Dan Martell - How To Do Market Research For Your Startup (Market Research Techniques)

In this episode, we talk about how to leverage the power of market research to your advantage in your business. How do you leverage market research in order to understand your market? What are the best tools and strategies you can use to get the most out of your market research? How can you leverage the knowledge you already have about your market to help you understand your competitors and figure out who your competitors are? And how can you understand how to price your product?

00:00:00.240 How do you conduct world class market research?

00:00:03.240 How do you figure out who your competitors are?

00:00:04.760 How do you understand how to price your product?

00:00:06.760 That is what I'm going to teach you guys

00:00:08.520 how to do in this video.

00:00:09.880 I'm going to teach you the strategies

00:00:11.280 to get that information as fast as friggin' possible

00:00:13.440 because in my world, speed is everything.

00:00:16.360 You know, when I was starting my company Clarity,

00:00:18.200 it was a marketplace for entrepreneurs

00:00:19.720 to get expert advice over the phone.

00:00:22.080 And every time I would share it with somebody

00:00:24.000 that kind of knew this space or were in the startup world,

00:00:26.640 they'd always mention this guy Carl Jacobs name.

00:00:29.760 So eventually I emailed him, I was like,

00:00:31.260 hey Carl, every time I share my idea with investors

00:00:33.860 or other entrepreneurs, your name keeps coming up.

00:00:36.020 Do you have a few minutes to chat?

00:00:37.660 And I gotta tell you, that first meeting

00:00:40.380 was probably the most informational, jammed packed 15 minutes

00:00:44.900 of the whole time I was building Clarity.

00:00:46.720 Because Carl had already built a company

00:00:48.520 back in the late 90s, early 2000s,

00:00:50.820 that did something similar for a different market segment

00:00:53.120 using a totally different technology stack.

00:00:55.480 And he had the experience, he understood the competitors,

00:00:58.380 he understood who were people today that were doing it

00:01:00.620 because again, his name kept coming up,

00:01:02.320 so anybody that had tried something similar,

00:01:04.520 they also went to Carl.

00:01:05.920 So after I showed it to him, the cool part was

00:01:08.020 is Carl eventually became a formal advisor to Clarity,

00:01:10.780 but I share that with you because it really showed me

00:01:13.220 a faster, better way to conduct market research.

00:01:16.020 And in this video, I'm gonna share with you

00:01:17.880 three other ones that are world-class,

00:01:20.020 that'll really take things to the next level for you.

00:01:21.680 The first one is leveraging university students.

00:01:24.420 I don't understand why every business doesn't use this.

00:01:27.420 There are MBAs, business, there's marketing students,

00:01:31.460 and all of them need real world experience.

00:01:33.640 So that's where you come in.

00:01:34.880 If you approach the professor at the university,

00:01:36.900 you can just go online and figure out who that is,

00:01:38.600 and just say, hey, I'd love to give a project

00:01:41.160 for your students to do.

00:01:42.000 I'm working on this new business idea,

00:01:43.640 or even a new maybe strategy or a specific segment

00:01:46.860 of the market you're currently in.

00:01:48.240 I wanna give them a project that they can work on,

00:01:51.320 and obviously, whoever does the best one,

00:01:53.700 maybe there's an opportunity to hire them,

00:01:55.400 maybe there's an opportunity for me

00:01:56.580 to be a good reference for them,

00:01:57.940 but leveraging university students

00:02:00.120 to get real great market research.

00:02:02.020 You gotta understand, they were taught how to do this.

00:02:04.220 For most entrepreneurs I know out there,

00:02:05.760 I was never taught how to do it.

00:02:07.220 I'd rather find people that are professionals

00:02:09.260 that have the supervision of professors

00:02:11.860 that are world class to really get that information

00:02:14.360 that you need to grow your business.

00:02:15.500 So the first one is leveraging colleges, universities,

00:02:18.200 to get the students to do the work for you.

00:02:20.080 The second one is actually hiring people online.

00:02:23.040 There are sites like upwork.com,

00:02:25.100 it used to be Elance, where you can go search.

00:02:28.340 There's a category called market research,

00:02:31.100 data research, marketing, and hire people

00:02:34.600 for five bucks an hour that have done this

00:02:37.460 for hundreds of other companies

00:02:39.000 to go and spend tens of hours researching

00:02:41.420 the different competitors, the pricing models they've used,

00:02:44.640 the way they position the product,

00:02:45.980 and then gather all that information into one document

00:02:48.500 for you to understand on how to understand

00:02:50.760 your market in your startup.

00:02:52.220 I think that is probably the fastest way.

00:02:54.540 it's something I use almost on a monthly basis,

00:02:56.300 is just hiring somebody to do research for you

00:02:58.640 so that you can go and work on things

00:03:00.060 that are uniquely qualified for you to do

00:03:02.160 from a productivity point.

00:03:03.600 It's amazing, it's fast, and it's information rich.

00:03:07.220 The third one, which is kind of why I told you

00:03:09.440 the Carl Jacobs story, is finding founders

00:03:12.180 that have failed before, or in this case,

00:03:14.760 founders that have actually been successful.

00:03:16.360 I mean, Carl eventually sold that company

00:03:18.260 to AT&T for hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:03:20.560 And the reason why that's awesome is those founders,

00:03:23.640 if it's a few years removed from the time

00:03:25.260 they tried the company and it failed,

00:03:27.000 they're gonna be more than open

00:03:28.400 on everything they've tried.

00:03:29.940 They're gonna tell you who are some of the competitors

00:03:31.920 at the time, who they think the competition is today,

00:03:34.560 what was their vision, what was their roadmap,

00:03:36.340 how was the strategy laid out,

00:03:38.140 and then they'll also maybe tell you about other people

00:03:40.300 you could potentially hire,

00:03:41.700 or other companies they've seen now recently

00:03:43.920 that are kind of in the space

00:03:45.460 that could eventually pivot into your market.

00:03:47.880 To me, going to founders that have been successful

00:03:50.420 or failed in that space,

00:03:52.460 Prior is a wealth of information.

00:03:55.060 And those are the three strategies

00:03:56.060 I want to share with you guys.

00:03:56.900 One, leverage your local universities, colleges.

00:03:59.840 Give those students real world projects

00:04:01.960 so they can come out and actually be super valuable

00:04:04.800 to companies instead of just studying

00:04:06.100 a bunch of stuff in a book.

00:04:07.440 Second is making sure that you use these online resources

00:04:10.740 like an Upwork to hire people wherever they are,

00:04:13.520 from Europe, from North America,

00:04:15.680 that have the experience to do this hundreds of times a month

00:04:18.580 for other companies and let them do it for your company.

00:04:20.680 And then the third is to find a founder that has failed

00:04:24.180 or succeeded in that business,

00:04:26.180 so you can really learn from them the fastest way.

00:04:28.420 And again, the coolest part is they may introduce you

00:04:30.620 to other talent, to partnerships, et cetera.

00:04:33.500 So those are the three ways for you to go

00:04:35.400 from no knowledge to knowing everything

00:04:38.300 about your market for your startup.

00:04:40.360 So if you feel this video is useful,

00:04:42.040 I'd love for you to share it with somebody

00:04:43.300 that needs to hear it.

00:04:44.300 As per usual, please like and leave your questions below

00:04:47.280 in a comment, and I wanna challenge you

00:04:49.400 live a bigger life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.

Dan Martell - April 04, 2016

How To Do Market Research For Your Startup (Market Research Techniques)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript