Ask HN: How to do market research for product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to do market research for product?

243 pointsmr_o47112 comments

Hello HN,

I’m planning to build a product but how can i perform market research related to the product

Let’s say I’m launching a product for restaurant owners helping them ease some their operations for example here’s my idea.

I see a problem with restaurants keeping their menus up to date on delivery apps or even online sometimes and some restaurants aren’t tech savy so how about I build a simple product which can help ease this and help them easily update menu and publish them on all platforms

Also I want to thank everyone for commenting on this post as I have been reading each one of them and each comment is useful for me

View on HN

Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative.

Thats why some UX uses matched-pair questions which have two approaches to the issue at hand, boolean opposites, so you can see if they move sliders, weight or answer both the "correct" way to align the response.

Separately:

"If I made a new service x would you like it" is not the same as "if I said it would cost you $5 to use new service x would you use it" is not the same as "do you think new service x would be useful" is not the same as "do you think anyone else wants new service x"

It's very easy to mistake these for "the same"

I am personally very skeptical of NPS and satisfaction scores in small communities. They may work for google scale entities, I don't think they do for <100 users. Many people canonicalise the results of 4-5 respondants. In my experience, if your primary job is to assess if they qualify for X or Y, and you ask them how much they liked your service delivery in denying them X or Y, they will be profoundly negative about the service, which is really not helpful because you may have written a simple direct and fast web service to deliver the negative outcome. And of course, the reverse is equally true.

The book “The Mom Test” is a really good read with similar advice.

This is a good book that helps deal with those issues: https://www.momtestbook.com/

Thank you for this one.

Haven’t read it, but despite doing engineering and product work for decades I’m always grateful for books like this as there is always more to learn! Looks great!

Any other must haves in this category?

Michele Hansens "Deploy Empathy" is an excellent complementary to The Mom Test.

The Right It: https://www.albertosavoia.com/therightit.html

Came here to recommend this book too. There’s a lot of great advice in it.

Here are some critical questions to ask yourself:

1. Do potential customers know they have a problem?

2. Do they already have a makeshift solution?

3. Do they have a budget to spend on a better solution?

Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative.

This is one of those things that Steve Blank tries to address with the "Million dollar question." He suggests something like this (paraphrased from memory)

1. Ask your prospect (this assumes you've identified a prospect and gotten in the room, or at least on a call, with them) "If this product were available today and I offered it to you for free, would you start the process of deploying and roll it out immediately?"

If the answer is "no" then you clearly have bigger issues to deal with, considering you're offering the product for free. At this point you have to dig in and find out why. Maybe it's the case that while the current need is valid, there are simply higher priorities for the customer right now. In which case, your only issue is timing. But you may keep digging and find that there's something else. Anyway, repeat this with a few prospects, and you should start to converge on a valid understanding.

2. If the answer to question 1 was "Yes" (and I mean a solid "yes" not a bunch of hemming and hawing) then you next ask "OK, what if I charged you a million dollars for the product?"

Now... if the answer is still "yes", well, in that case you better have a purchase order ready to drop on your customer's desk Right Now. You've won, there's nothing left to do. Well, except for actually delivering the product, and successfully deploying, and integrating it, training users, creating value, etc. But in terms of sales, that would be the "Holy Shit" moment.

Probably not gonna happen though. Probably they'll start hemming and hawing and going "Well, uh... I mean, I dunno, a million dollars is a lot of money...", etc. That's OK. That's not a "no", it just means you now have an idea that the value your product represents to a customer is somewhere between 0 and a million dollars. If you find yourself in this situation, the (huge) body of material out there on sales, pricing and negotiation comes into play. But assuming you can get your customer to a "yes" at a number that would be profitable for you, then you now know that you have a product that can be sold to at least one customer for a profitable price. If you get this far, you're in pretty good shape. If the product actually exists, go ahead and sell it. Use the money to fund further exploration. Keep iterating. If it doesn't exist yet, promise the customer you'll let them know as soon as it's ready and keep iterating. Asking for a non-binding letter of intent to purchase might be useful if you're going to seek external funding.

What's your advice on doing this for products in rapidly changing markets?

Example: Say you are an AI graduate who has worked in AI for a while before ChatGPT.

Suddenly a competitor spins up something you were also developing - faster with ChatGPT - no problem, you launch it too.

One month later, 20 more competitors have popped up, but none really gained too much share. It seems ok.

Two months later, a competitor with funding launches, but now the product is free.

You start losing users to FreeComp, who also buy conference attention.

Your users say well, if you add this advanced feature - then we'll pay - but not now we can go to FreeComp.

Can you trust that? For how long? How would you weight it?

This is why I dislike when people gloss lovingly on product market fit. PMF is only part of the problem, an interesting indicator, and possible decision making support construct. But that's it.

Markets change, many evaporate or at least lead an accerated decay. Sometimes you double down on the decaying market, as the correct decision. Organizations have abandoned products, markets, or even invested in complete pivots as a result.

There's single right answer.

Your competitors almost never matter. Most products fail because they a) never ship or b) don't solve an important problem.

If you're paying attention to your competitors, you're probably not paying enough attention to your customers.

If your customers are really just turned on by the latest shiny object, they're not customers, they're fad followers. Don't bother with them.

