Understanding customers’ needs with no customers

It's hard to understand real customers' needs, mostly when they are just a few and you don't have an easy way to contact them without annoying them. With this strategy, you will get the information you need only by looking into the right place on the Internet 🌐

First of all, you need to identify your competitors and the common features within each of them. Set up a table with two headers: "Competitor" and "Common functions" and fill it.

Now add for each row three new fields: "Reviews, Roadmaps and Plugins directory":

• Fill the first field with the competitors' pages on the major reviews sites: G2, Capterra, Trustpilot ...
• Fill the second field with each competitor's roadmap site, you can easily find them with a simple google search: "Site name - Roadmap/Coming Soon/Future updates"; they usually use a specific site to do that: Canny, Craft...
• Fill the third field only if the competitor allows external plugins in its platform. Write in it the plugins site directory.

All you have to do now is to analyze each site and find common customers' issues. During the analysis of reviews and plugins, you could find some hidden pain points that affect your market. Solve them and integrate the solution into your platform, by this you will be able to be the next big thing in your market 🚀

In your analysis, remember to sort your data by popularity and filter them for your buyer persona.