How do you do market research?
Long story short: I'm solidly a software engineer, and tend to view problems in terms of the software I'd use to solve them. Right now, after around 14 months of freelancing I'm in a position to start working on a lifestyle business, but I'm having a hard time evaluating worthwhile projects.
My first pass at this, I thought about all the stuff I was good at building, until I realized that I'm more interested in trying something new - even ideas that are much lighter on software, and heavier on marketing and branding.
My second pass, I'm trying to gather information on the sorts of solutions people need - stuff I can build and sell in the $19-$49/month range. I'm less interested in picking a passion project, and more interested in doing market research and building something that I can actually sell.
Problem is, I haven't had to do market research before! I'm getting stuck. There seem to be so many options, but I feel like it would be better to pick one and commit to it for at least a few weeks. Any suggestions on a good way to go about this?
Do you want to do market research to find an new idea or to validate an idea you already have?
For the latter, I'm using these tools:
If you want to do research to get new ideas, I'll browse through all the software repositories I'd find:
There you'll find mostly installable software projects, but most of them can be transformed into an SaaS. After all it's just to get ideas.
Another great resource when brainstorming for software ideas are online magazines like lifehacker.com.
Going through software lists is an idea I hadn't considered, thanks!
I've been using Google's Keyword Planner Tool to find popular searches related to stuff I'm familiar with, and I found a surprisingly high amount of searches related to podcasting, so that's a strong contender for my next project.
I'd start with an area/industry/user type you know well and have credibility with, then strike up conversations to learn about how they work and what challenges they encounter.
As an example:
Since you are looking for an idea, I'd take a few minutes to sit down and think about what areas you're uniquely qualified to succeed in, and start your exploration there. I'm sure there will be many opinions on this topic, but that's mine!
Hey Wogan, thanks for sharing! May I know what is the problem you are trying to solve?
The problem I'm trying to solve is finding a problem to solve :)
I've got a lot of experience in a lot of different fields, and that's making it difficult for me to pick something to focus on. So I figured I'd try the opposite approach, and learn how to evaluate what the market needs, then just build that.
It can be a great problem to have :) Based on my own experience, it's great to do something that you know so much that others don't know about. You may wish to use this to pick out the thing to focus on. Looking forward to your updates.
Another way is to look for desktop applications that were written long ago (90's) and don't have a web version (or have poor web version). I remember looking at a particular desktop software, it was ... not nice, to put it mildly. And there was no web equivalent for it.
You can post specific questions, or even open ended questions on MTurk. These two sites do the same and they have collected a bunch of ideas, not sure how many are actually viable
https://www.oppslist.com/
https://nugget.one/
I'll check those out, thanks!
Porting desktop applications to the web - I kinda do that already :) A big % of my hourly dev work involves taking Excel-based processes and turning them into web apps. The downside there being, each company tends to have unique requirements and workflows, and it's a bit hard to generically productize that.
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