I think you need to have a better distribution strategy than your competitors

And don't ask friends or family.

Elicit feedback by starting with the premise of "How does this suck right now?"

I would go even further and say every answer to any question that includes hypotheticals is useless, unless you already have a deeply trustful previously-established business relationship with the person you're asking. Ultimately, the only useful things are actions, cash, and signatures.

>Will you install this right now to get started with the free trial?

>Will you hand me the money so I can hand you the keys?

>Will you sign this contract here so we can start with shipping and installation?

And they really aren't even questions. We can rephrase them as simple trades/exchanges:

>You get: a free trial; I get: you at the start of my sales funnel

>You get: the keys; I get: the cash

>You get: the product/service; I get: your legal commitment to pay me

I think it's important to differentiate between market and product research. "Market research" for me is much more high level. I'm looking for competing companies/products, what are they doing? what can I do better? how they are positioned (budget, middle of the road, premium)? I'm trying to get a feel for how large the market is (in $ and # of users), etc.

"Product research" is talking to prospective users/customers. For me, early stage conversations are me trying to understand the customer's problem and how painful it is, not immediately going in with a solution in mind.

Rather than "I've a got a tool that will update your menus on your website", I'm asking "I noticed your website menu is not up to date, why?" "Is it hard to update? Is it expensive? too time consuming? does anyone really care? do you care? does having an outdated menu impact sales?"

Once you've talked to 10's of customers (at minimum), you think you understand the problem, and even have a solution, only then start getting feedback on your proposed product. Do NOT build anything before having customer conversations.

Some general research tips:

- Family and friends in the industry

- Twitter and reddit (looking for complaints, wish lists, people asking for alternatives)

- Product review

- Industry specific publications and forums

- If you've got serious cash, expert interviews and surveys through GLG insights or similar

- Finding people on Linkedin and ask to have a conversation

This is a really useful post thank you

Is there a suggestion for reaching out to public officials?

Is there a list of these areas?

>Is there a suggestion for reaching out to public officials?

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I assume you're trying to find government customers? Some agencies are far more proactive, easier to deal as it's in their mandate to help businesses. An example would be a Chamber of Commerce. Try and get someone within an agency onboard to advocate for you.

You could try finding gov employees on Linkedin as a more direct route. Another option is to try contacting your local elected officials and ask for help, that's what they are there for.

If you are having difficulty in your outreach, you can try finding ex-gov employees or service members who can help you navigate bureaucracy.

Don't overthink it, just get out there and talk to people. The more the better. In my experience, the limiting factor on day 1 is a lack of information, so your job is to learn until it's fairly obvious what to do. Thinking doesn't really generate new data, only action can, so walk into every restaurant you come across, write cold emails, etc.

As far as how to conduct these sorts of interviews goes, a few people have mentioned the mom test - it's v short and simple but it is indeed good. People, for the most part, avoid conflict and so don't give you honest feedback. Instead they tend to be complimentary, but non-committal. As a result, you need to be a little indirect in your line of questioning, and pay more attention to what they do than what they say.

When it comes to testing a product, try and deliver the value manually instead. Businesses don't buy software, they buy solutions to problems. Software is just a way to deliver the solution to many customers. If you can't convince someone to pay you to keep their menu up to date by hand, they won't pay for your software to do it either. Perhaps you convince them to give you the relevant credentials to update menus across platforms yourself, and then they email you when something changes, or you give them a google form, or you go into the restaurant every day and ask what's new. Not everyone is open to working with someone in a scrappy way like this, but you'd be surprised.

You can easily serve a handful of customers manually like this, which will give you the data you need to decide if it's worth it, and the data you need to build the product.

Anyway, good luck!

Okay take this with a big bucket of salt, took a year off from work last year and my initial idea was build something(failed miserably, total disaster, will try again sometime in future) but since I was totally unaware of how the whole marketing and market research thing works, I tried summarizing [0] everything at a very high level to get started, it helped a bit both when trying to build whatever the heck i tried to build and also to have a general understanding of the steps. hope it helps :)

[0] : https://blog.geekodour.org/posts/market_research/

Excellent summary, clear, concise, complete. Well done!

I know you didn't ask this way but I can tell you how NOT to do it and how to avoid a lot of pain.

Don't just build the product in the hopes that people will come to you. Aside from doing market Research et Al, it's equally important that you figure out if you will be able to "market" the product. If you don't have a thoroughly planned GTM strategy that's peer reviewed by people who understand your market, you might end up with a great solution but no access to potential buyers.

An example would be if you target enterprise but know that enterprises would never buy from you because you're too small or not trustworthy, you need a way to overcome this hurdle.

Or, you're targeting individuals but there's a competitor with $300M funding who owns all marketing channels. You might not be heard in the noise.

I once was the dev lead working for a mid size non tech company. The company found the perfect product to meet their needs. It was built by an Indy developer. If we signed the contract with him, we would represent 60% of his revenue.

The director of IT and CTO were reticent to base their entire data capture system that was going to be rolled out to thousands of field workers to him.

I suggested that they only sign the contract if the developer was willing to put their entire codebase in escrow and agree that we had a non exclusive right to the code under license.

Everyone agreed and the lawyers talked and made it happen.

