Is Market Research Useful?
Market Analysis, swot analysis, and so on... are they really useful for starting a business? can you give me some examples?
Market Analysis, swot analysis, and so on... are they really useful for starting a business? can you give me some examples?
I don't think SWOT analysis is particularly useful at the early stages. Market analysis is a broad term that could encompass many types of analysis. I think the most important thing at the beginning is something called customer development. It's the act of finding where your target customer hangs out, reaching out and interviewing them; asking questions about how they currently solve the problem you're trying to solve for them. For example, I'm targeting newsletter creators (why? I thought it'd be a good fit for me). So I found newsletter creators online, emailed them and setup phone interviews. Then I asked questions about how they run their newsletter and what is hard about it.
A couple of good books related to customer development:
The Mom Test
Lean Customer Development
SPIN Selling
Also, if you want a general overview of what marketing is and how you should think about it, I'd recommend Strategic Marketing Management by Alexander Chernev. It's very dry and academic but it does help put a lot of things around marketing in perspective.
Thanks, I'll read it for sure. I'm really interested to understand these things, also because I don't get companies that offer services about "market analyses", how can you use their results
One use I can see of the market analysis can be when you reach the valuation stage - where you want to see how much your company could potentially be worth: is the market growing? by how much? how are competitors doing. So this could be used to prove the worth of your company to investors. But yeah, that would be a lot later stage.