Dan Martell - April 04, 2016


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


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

216.27907

Word Count

1,054

Sentence Count

42


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.