I led a quarterly validation of the code in escrow. He would come onsite and I would watch him download the code from the escrow company and build it from scratch and deploy it and I would do a smoke test.

Did this arrangement work out for everyone?

They gave him a shit ton of money and he started focusing more on the company’s needs.

I had the idea from being on the other side. I worked for a small struggling startup 3 companies before then where our major customer had us do the same.

When we were bought for scraps, the customer exercised the right to the escrow and the customer negotiated the rights from the acquiring company to let me work for them under contract.

I made out like a bandit. I was one of the only three people in the world who knew how to compile and maintain the proprietary VB like mobile development platform - an SDK, a VM (something akin to the JVM)

What marketing channel did they use to find the dev?

He wasn’t a consultant. He wrote software that made it easy to develop data capture forms on iOS and Android. They had already done the initial contract before I got there.

I was brought in as the dev lead for the next phase, integrations as we acquired companies, migrations, etc.

I don’t know how they original found the software. But it became much more crucial as they expanded and the company I was working for was aiming to go public.

The counter to this is "analysis paralysis". Better to get good at building stuff than spend all your time trying to come up with the perfect product.

I've seen people invest 100k+ and years in products that never had a market but I've also seen people invest no money and years in talking about "stuff".

Here what has worked for us:

Talk to potential customers and use very open ended questions. Be upfront that you are doing market research about delivery app usage in restaurants. Start with something like "How is using delivery apps going for you?" The opener the question the better. Most people love to complain. So your hope is that they rant about their biggest problem. If they don't ask about other areas until they start ranting.

After you found a problem, ask follow up questions about how the problem is impacting them personally. (People don't care about their company, they care about their salary, promotions, if their boss likes them etc.) This will help you later in selling your product, when you call back the person 3 months from now with a prototype.

When you have a concrete product or prototype that you show off, the best indicator is that people ask if they can buy the product right now. If they don't or you have to ask them if they are interested it's probably not solving an important problem for them.

PS: This works for B2B. B2C is probably different.

Can you talk about the dichotomy for B2C? I ask since the small businesses like restaurants seem reminiscent of B2C.

Small business already have all the relevant characteristics of selling B2B. They have much more in common with a large multinational company than with a consumer, with regard to the sales techniques we use.

The main difference I see is, that with B2C you need to find a useful product and the rest is marketing. This is my simplistic view as somebody who doesn't do B2C. There is lots of nuance, but I believe you need a similar skillset for most B2C ideas.

B2B has a larger logical component to product design and sales pitch and a much more individualised emotional component.

The logical component is about what to sell to solve a specific problem. If you have different products that each increase a company's revenue by a million dollars, some of those won't sell for 0 dollars and for some you can charge more than a million. Why? Because the company doesn't make any decisions. The people within that company will buy what helps them and a sales representative will pay a million of the companies money to make a million more in revenue, because his numbers go up.

For the restaurants that means they might not pay anything for automation in regards to online delivery, because they don't even recognize how much time they waste. If they don't see a problem or only a temporary problem you won't sell your solution.

The emotional component is also very individual when selling B2B, because people have hidden agendas. They want a tool because their numbers go up and then they get a promotion. They want to start a project to make their boss pat them on the back. The want a tool that saves them time, so they can go home earlier and see their kids.

You see it's all about finding the right angle to solve a problem in B2B. It needs to solve some problem for the business and it must solve a big problem for the person you are selling to that they are emotionally invested in.

With restaurant owners it might mean that saving the owner two hours a week is worth nothing to them because they still need the same number of employees and it's not their two hours but their employee's.

After defining your target audience and doing a competitor analysis, build a quick landing page with a waitlist. Try to drive traffic there with social media posts (and maybe with paid ads). Loosely said, the more people signup your waitlist, the more they want to pay for your product.

Anecdotal, I once planned to build a sports related mobile app with music platform integrations. I scraped together a BuyMeCoffee page and wrote an extensive Reddit post about the app idea. The post got hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours — and three people even paid via BuyMeCoffee!

It was quite easy to tell I had hit a jackpot. The idea failed though because Spotify's et al TOS' are quite hostile when it comes to commercial apps.

> Build a quick landing page with a waitlist.. I scraped together a BuyMeCoffee page and wrote an extensive Reddit post about the app idea.

That's a great idea, thanks for sharing

I've built several products for restaurants, all of which have failed. I came to the conclusion that restaurant owners are so burdened with "big challenges" like food and staffing that they don't have time even to think to consider resolving other issues. Furthermore, they're not fond of deliveries, as the majority of their income comes from alcohol sales.

One recommendation I have is to try manually providing this service to a few restaurants for a small fee. I didn't explore this approach - I simply gave up - but perhaps it might work for you. For instance, they could message you a photo of their menu, and you could update it across various delivery sites. By leveraging some AI and cheap labor, you might even be able to scale it up.

have you found smb success elsewhere? i can't seem to find smb to be able to pay enough attention to software solutions.

have ruled out enterprise and mid market as I'm bootstrapping with no clout.

I'm in the same boat right now, and the advice that's helped me is to focus on customer problems, not (yet) on solutions.

For example, you talk about "a problem with restaurants keeping their menus up to date." But is that a problem restaurant owners have? Or is it a problem you (as a customer) have? And regardless of whose problem it is, how big of a problem is it?

