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.