Best market research: consulting or interviews. Thoughts?
Had the idea to do some consulting for my target market.
--Anyone have thoughts or opinions on doing consulting vs interviews for a target market?--
I realize that the consulting bit will still involve cold calls/talking to folks. The big difference to me is that consulting allows for wording like: "help you automate your current workflows" vs interviews: "will get back to you with the findings of my research"
Both have their place, but there's a step that often gets skipped before either: passive signal mining.
Before spending time on consulting calls or interviews, I've been extracting pain points directly from Reddit — structured scraping of high-signal threads, then scoring each pain point by frequency × emotional intensity. It takes 2-3 days and gives you a priority map of what people are actually struggling with, in their own words.
The output isn't a replacement for interviews — it's a pre-filter. You go into your consulting calls or user interviews already knowing which 3 pain points are worth probing deeper, instead of fishing blind.
In my experience, this cuts interview time in half and makes the questions much sharper. The emotional language people use in Reddit comments ("I've tried everything," "this is driving me insane") is often more honest than what you get in a formal interview setting.
I did both.
Recently I introduced deep-dive reports in our Micro SaaS HQ ecosystem with a lot of data points around each niche. This will be the kind of market research you are talking about.
On the other hand, I am also building Founder Beats - Founder Insights with hundreds of interviews from founders clustered across various niches and product types.
Hope that helps!!
If you are going to be conducting any interviews.
Make sure you use this no-nonsense list of words and phrases so you can focus on problems vs solutions:
These are great suggestions. I'll definitely use them.
Since we can classify consulting as a "custom fit solution" instead of a "productized solution", I'd guess it also would require its own customer/market research.
You might use it as a verification system or a deeper customer research system but I assume its overall cost (depending on your acquisition cost and time cost) might be higher than interviews. Yes, you would be paid in consulting but each iteration of research will be a bit infrequent, your total research time would be longer.
But again, the depth of insights might be much better.
I had the same thoughts with regards to greater depth of insights. Though I see your point about extra market research and acquisition cost.
Given that you are currently doing market research, I'd go for the interviews.
Companies are already skeptical about consultants unless they have a pressing need. If you don't know why/how you are doing to add value to them, the consulting pitch will be a hard sell.
Fair point!