Add That Human Touch
Market Research & Product Validation
Market research and validation to help you figure out who your product is for and where to find those people.
Essentially, this is going to show you where your real demand is.
I research your market, analyze potential customer groups, look at relevant online communities and competitors, and summarize the best opportunities for reaching your audience. Depending on the project, this can include audience polling, surveys, interviews, or outreach testing.
You receive a written summary with demand insights, target audience breakdowns, and recommended next steps for marketing, positioning, and funnel testing.
Projects typically range from $300 to $800, depending on the workload and scope of the project.
Payment Plans Are Available and Can Be Discussed.
Project Breakdown
Introduction
The Goal of this is to take my client from having a product with no clear customer base to knowing their exact customer base and how to reach them.
The process is as follows: steps taken to identify potential clients, an explanation of the primary demographic, an analysis of the primary demographic, and a recommendation on next steps.
Step 1:
Find popular businesses that already operate and are similar to my client’s company. In the same field and even similar region.
Step 2:
Find those businesses online social media.
Step 3:
Find recent what they have done recently and dissect who engages with them. How they engage with them and why.
Step 4:
Look throughout the demographics of the of clients, customers, and people that follow them.
Analyze and diagnose.
Step 5:
Write a diagnostic including:
Businesses Ideal client's demographics: region, profession, stage of life, and a few other descriptors.
Identify which channels the ideal clients would be reached at.
Based on diagnostic, recommended positioning and outreach strategy.
(Short) Sample
CartReply Research
Introduction
The point of this project was to prospect potential clients for a SaaS website that sells an automated customer support and returns tool for Shopify stores.
The product, CartReply, helps small e-commerce brands answer repeated customer questions about shipping, returns, refunds, damaged items, order status, and basic product questions.
The process is as follows: steps taken to identify potential clients, an explanation of the primary demographic, an analysis of the primary demographic, and a recommendation on next steps.
Step 1:
Find popular Shopify support tools and e-commerce customer service platforms that already operate in a similar space.
This includes help desk tools, live chat apps, returns management tools, order tracking apps, and customer support automation products.
Step 2:
Find those websites’ social media pages, app store listings, public reviews, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and founder communities where people are talking about these tools.
Step 3:
Find recent posts, reviews, comments, and conversations. Look for new activity, complaints, questions, followers, and people describing the same problem over and over.
Step 4:
Look through the demographics of the people engaging with these posts and communities. Look at what kinds of stores they run, how large they seem to be, what problems they complain about, and whether they appear to be close enough to the problem to pay for a solution.
Analyze and diagnose.
Demographic:
Utilizing this pipeline across various Shopify apps, e-commerce founder communities, customer support pages, and product-based business discussions, it seems that the strongest potential client base is not brand-new store owners.
The stronger audience appears to be small Shopify brands that are already getting orders, but are not large enough to have a full customer support team.
Many of them appear to be clothing brands, beauty brands, skincare shops, home goods stores, fitness product stores, and small niche consumer brands. A lot of them seem to be run by solo founders or very small teams.
The common issue is that these founders have started getting enough customer activity for support to become annoying, but not enough revenue or staff to make hiring a support person feel obvious.
Through analyzing comments, reviews, and conversations around support tools, there is no shortage of founders asking about how to handle shipping questions, refund requests, return policies, order tracking, customer complaints, and repeated messages.
This leads me to believe that there are people in this specific demographic who are not only aware of the problem, but actively trying to get it off their plate.
The key detail is that these people are already paying for tools. They are paying for Shopify, email marketing, payment processing, shipping software, Canva, ads, product photography, and other business tools. So the issue is likely not whether they are willing to pay for software. The issue is whether they believe this software solves a problem painful enough to justify another monthly payment.
The best potential client is likely a store owner who is doing enough sales to get repeated customer messages, but not enough sales to have an actual operations team.
They are probably still answering customers themselves or having one assistant help when things get busy.
That is the gap.
Recommendation:
Select small Shopify store owners as the initial target audience, specifically stores that are already making sales and dealing with customer support problems.
The best approach would be to reach out to founders who are already talking about shipping issues, return problems, order tracking, bad customer reviews, or being overwhelmed by customer messages.
These people are likely found in Shopify communities, e-commerce Reddit threads, small business groups, TikTok comment sections, YouTube videos about running an online store, and the review sections of competing tools.
The first marketing angle should not be “AI customer support software.”
That sounds too vague and too much like every other SaaS product.
The better angle is:
“Stop answering the same customer questions every day.”
That is more direct. It points to the actual pain.
The product should be positioned around saving time, reducing repeated messages, making the store look more professional, and helping founders avoid losing customers because they respond too slowly.
I would not recommend starting with a broad cold email campaign as the main way to get the first users. Most e-commerce founders already get pitched constantly, and a random cold email about another software tool may get ignored.
The better option may be direct engagement in the places where they are already asking for help.
For example, if a founder is complaining in a Shopify group about customers asking “where is my order” every day, that is a much better opening than sending a generic cold email.
Short-form video could also work well here. The content should show the problem clearly and quickly.
Examples:
“3 customer support messages every Shopify founder gets tired of answering”
“If customers keep asking where their order is, your support system is broken”
“When should a Shopify store automate customer support?”
“How slow replies make small brands look unprofessional”
“Why your inbox feels insane after your first real sales spike”
The goal should be to make the founder feel seen. They should read the page or watch the content and immediately think, “Yeah, this is literally what I’m dealing with.”
From there, point them directly to the site.
The landing page should show the problem, show how the tool fixes it, and make it clear that this is for small stores that are growing but not ready to hire support staff.
Conclusion
In short, in order to get this business off the ground, the potential client pool is there.
These founders already have the problem. They are already online. They are already talking about customer support, shipping issues, refunds, returns, bad reviews, and being overwhelmed by repetitive messages.
They are also already paying for tools to run their businesses. They do not need to be convinced that software is useful. They need to be convinced that this specific software saves enough time and stress to be worth adding to their stack.
They are easily found through the internet. They just need to be directly targeted, spoken to clearly, and given access to the site.
They will pay money for this if the product solves the problem and the message is direct enough.