We can break it up into pieces:

1. Assume an up to date menu meant the restaurant had more customers. Would the restaurant be able to serve them? Obviously, if the restaurant is already full at peak hours, then more customers may not help. But what about restaurants that aren't full? Why do they not have enough customers? Is it because the menu is not up to date? Are there other possible reasons, and if so, could those lead to product ideas?

2. From the restaurant's customers perspective, what would they do to solve the problem? Would they switch restaurants if their favorite restaurant didn't have an up to date menu? How many customers would say, "I would eat at X more often if their menu was up to date"? What if all restaurant menus were always up to date? Would customers pay extra for that service?

3. One other entity to consider is the delivery app. Would they benefit from having up to date menus? Would people prefer a delivery app with up to date menus vs. competitors? Would that reduce churn for a delivery app? How much?

Of course, to get the answers to these questions you need to talk to restaurants, restaurant patrons, and delivery apps. But hopefully breaking it down can help guide the conversation.

Others have mentioned the mom test - I would like to mention Amy Hoy, “stacking the bricks” and in particular “the sales safari” method of qualitative research that she’s devised.

Some further reading/viewing on it here - https://stackingthebricks.com/video-sales-safari-in-action/

(I’ve written a book on the topic but I’d promote those others ahead of mine, any day.)

Could you me email me your book ( email in bio)

I feel like a weird industry has popped up that makes you feel like you can validate everything in advance. I think this comes from Product Managers in large, risk-averse companies that excessively try to minimize mistakes.

However, if you want to start a startup, you aren't optimizing for mistake minimization! You are figuring out if anyone cares as quickly as possible. You will only get true validation of this by seeing if people use your thing, and then iterating from there.

My advice would be - you have to _both_ talk to people and _at the same time_ create whatever your MVP is to launch as fast as possible. It might be a spreadsheet. It might be you doing stuff manually for them before building the software. Get something into their hands as quickly as possible.

I agree with this! I think its great that you're trying to ask people for advice but honestly you want to maximise your learning from your potential customers themselves! The book 'The Lean Startup' mentions "faster learning loops" where you try to build something as fast as possible, find out whats wrong, iterate. - Book summary here: https://tdevroome.medium.com/book-summary-the-lean-startup-2...

I agree with all of this.

The vast majority of people aren’t good at being visionary, most aren’t technical, and many will give you a default culturally-aligned answer (eg positive to be nice and conflict-averse, or negative because they are tired of dealing with sales and bullshit, for example).

Therefore having some sort of MVP (even as said just a spreadsheet, or a storyboard) to help people understand what you’re even talking about and envision it in action, would be very useful.

I built a tool that lets you chat with 375k user software reviews and ask about user pain points.

I put in a version of your question:

What should I build for restaurant owners to help them ease some of their operations?

And here is the first part of the answer it gave back:

1. One of the major pain points that restaurant owners face is the difficulty in managing and tracking orders from multiple delivery platforms. A software solution that consolidates orders from various platforms like DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub, and ChowNow into a single dashboard would be highly beneficial. This would allow restaurant owners to manage their orders more efficiently and reduce the chances of errors or missed orders.

You can use it here https://www.painfinder.co/

This is very cool, have you considered adding saveable/shareable threads to drill into specific topics? Have found that useful on OAI and other LLMs

It's a good idea and I should do it, because people ask the same questions and it would be better if they could just share the answers

I asked the following question - “What should I build to help consultants who know AWS to people who are willing to pay to dollar”.

How is the answer I got from your service different than the answer I got from ChatGPT?

Since anyone can enter the same question for both, I won’t bother posting the replies.

I tweaked your prompt:

How can I help consultants who have AWS skills meet potential clients that need their services and are willing to pay top dollar?

Here's what Painfinder responded with:

"1. One pain point that consultants with AWS skills often face is the challenge of finding potential clients who are in need of their services and are willing to pay top dollar. Existing software solutions in this space do not provide a comprehensive platform for connecting consultants with clients in a targeted and efficient manner. However, there are opportunities to address this pain point by leveraging the capabilities of existing software products."

The difference is in the reviews. If some of the scraped user reviews that are included in Painfinder speak directly to the question, the answer will be more specific and higher quality. If none of the reviews are relevant, it will give about the same answer as ChatGPT.

Reviews from where?

All I’m getting are hallucinations

Software review sites -- TrustRadius and TrustPilot

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If you want to create a B2B product, I would look for 1-star reviews in G2 and Capterra and see if you can solve these problems yourself.

You could also check what people are complaining about / asking help for in relevant subreddits and see if you can build a product around that.

Have you actually done this approach? If so, I'd love to hear more.

I ask because I often see the advice that people should look in the Shopify/Hubspot app stores for paid apps with lots of users/ratings and a low score, and while this sounds good, I've found very, very few apps that actually match these criteria. Typically a low score indicates a complaint that is outside of the technical scope that the app owners could address, and ends up being a weak signal imo.

Yes, I have used this for feature roadmaps.

I don’t do what you mentioned (ie. look for paid apps with lots of ratings & a low score), I look for any app with at least one 1 star or 2 star reviews and I also look for any problem (doesn’t have to be related to an app) in reddit or any forum.

