Market Research – The Starter Kit

Google’s advanced search operators

Google Search

A few days ago, whilst delivering one of our Start-up Essentials sessions on doing market research, I briefly mention that Google is your best friend for doing research, specially if you familiarise yourself with its advanced search operators.

Google itself has a great little basic guide on how to use them here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Though my absolute favourite is this one by the Australian SEO company Supple, because is more of a quick, simple, visual reference library: https://supple.com.au/tools/google-advanced-search-operators/

Regardless of which one you use, Google search operators are incredibly useful when searching for very specific information or documents in a certain format that normal general searches would otherwise not rank as relevant enough to show up in search results.

Don’t be scare to give them a try, you never know what hidden information gem you might find!

Steve Blank’s Tools for Entrepreneurs

You might know Steve Blank as the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “The Startup Owners’ Manual”, both recommended reading for anyone thinking about starting their own business. But few of you might know that he is actually less into making tons of money out of his every thought and very much into sharing all kinds of info.

He has, therefore, put together a dedicated part of his website precisely for that purpose. It is basically a repository of links to absolutely everything related to things that entrepreneurs might need along their journey that quite frankly makes me wonder 2 things:

1. Is he trying to compete with Google as a search engine for entrepreneurs? and

2. Why do I even bother trying to create my own repo?

Anyway, visit him here: https://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/ but come back for more great other obscure resources that he hasn’t found out about (yet!)

Cheers!

Stats for all!

Stats

I only know a handful of people who genuinely get excited about statistics, but a lot of starting a business relies precisely on that.

If you truly think about it you need to gather data at every stage, and then some more! So, perhaps us entrepreneurs should all get more familiar with our statistical analysis tools.

For this purpose, I found the personal website of David Lane, a Stats and Management Professor at Rice University, with lots of info, tutorials and tools on statistics, with a mix from the quite easy to understand to the straightforward super complicated, but it’s up to you how you use it:

http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/

Enjoy!

What are people searching for within…?

Yesterday I posted a link to Answer the Public, and today’s tool is quite similar but at the same time can be used for very different purposes.

It’s called Soovle and is another research tool that focuses exclusively on showing the Top 10 general searches that people do for a term.

The results come from multiple search engines, but all of them are only within certain websites, including Ebay, Netflix, The Weather Channel and Wikipedia.

So, it is very useful if you want to know what people search for, when looking for something. For example, if you are searching for a heater, you might go to ebay and search for used heaters, electric heaters, heaters from an specific brand, heaters that are white, heaters that go to a certain temperature or have certain features, etc, etc, etc!

Google wouldn’t necessarily know this kind of info, but Soovle helps you figure that out! Check it out at http://soovle.com/

Answer the public

An incredible useful tool for marketers, aspiring entrepreneurs, researchers (or anyone who is curious in general, really) wishing to explore what kind of questions people are typing on Google and Bing for an specific topic or keyword.

It is great for market research and insights that can inform anything from idea generation through to customer service!

http://answerthepublic.com/