Market research sounds like something with a budget, a firm, a survey, a report you pay for and barely read. For a solo founder, that’s not the reality and never will be. The reality is you’ve got an afternoon, a laptop, and a nagging worry that you don’t actually understand your market as well as you should.
Good news: an afternoon and an AI sidekick is enough to fix that. Here’s a workflow.
Step 1: Size the demand
Before anything else, you want a rough sense of whether enough people want what you’re selling. You’re not after a precise number: you’re after a signal: is this a real, recurring need or a nice idea?
Ask Miles to map the demand around your offering, who has the problem, how they currently solve it, how often it comes up. In a few minutes you have a picture that would’ve taken a day of scattered Googling.
Step 2: Scan the competitors
You can’t position against a market you haven’t looked at. Have your sidekick pull together who else serves your space: what they offer, how they talk about it, what they charge, and, most useful, where the gaps are.
You’re hunting for the gap
The goal of a competitor scan isn’t to copy what works; it’s to find the angle nobody’s taken. The underserved niche, the frustrated customer segment, the thing everyone does badly. That gap is your opening.
Step 3: Sharpen your positioning
Now turn research into a sentence. Positioning is just being clear about who you’re for and why you’re the obvious choice. With the demand and competitor picture in hand, work with Miles to draft a few positioning options and pressure-test them:
- Who exactly is this for?
- What do they get from you that they can’t easily get elsewhere?
- Why should they believe you?
A solo founder who can answer those three crisply is ahead of most of their competition.
Step 4: Save it to memory
Here’s the step people skip, and it’s the one that compounds. Research you did once and forgot is research you’ll redo. Because Miles remembers, you can save what you learned: your target customer, the competitive gaps, the positioning you landed on.
Research that compounds
Next month, when you’re writing a campaign or deciding on a price, Miles already knows your market, you’re not starting from scratch. The afternoon you spent pays off every time the business needs to make a market-aware decision.
An afternoon, not a budget
You don’t need a research firm to understand your niche. You need a few focused hours, the right questions, and a sidekick that does the gathering and remembers the answers. Size the demand, scan the field, sharpen the angle, save what you learned, and walk into your market knowing exactly where you fit.