To be fair, it’s quite a numbers game to dig for useful problems or insights.

A related video about the process is Amy Hoy’s Sales Safari: https://youtu.be/67JVkG4dpj4

Thanks, this is a good insight I hadn't considered.

So it doesn't matter if the app overall has a good rating, you're just looking for the signal that some subset of users isn't getting their needs met?

Yes, exactly!

Aren’t a litany of those reviews fake and written by competitors?

How do you trust a single 1 star review as validation?

YC Startup School puts out some excellent content. I recommend the whole series but in particular "How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas" [1] and "How To Talk To Users" [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th8JoIan4dg&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1iF1c8w5Lg&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

Offer to keep the menus up to date for them yourself, for a price. Now you know how much they’ll be willing to pay for a solution, and you’re in a nice position to develop your product from (that will replace you).

This is the answer for step 1. Figure out if there’s a market and figure out what that product is worth. You doing it manually is like a prototype but it’s actually providing value to your customers more than just hypotheticals without you spending resources building anything.

This approach is also forcing you to interact with potential customers. The value to you of those relationships is both quantifiable in terms of revenue but also unquantifiable in terms of learnings. Do as much as you can to learn about your customers and your product before spending anything on building it. This is the definition of MVP.

This really isn't something that can be answered easily in an Ask HN thread. This is a HUGE topic, about which many books have been written, many classes have been taught, etc. Any comments you get aren't even going to begin to start to scratch the surface of the surface.

That said, I'd suggest you start by reading The Four Steps to the Epiphany by @sgblank. His "Customer Development Process" is basically "market research" but by a different name, and with a slightly different focus than "traditional" market research.

While you're at it, I'd suggest also hitting up Alibris (or your favorite pirate e-book site, whatever) and pick up a cheap "Intro to Marketing" book. Doesn't matter which one, or what edition, but probably go for something written in the last 15 years or so. Even if it isn't super up to date, a lot of the basics will still be valid.

The book The Mom Test is also good and should probably be required reading at this stage.

If you want more, consider searching the HN archives, as a lot has been written on this topic here over the years.

First, you need to find your people. Then you need to understand their pain.

To find them, find professional organizations, newsletters, chamber of commerce members, whatever where they go and attend. Learn how they describe their space and what problems they talk about. If the problem you're solving comes up regularly, that's great!

Then you need to understand their pain. Ask them about it. Ask them what happened & what they did last time. Ask them what the consequences, costs, and results were.

Do NOT ask them to predict the future.

I wrote this up a long time ago: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/the-problem-with-would

What do you consider your competition? If a problem exists, there are a ton of people out there with some kind of solution they’re already using. You can likely beat the competition on one of three broad areas: price, quality, and availability. You can sell yours cheaper, yours can be better, or yours can be easier. Once you have that, you need to demonstrate that value to other people.

There are a ton of people who currently pay for your competitor’s product, and would gladly switch to yours. You need to find those people and demonstrate your product’s value to them. They will pay you instead of your competitor - that slice of the market now belongs to you, as long as you can keep it, because bear in mind there will always be a ton of people who can make a cheaper, higher quality, or more accessible version of your product.

You might also get lucky enough to stumble across a problem no one has solved yet, or else you might be clever enough to create a problem that your product solves. Those are once in a lifetime type opportunities, big risk versus big reward. Those are the things everybody dreams about that.

But you also don’t need those to get by - if you enjoy solving problems, you can get paid for it, and not invent the microchip or split the atom or chart the sea or the sky.

> There are a ton of people who currently pay for your competitor’s product, and would gladly switch to yours

If I’m a business owner, I’m not switching from “a well known piece of software that meets my needs” to a product built by a random indy developer to save money.

In your particular case, you have identified a problem (restaurant owners finding it difficult to keep their online menu's up-to-date).

Is the problem real? How did you find out? Talking to a few restaurant owners (who are keen to discuss) is the starting point. This will also give you insights into other adjacent problems (eg. why should I have to update my menu on my internal database and web portal?).

Is the problem worth solving? How often the restaurant owners need it? Is it important enough that they will pay for it? Do you believe you need to bill for it, or give it out for free to build the base for a future paying product?

As pointed out in the comments, go-to-market is really important. In your particular case, you have the opportunity for self-service acquisition, or via affiliates, or via partnership with Uber Eats, Yelp etc. to simplify on-boarding for restaurants. Go-to-market becomes a deal breaker as soon as you have a good product-market-fit.

Another thing to consider is the scope of the problem. While it may be true restaurants don't keep their menus up to date - you need to understand if that matters and how much. One way to assess this is to interview restaurant owners and ask them broad questions like "How do you keep your menus up to date?", "How much time does this take you?", "Who is responsible for doing this?", "Have you had an customer complaints due to inaccurate menus?", "Have problems with order items caused you to lose business? if so, how much?", "What solutions have you looked for already to solve this problem".

This last one is especially useful because if they never looked for a solution its a signal this isn't a real problem. There are millions of problems in the world and most of them are not worth solving because they don't actually matter that much. That's an important angle to think about.

My best advice is to research competing products and what people have to say about them.

If it's a physical product, Amazon reviews are an incredible resource. If it's a digital/software product, use Google to search for "Alternatives to X", and then research each alternative. Again, look at what people are saying about the product.

