Hacker Remix

Ask HN: When is it too little and when too much when you do market research?

3 points by pinter69 2 days ago | 5 comments

sandra_vu 2 days ago

It depends.

If you need to ask this question, then ship small to your audience first.

muzani 2 days ago

With vibe coding these days, you can just ready, fire, aim if it's simple enough. If it takes a month to do research, but a weekend to build a prototype, just build the prototype and show them to the customer.

codingdave 2 days ago

Even putting aside the wisdom or lack thereof of "vibe coding", this is still wrong. A weekend of AI generated code will still be better if it is informed by a few hours of prior conversation with customers.

And really, that is the answer to OPs question - you should keep your research in line with your coding efforts. Small coding == small research. Big coding == big research.

pinter69 2 days ago

Something I found that helps me is asking the question - if in retrospect the outcome of my plan will not be as positive as I have planned - will I regret not researching more right now.

But, this came with a lot of experience. In the beginning it's hard to imagine how and in what ways the outcome can be not positive and how it connects to the research today. And, I feel my experience is still lacking around this.

muzani 1 day ago

Research should not be done in surveys. The old way was at least a powerpoint presentation, vertical slice, or a wishlist. However, people have gone wise to wishlists. Prototypes are the new PPT and faster to set up.

Customer interviews tend to exclude a lot of things too. Do people want a browser without a million tabs open? Sure. Do people want a payment gateway that can be set up in an hour? That sounds like a scam, but why not? Do people want a game about a plumber jumping on tortoises who shoots fireballs whenever they eat a flower? Probably not.

I do believe people have a good idea of what they want to bring to the world and at some point it's just easier to show what they had in mind.