- How do you conduct world-class market research?
How do you figure out who your competitors are?
How do you understand how to price your product?
That is what I'm gonna teach you guys
how to do in this video.
I'm gonna teach you the strategies to get that information
as fast as freaking possible because in my world,
speed is everything.
When I was starting my company, Clarity,
it was a marketplace for entrepreneurs
to get expert advice over the phone,
and every time I would share it with somebody
that kinda knew this space or were in the startup world,
they'd always mention this guy Karl Jacob's name.
So eventually, I emailed him.
I was like, "Hey, Karl.
"Every time I share my idea with investors
"or other entrepreneurs, your name keeps coming up.
"Do you have a few minutes to chat?"
And I gotta tell you, that first meeting
was probably the most informational, jammed-pack 15 minutes
of the whole time I was building Clarity
because Karl had already built a company
back in the late 90s, early 2000s
that did something similar for a different market segment
using a totally different technology stack,
and he had the experience.
He understood the competitors.
He understood who were people today that we doing it
because again, his name kept coming up.
So anybody that tried something similar,
they also went to Karl.
So after I showed it to him, the cool part was
is Karl eventually became a formal advisor to Clarity.
But I share that with you because it really
showed me a faster, better way to conduct market research,
and in this video, I'm gonna share with you
three other ones that are world-class,
that will really take things to the next level for you.
The first one is leveraging university students.
I don't understand why every business doesn't use this.
There are MBAs, business, there's marketing students,
and all of them need real world experience.
So that's where you come in.
If you approach the professor at the university,
and you can just go online and figure out who that is,
and just say, "Hey, I'd love to give
"a project for your students to do.
"I'm working on this new business idea"
or even a new maybe strategy or a specific
segment of the market you're currently in.
"I wanna give them a project that they can work on."
And obviously, whoever does the best one,
maybe there's an opportunity to hire them.
Maybe there's an opportunity for me
to be a good reference for them,
but leveraging university students
to get real, great market research.
You gotta understand they were taught how to do this.
For most entrepreneurs I know out there,
I was never taught how to do it.
I'd rather find people that are professionals
that have the supervision of professors
that are world-class to really get that information
that you need to grow your business.
So the first one is leveraging colleges, universities
to get the students to do the work for you.
The second one is actually hiring people online.
There are sites like upwork.com,
used to be Elance, where you can go search.
There's a category called "market research"
and "data research", "marketing",
and hire people for five bucks an hour
that have done this for hundreds of other companies
to go and spend tens of hours researching
the different competitors, the pricing models they've used,
the way they position the product,
and they gather all that information
into one document for you to understand
on how to understand your market in your startup.
I think that is probably the fastest way.
Something I use almost on a monthly basis
is just hiring somebody to do research for you
so that you can go work on things
that are uniquely qualified for you
to do from a productivity point.
It's amazing, it's fast, and it's information-rich.
The third one, which is kinda why I told you
the Karl Jacob's story, is finding founders
that have failed before, or in this case,
founders that have actually been successful.
Karl eventually sold that company
to AT&T for hundreds of millions of dollars,
and the reason why that's awesome
is those founders, if it's a few years removed
from the time they tried the company and it failed,
they're gonna be more than open on everything they've tried.
They're gonna tell you who are some
of the competitors at the time,
who they think the competition is today,
what was their vision, what was their roadmap,
how was the strategy laid out,
and then they'll also maybe tell you
about other people you can potentially hire,
or other companies they've seen now recently
that are kinda in the space that
could eventually pivot into your market.
To me, going to founders that have been successful
or failed in that space prior is a wealth of information.
And those are the three strategies
I wanna share with you guys.
One, leverage your local universities, colleges.
Give those students real world projects
so they can come out and actually be super valuable
to companies instead of just studying
a bunch of stuff in a book.
Second is making sure that you use these
online resources, like an Upwork,
to hire people wherever they are,
from Europe, from North America, that have the experience,
that do this hundreds of times a month
for other companies and let them do it for your company.
And then third is to find a founder that has failed
or succeeded in that business so you can
really learn from them the fastest way,
and again, the coolest part is
they may introduce you to other talent,
to partnerships, et cetera.
So those are the three ways for you to go
from no knowledge to knowing everything
about your market for your startup.
So if you feel this video is useful,
I'd love for you to share it with somebody
that needs to hear it.
As per usual, please like and leave your questions below
in a comment, and I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger live and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.