What you're looking for is a gap in the market that your product can serve. If everyone is complaining about price, is your product cheaper? If everyone is complaining about complexity, is your product easier to use? If everyone is complaining about a lack of features, does your product have those missing features?

You don't need a product that solves every problem for every person. You're looking for a few key problems that you can solve better than anyone else.

If your product doesn't solve any problems better than the competition, move onto the next idea.

This is great advice and i love this idea and one thing that scares me the most is that what if it’s already done before then i change my perspective i think its good to compete as its healthy for business

Absolutely. As long as you're doing something that solves some problem better than the competition.

For example, some might argue that Apple products are the best. Others might say Dell or LG or whatever.

But there's no product out there that solves everybody's problem perfectly.

Even if Apple really did make the best computers, we can probably agree there's room in the market for cheaper products.

But if you're trying to sell a product that isn't better in some way, you're going to have a hard go of it. Your product needs to be the best solution for some segment of the market, even if it's a niche slice of the market.

100 % agreed with you on that

Everyone is figuring it out and there's no one 'true' answer. The earlier on you are, the simpler your assumptions might be to test; they become more complex over time.

The first question to ask is to understand where you're starting from in your knowledge of the problem. What is the objective of your research?

Assuming you know who your competitors are and your objective is to know their shortcomings to differentiate your product, you might need to do this as there may be many products in this space.

Try to find places where people have spoken about the shortcomings of your competitors' product online. This should give you an initial baseline of some problems you might want to solve first, or at least some problems to validate because you assume no one else is addressing them.

Use the insights gained from that research as the answer to an equation where you've been given the answer first but are now looking for the question it answers.

Generate questions to help validate whether that's the right problem to solve. Start finding people to speak with on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., ask questions and gain insights. Do they match? Is there anything new? Which problems seem the most painful for the person you spoke to? Validate that on social media and repeat the cycle.

You can get help at: https://contrarian.ai, where they are looking for a few customers to work with to start validating their hypothesis.

First, forget about whatever thing you're planning on building. It's almost certainly the wrong thing. Second, get a job at a restaurant that deals with delivery apps. Third, observe restaurant owners and think about how you might sell to them. Fourth, based on your time at the restaurant, consider what product you might build to sell to them. Last, build a product.

Source: Me, having wasted years and countless thousands getting it wrong before starting to get it right.

A really good read: “The mom test” to teach you how to conduct customer interview. There is a lot of things to learn from it that I did not suspected but that are really important.

There is only one reliable way to do market research, and that is to sell the product. Find a restaurant with an outdated website. Go into the restaurant and take a paper menu and create a website with the updated menu, make the website responsive, if you can't upload the information to Yelp, screenshot the Yelp page and replace the prices and photos with Microsoft Paint.

Walk into the restaurant and sell it to the owner. If he buys it, congratulations! Now you have to go build it.

Identify your target audience: In your case, it would be restaurant owners who struggle with keeping their menus up to date on delivery apps and online platforms.

Define your research objectives: Determine what specific information you want to gather through your market research. For example, you may want to understand the challenges restaurant owners face in updating their menus or their willingness to adopt a new solution.

Conduct competitor analysis: Research existing products or services that aim to solve similar problems for restaurant owners. Analyze their features, pricing, customer reviews, and overall market share.

Gather feedback from potential customers: Reach out to restaurant owners through surveys, interviews, or focus groups to gather insights about their pain points, needs, and preferences related to menu updates and online platforms.

Test your product concept: Create a prototype or mockup of your product idea and present it to potential customers for feedback. This will help you validate whether your solution meets their needs and if there is sufficient demand for it.

Analyze the data: Once you have collected data from your market research activities, analyze it to identify patterns, trends, and key insights that can guide the development of your product.

Refine your product strategy: Based on the findings from your market research, refine your product strategy by incorporating customer feedback and addressing any identified gaps or opportunities.

Remember that market research is an ongoing process that should continue throughout the development and launch of your product. Stay open-minded and adaptable as you gather insights from potential customers and make adjustments accordingly.

Good luck with your market research journey!

ChatGPT, right?

Come up with a list of questions and topics that you need to know more about that you would ask if you had access to key people in your target market. Instead of setting up interviews and meetings, run those by chat gpt (use gpt 4 for better results).

Take the answers with a grain of salt of course but mostly you might learn a thing or two as it is trained on a wealth of published articles and market research that you'll never get around to reading even a tiny percentage off. You can even ask it to suggest some follow up reading.

I recently had to figure out the airline industry as they are a potential customer for our product. My questions related to understanding what kind of cost bottlenecks they are facing in their operations and how our product should be best positioned to address problems they have. So I simply asked chat gpt about common causes for flight delays and other cost factors, top n cost bottle necks, etc. I was able to get some very detailed insights out of it fairly quickly. So, when we did talk to our potential customer, we already knew a lot about their business.

If the restaurant's idea is your idea, it is a good business.

But the real money is not on the monthly fee you will charge restaurants to update their menus. That you can give for free.

The money is in automating their purchases and delivery of ingredients they need to run their restaurants. If you already know what they serve and have a system running their backend, it's easy to do that.

