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I’m sure a lot of you who have sought advice from business experts have been told by them that the first thing you should do is “market research”.  By this they mean a scientific study to determine if your business idea could possibly be made into a profitable business. While such a study does indeed have uses in the word of academia and is used by many large companies to determine investment opportunities, is it sub-optimal for a business start up.Such a study would involve questionnaires, interviews and focus groups along with desk research. There are two ways you could do this. The first one is to pay for a market research professional to do it. However, this is not practical for most start ups because it’s too expensive.

Secondly, you could do it yourself. However, in reality, this is not practical either. It will take months to put together a worthwhile study. When you have it completed, investors won’t believe it because you have done it yourself.  It’s not that they think you are not trustworthy, but that naturally, you are biased even if it’s just on a subconscious level.

Instead of doing scientific market research, I suggest that you do market research in conjunction with the day to day operation of your business.You should get to market as fast as possible and test and measure constantly. You cannot make any solid decisions without real market feedback. You must use this market feedback to change your product and make it better. This results in constant incremental improvement. Also, the main advantage of Organic Market Research is that you have an operating business with real market feedback. You will have traction and be in a much better position to get investment.

Instead of spending months doing market research alone, you spend it developing a real product (prototype, beta), getting early adopters and doing real world market research. It’s pretty obvious which type of market research wins.