market-research_skill

Overview

This skill helps founders and product teams validate markets, size opportunity, and analyze competitors before building. It focuses on practical, order-of-magnitude market sizing (TAM/SAM/SOM), bottom-up revenue estimates, customer discovery, and competitive positioning. The goal is a clear recommendation: GO, CONDITIONAL, or NO-GO, backed by numbers and prioritized validation steps.

How this skill works

I guide you through early customer discovery to confirm demand, then produce a bottom-up market size using realistic capture rates and price assumptions. I map competitors into direct, indirect, DIY, and do-nothing substitutes and score the opportunity with a Solo-Founder Market Fit rubric. The output is a concise findings document with sources, numeric estimates, and an explicit recommendation plus next-step experiments if needed.

When to use it

• You need to know whether a business idea can fund a solo-founder SaaS.
• Before building an MVP or spending dev time on an unvalidated problem.
• When deciding between multiple target customer segments or verticals.
• To benchmark competitors, pricing, and positioning before product design.
• When fundraising or preparing investor materials requiring market estimates.

Best practices

• Talk to at least 5 targeted prospects quickly; 5 convos reveal ~80% of insights.
• Use bottom-up estimates first: count buyers × price × realistic capture rate.
• Treat top-down TAM as a sanity check, not a plan.
• Map substitutes beyond direct competitors (DIY and doing nothing matter).
• Pick one distribution channel you can test in <30 days with <$500 and validate CAC.

Example use cases

• Validate demand for a niche HR automation tool with 10 customer interviews and a landing-page test.
• Estimate three-year SOM for a vertical SaaS using LinkedIn counts and pricing tiers.
• Compare positioning vs competitors with a 2×2 matrix to identify an empty quadrant.
• Decide GO/NO-GO after scoring market fit using the 8-criterion rubric.
• Plan a $200 paid search experiment to measure signup conversion and CAC.