And everyone in this business knows one of their main pain points is purchasing ingredients: it needs to be done frequently, fast, from a good supplier, preferably close to them, and at a good price. It's a hustle. They spend a lot of money, time and energy doing that.

There are fast-growing SaaS companies in Brazil making a lot of money in that area.

Would these be fully SaaS considering the operational difficulties? Or do 3rd parties handle the logistics.

Would really appreciate if you could share some of these Brazilian companies as English google did not yield any results.

Sure! One of the hottest ones is called Zak.

They just received a $15 million check from Tiger Global and other top VC funds in Latin America. Here are some news articles in English:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/10/digital-restaurant-startup...

https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/tiger-global-leads-15...

https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/zakpay-series-a--b9...

Their website is in Portuguese only, but I think you can ask Google Chrome to translate it:

https://www.zak.app/

Hope it helps!

It’s not just about building a product. If you can build the product, there are probably 50 people that could build the same product that are reading your question.

What is your “unfair advantage“? What do you bring to the table that hundreds of other developers couldn’t do?

You conduct a statistically valid survey among your target audience.

If you have the resources, conduct qualitative research like focus groups or individual interviews too.

There are thousand of market researchers like me that do this for a living. Find one you trust and ask them for help.

I was is in a similar position some time ago (albeit with a very different product).

Long story short: Understanding the complexities of why a certain problem remains under-addressed was difficult in our case. As a result, we ended up pivoting into the direction of helping (potential) founders validate ideas through a specialized search engine of startups. We just launched a beta version of this on https://www.symonda.com - while many features are still lacking, maybe it can still be a useful resource.

How is this different than searching crunchbase or pitchbook for a list of companies?

Our goal is to help people discover, test and validate startup ideas. We believe that a powerful free-text search engine is the best way to achieve this.

At this time, we focus on helping people find companies via their product and service offerings and not so much on 'who they are' (i.e. company characteristics, investors etc..). This is a fundamental difference to those platforms you mention.

hmm the examples on the landing page are simply categories which crunchbase search has well.

I take it ya'll are indexing the descriptions and/or functions of the companies as well?

any query suggestions to highlight that difference in indexing?

great work

As you already have a niche in mind (restaurants that are already on delivery apps), you can make a list and try to approach them.

How I'd do that (consider it a brainstorm):

- I'd build a simple prototype

- If I have friends in the niche, I'd approach them and ask for feedback

- I'll actually ask them who is managing their menus and marketing. It makes sense to try finding agencies (these could be graphic or print agencies) that print the menus. They can get you in touch with restaurant owners and maybe they know something about keeping menus up to date.

- I'd write down what their struggles are. For example - expensive to update high-quality printed menus, challenge to maintain onsite digital menu, challenge to match current availability with online platforms, etc.

- See if any of the issues they're referring to, does actually relate to the hypothesis you've built. If you're not happy with the result, iterate.

- Play around with use cases - list a couple of use cases (Client orders online, client cancels online, client orders on the phone, order is paid but no availability, out of stock, etc). Observe the business processes surrounding these use cases in the restaurants and see how your solution (or hypothesis) might fit there.

- If you don't feel threatened by the delivery apps, try approaching them. They are usually pretty well-connected with the restaurants and know a lot of their pain points.

- If you can afford it, spend some time in real observations (I'd do that by sitting around a friend who has a restaurant and accepts orders).

If you have a prototype that you believe can be validated, try it with a restaurant. If you're unsure how to approach a restaurant owner, manager or staff, just go there and order some food. Then present yourself and express curiosity. My experience is that if they are not busy and if you don't ask for money, they could be talkative. The more you order, the more talkative they get.

Be very careful what you promise for free to the restaurants. They might ask you to build them a website or help with Windows update.

Good luck! Hope you got some insights.

All I can say is nobody answers online surveys anymore it seems :( I tried and failed hard with that. Speaking it people directly gave me more insights.

The best approach is to build a prototype and test the waters.

Did you speak directly through cold email ?

Ideally you are part of the market in which your product exists. That is really the only way to make it big imo. Or you need to have friends, family who are in that space and you have known for long.

Start with the question of whether this will solve a big enough problem for your target audience that they'd be willing to pay for it?

In your example case - most likely not. The problem is there, but menus going out of sync on delivery apps probably doesn't generate enough troubles to be worth paying for.

Follow-up with if they will be willing to pay, how much? Then take that number multiply it by the audience size and see if it's worth it.

These two questions tend to eliminate the vast majority of half-baked ideas very quickly.

This is less of an answer to your how question and more of a validation/market research to the restaurant idea you have.

I went to techstars with the cofounders of Nextbite (ordermark at the time) and they did very well in consolidating orders from all the online platforms for the restaurants. I don't know if they ever took on menus, but I do know that restaurants struggle with keep up to date with all the food apps. So, seems like your idea has some market validation! Good luck.

My anecdote:

I built a product without all the research, focus groups and whatever else they say you have to do. I needed the product, I could see clear as day that other people would too.

Yes, a good idea still needs to make it to people's eyes and ears, but IMO, if an idea is good enough that you can't pass up doing it -- do it. You probably won't regret it, regardless of the outcome.

