Research for Startups

Often it's the point at which research is worth the most, because you still have the option to change direction. The cheapest research you'll ever run is the study that stops you building the wrong thing. What matters at this stage is scoping it small: one question, answered credibly, fast.

It depends on the question, the method, how hard your customers are to reach, and participant incentives. A focused validation study with a small number of interviews is a different order of magnitude from a full segmentation and pricing study. We scope to your budget and tell you honestly what it will and won't answer.

Focused studies can move in two to three weeks, and we've delivered full studies including recruitment, fielding, and reporting inside two weeks. Speed depends mostly on how hard your audience is to recruit: general consumers move fast, senior professionals don't.

You should, and founder-led customer conversations are genuinely valuable. Where we help is with the parts that are hard to do yourself: reaching people outside your network, asking questions that don't lead the witness, and hearing what a buyer who chose a competitor actually thinks. Founders are also the worst-placed people to run an unbiased test of their own idea, and that's true of anyone testing something they built.

A method someone can follow, sources that can be checked, and stated assumptions. Investors rarely challenge the number itself; they challenge how you got it. A sizing built bottom-up from identifiable customer counts and realistic pricing survives questioning that a top-down percentage of a large market does not.

The useful evidence is in what people do. They keep using it without being reminded, they describe it accurately to other people, and they'd be genuinely stuck if it disappeared tomorrow. Research helps by measuring that across all of your users, including the quiet ones you never hear from.

Yes. Market sizing, competitive positioning, and product-market fit evidence are standard components of a fundraise narrative, and we build them into investor-facing decks designed to hold up when questioned.

We do, though we can also work from your user list. We recruit to your screener across the US and internationally, verify participants qualify, handle scheduling, and administer incentives. Reaching people outside your own network is often the specific thing founders can't do alone.

Then it saved you the runway you were about to spend finding out the expensive way. In practice results are rarely a flat no; more often they point to a different buyer, a narrower use case, or a different price. That redirection is usually the most valuable thing the study produces.

Yes, and we'd usually recommend it. Start with the single question blocking your next decision. If the findings raise a bigger question worth answering, we'll scope the next study when you get there.