I not been "in" on that world. > I especially don't understand why you are > recommending a marketing book. Marketing and market research are intertwined disciplines. You can't market something if you don't understand the market, you can't penetrate a market if you commit marketing crimes. The books I recommend discuss market segmentation, categories, positioning, attention, expectation, barriers to competition, market entry, etc. Many directly related to understanding markets, and most are of interest to someone trying to build their own small business. But as I said before, they pale in the light of experiencing the world yourself.

Books mentioned by lain above, for the curious.

People will pay for anything, Lain. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-other-stuff-year-in-review-2012/

Here are a few books about how to come up with and test business ideas.

Just sort of hate posting... software devs trying to make a business out of software are the greediest most dishonest people I've ever met. Software is a fuarrrking soykaf product, unless you can pull the wool over consumers' eyes, which leads to fuarrrking retarded computer users. Software as a service? Absolute fuarrrking cancer. I hope all you code monkeys looking to be a unicorn get hit by a deer and dance with a bear. Big caveat here: industrial software is usually useful. You know, programming a machine to do needed things. Usually means firmware. Useful things. Facebook? Tiktok? Microsoft? Twitter? Google? Email hoster? You're making the world a worse place. fuarrrk off with your 'omg software can do ANYTHING'. You're fuarrrking retards. Make actualy useful products that do things. But none of you probably know how to actually code. So we'll get more useless bullshit to flood consumer electronics. Bravo. Your contribution to the world? Negative. I dare you. Name one piece of sold software that's not worse because it's proprietary?

>>42594 >Name one piece of sold software that's not worse because it's proprietary? I was gonna say one of my company's products could never be made without a lot of funding, more than an open-source project would ever get (not to say its impact was really positive to anything besides corporate bottom lines). But then I remembered how insecure it was. Critical issues were shoved under the rug in the hope that customers would never find them, and that's exactly how management wanted it.

>>42594 the worst part is that if you want to learn to program, whether it's for hobby or as a practical skill, everybody expects you to get into bloatware soykaf: python, javascript, codecademy, leetcode. If you look for advice almost anywhere, as it regards learning or trying to find a place in the industry, you are buffetted with the commonplace options that make programming an absolute soykaffest. It is not something you can ignore, either. It completely pollutes your options. Perhaps one would like to imagine writing software for astronomical applications, medical imaging, something that could be actually useful. But because these are niche subjects everybody and almost every piece of advice is geared towards turning you into a bloat-producing monkey that wastes cycles and overheats the GPU to serve a static website. Oh, and everybody now expects the AI to do all the programming for them. The cycle of enshittification just accelerates.

>>42597 Python was a "GUI" for people from other fields who don't have time specializing in programming as on the backside its always glued to C / C++ / CUDA / openCL to get the required performance written by specialists. It was a perfectly reasonable when your usecase was "lets give the scientist easier access". The problem is merely it got into mainstream and the mainstream is filled with idiots. HR is also now gooning to weird edge cases to filter applicants which contradicts the purpose of an accessible language. I think the root cause is they dont understand and substitute with whatever they can grasp. HR cant skill check you on the latest ML research but can copypaste some leetcode crap and compare if you gave the same answer so thats exactly what they do. Your are victim to their need to appear competent.

>>42600 > Your are victim to their need to appear competent. This is lucid statement. All the cargo cult buzzword ridden talks on the net is about people pretending to understand stuff while they just use big fancy words projecting their social status in order to be accepted into this culture of corporate drones.

>>40463 More of a rhetorical question, but why is there more real advice in this post than in all these books? >>42593 In all the case studies, the founder's idea is just handwaved away as something they started out with, like the only problem worth addressing is how to refine that idea. Even in the book about "the epiphany", which is kinda funny.

>>40428 I had an idea to make a Neocities clone two years ago. The 'indie web' seemed to be popping off, YouTuber's were making videos on it even. I always thought it was stupid, but I was more than happy to give these people server space. I think I waited on the idea too long, and I don't know how much steam it has anymore. I've wanted to make a better version of some administrative software, as they all seem to be soykaf, but I hardly know how to get the requirements for this.

>>42763 Considering the only alternatives (website hosting with social aspects) is Nekoweb which feels like 1 Discord fight away from imploding, I think there's still room for another service like Neocities.