Just start selling it, even though you haven't built it yet. If it's successful then your first few customers will be disappointed because you don't deliver well, but by definition if the market demand exists there will be lots of other customers you can delight in the future. If the market demand doesn't exist (or you are bad at selling, etc...) this is the fastest way to find out.

I realize that it's probably not productive to invite a whole digression here on the whole "fake it till you make it" philosophy, but I can't help but feel that it's reckless.

Sooner or later (we may already be past that point), serious buyers will just stop speaking to anyone at all who even just remotely gives off the vibe of being a bootstrapped startup, assuming they're all just hustlers who won't deliver.

When conducting market research for a product, it's crucial to combine both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Surveys, data analysis, competitor analysis, and customer interviews can provide valuable insights. Additionally, exploring online forums, social media, and industry reports can help uncover trends and customer preferences.

1. Ask people how much they will buy it (with their money), not if it's a good idea. 2. When they don't want to buy, ask why.

I've built a product and have been building it slowly for over 3 years now and have got 3 paying users with $100 MRR. It's a boring product, already validated but a big market but also big competition.

I'm still figuring out how to market it and attract more users to it.

Though this doesn't discourage me from continuing to improve and build the product.

What's the product?

Don't build software for restaurants, unless you know a brand name in the industry that would vouch for you. Speaking from a position of failure and success (incidentally with the same product).

Test multiple ads with different versions of what you think people want and see which ones convert best.

Use an appointment booking funnel and when you talk to people you can learn more about what they actually need.

don't do market research. https://www.pretotyping.org/

Talk to users and ask if they would give you x$ for this.

create a landing page with a signup form (just an email is fine) and on the landing page state what you are offering, what your product is, what your SaaS will do, etc. Gauge interest that way. Bonus: Think of a price you think is fair, double it, then add it to the page and gauge interest.

Then post it to hacker news ;-).

when participating in a startup workshop, they told us to go outside and talk to 100 ppl.

Having dealt with the very problem and market you’re thinking of penetrating I would actually walk away right now. Go talk to 5 engineers from POS, delivery, or QR companies. Restaurant owners will tell you whatever you need to hear. This is an exception industry, where I highly recommend talking to industry veterans over restaurant owners. This problem is a siren song to optimistic entrepreneurs and bright eyed engineers that haven’t had their hearts ripped out by one of the most hostile industries to startups.

The whole restaurant industry tech stack is built on closed APIs and POS systems that sometimes have no API. Plenty of POS and delivery services will not even consider granting API access until you have a substantial number of restaurants on your platform. Or charge you 10k-50k for a license to their sdk.

That’s just starting with access.

The next obstacle your product is going to have to deal with is a complete lack of standardization across products and platforms. Omnivore tried to solve this but ended up with a joke of a product.

Menus look easy right? Here are some of the nuances to consider. Does the menu support options or price variations? Variations are things like large medium small. Modifier groups are things like temperature, sides, etc. some POS systems support nested mods, Doordash for example let’s you have up to 7 mods in their API. Consolidating this with a POS that has no support for nested mods, will not be trivial. What about combos? Toast, and Square deliberately chose not to support combos due to the complexity but anyone coming from a Micros systems will demand combos. Are you going to support chits? If so do you have experience with esoteric kitchen printers to test kitchen and receipt printing with? Oh yeah, everyone writes their own proprietary drivers for printing shit, so good luck there. What about when restaurants have entirely different schedules for their delivery menu vs in house menu. How do you plan on handling things like deliberately out of sync holiday menus. Then you have the whole thing of access control. Some items are meant to only be orders by managers and not appear on digital menus. Are you thinking of doing enterprise? Great, you’re going to need to deal with inventory management systems too. Not only, you have to convince those players to integrate into you. These are small examples. If you try to build a universal machine for menus, you are going to have to come up with a generalized menu format that spans nearly 40 years and tens of millions of lives of code of feature creep. Then you’re going to have to deal with convincing everyone to work with you in an industry that’s main form of competitive advantage is anti-interoperability. If you crack this problem, let me know, I wanna invest.

The last thing you’re going to have to contend with is the user. Unless you are going extreme SMB (no margins). Who you sell your tech to will not be who uses your tech. This introduces a myriad of problems. Restaurants are revolving doors. The cost to retrain a new manager and not have your system ripped out by someone who hasn’t used it every 6 months is not a joke. Oh also, get ready to lose your nights and weekends to tech support.

I think so many tech people have walked into the restaurant space with a simple view of the space only to get burned. Myself included. I wish someone on the tech side had sat me down before I started one of these particular projects. The source of truth in a restaurant is whatever is in stock and whatever the manager feels like. Tech wise, it’s mostly the POS and they are extremely verticalized for a reason. Good luck! Hope this helps.

Wow that is one of the most informative HN posts I've read to date.

Thank you for sharing.

What are your thoughts on TOST? Further, when you talk about your purchaser not using your end product isn't that most SaaS businesses e.g. the person who purchases a crm will likely not be the user.

Lastly, I'd sincerely appreciate your thoughts on the supply side of the industry if possible. My email is in bio.

Sorry, I just saw this. I’ll email you now. Happy to share my experience and answer any questions you have.

-Jamie

Check with Clover or other pos companies, that might help you.

Helpful ideas in thread. Thanks!

Try to check with Clover or any other pos companies, that might help you.

really good info

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