z-market-research

Market Research

Scan a market in a fixed order, evidence every claim, and hand back a digest — not a strategy essay.

Scan order

1. Competitor discovery — direct search patterns ("<category> software", "<category> tools 2026"), comparison/review sites (G2, Capterra, AlternativeTo), launch platforms (Product Hunt, BetaList, Show HN), and "<competitor> alternative" / "<competitor> vs" queries to surface who else gets compared against whom.
2. Pricing-page teardown — capture every tier verbatim: name, price, billing period, currency, seat/usage limits, feature gates. Don't normalize currency or round numbers; record what the page shows, note the annual-vs-monthly toggle discount if present.
3. Positioning read — pull the vendor's own headline, tagline, and top feature callouts. Label these as vendor claims, not verified fact — a pricing page describes intent, not measured outcomes.
4. Demand signals — search-volume proxies (cite the tool used, e.g. Google Trends direction, a keyword tool's estimate), community threads (Reddit/HN/niche Discord/Slack search for the pain, quote representative complaints with links), job postings (a company hiring for a role tied to the problem signals budget exists).

ICP hypothesis

For each candidate ICP state: who (role, company size, vertical), pain (the specific job-to-be-done), current workaround (spreadsheet, manual process, a competitor, nothing). Treat it as a hypothesis until at least one source — a community thread, a job post, or a competitor's own positioning — backs it. An ICP guess with zero backing sources is a gap, not a finding.

Evidence rules

• Every claim carries a URL and the date it was fetched.
• Absence of data is a finding: state what was searched and that nothing turned up, don't skip the question.
• No numbers from memory — pricing, volumes, and benchmarks come from the fetch, not recall.

Digest output format

Reproduce this shape for the final digest:

<digest-template>

Question

<the question this research answers>

Answer

<2-5 deciding facts, each with an inline source link>

Competitors

Gaps

<what was searched and came back empty, or where confidence is low>

Sources

<title>(<url>) — fetched <date> </digest-template>

Do not

• Pull pricing, volumes, or feature claims from memory instead of a live fetch.
• State a vendor's marketing copy as fact instead of labeling it a claim.
• Skip the Gaps section because nothing was found — absence of data is the finding.
• Write a strategy recommendation, pricing model, or GTM plan — that's downstream work.

Verify

• Every row in the competitor table has a source URL and fetch date.
• Every ICP hypothesis names at least one backing source or sits in Gaps.
• The digest has all five sections, even when a section is short.

does not design pricing or GTM; it supplies the market facts