What is a market research tool
A research tool is ussually a web app that allows you to research populary of a specific topic.
Why not to pay
The usecaseses of market research tools are great and a lot of people have used it successfully to make money. The problem with most of them are I’ve found is that they cost substantial amount for small businesses who say they really need them. The problem is them is that they market themselves as the only tool a startup needs to decide who their custommers are and what do they need.
I’ve recently been reading The Lean Startup, which is even taught at Harvard Business School. You can get for free with Audible free trial and if you use this affiliate link you will support me. In this book Eric Ries writes about the first stages of successfull startups. He goes by telling his own experience from Silicon Valley. They’ve made a product with genial idea of creating new VR chatting app, which would gain it’s users from existing ones by creating addons that would allow their app to be used from any other chatting app. They built it with crazy amount’s of work done, big budget and clean code. Can you gues what happenned at launch of the app? Nothing. There were no users, even though he had other large businesses to support the app. What’s worse more when he interviewed the first custommers, they said that they aren’t going to use it. Partially because they didn’t even know how.
Why this happenes?
The initial mental map that you get from a market research tool is just an expression of one of Infinite custommer needs. Then you’ll put it together to create your hyphothese of a possible solution. The next part is what most of companies and especially startups struggle it. You need to first evaluate the idea. This is the hardest part. You can ask a custommer what he or want. Yes, but does a single custommer know exactly how your app should be built? Even if if he does, he probably doesn’t know about the needs of all other potentiall custommers your startup can have.
How to find what custommers want?
If asking custommers what they want is not enough to built a successful pruduct, what can you do? You need to test the idea. Innitial testing of ideas are done by creating the smallest MVPs that can prove or disprove your hypotheses. You’ll see which of the pruduct is actually usefull for them and if the new features that they’ll request are actually in line with what you are planning to build next.
Best free alternative
Of course there are reasons to pay those tools but the biggest and best tool from my opinion is Think With Google. This also includes many of their other subproducts like the well-known Google Trends, where you can find how popular a keyword is in different countries across the whole world.
Conclussion
Thanks for reading this far, I hope you’ll consider checking up with my affiliate link the great book which inspired this whole article - The Lean Startup.