Dummies Guide to Startups - Research 101

"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work!" - Thomas Edison Continuing from the last post, lets focus on Research for a minute. Market Research is finding out about who else is in your space, what they're doing, how they're doing it, and how they stack up against each other. It is about checking to see if there's any demand for what you're offering and which bits of it your audience will really like. At it's simplest Research for startups is about:

• Segmenting (categorising) your competitors and audience
• Looking for trends
• Reading, reviewing and making notes - Online vs offline
• Capturing both qualitative and quantitative information
• Running Questionnaires, Surveys & Interviews
• Group discussions with stakeholders
• Subscriptions to research houses – Datamonitor, Forrester, Mintel
• Subscriptions to blogs and news related to your idea

Outputs usually include:

• Copied and pasted text and links from the web
• Mind maps - scribbles on paper
• Outlines and overviews in Word
• Comparison tables in Excel
• Screenshots with observation notes in Powerpoint
• Visual Diagrams - always a good bet if you can think that way!
• Stats and Graphs for the more ambitious
• The more reference material you have, the better your analysis will be.

I'd recommend using a tool to manage your notes - Evernote or OneNote, or something like Google Docs or Keep which is always available anywhere online or via mobile, and maybe a bookmarking tool to keep track of interesting links and stuff you may want to go back to one day.