Individual skill
research-the-market
Go outside the founder brief and research the real market before the plan is written: the exact communities, newsletters, and venues where the user's ICP already sits, how comparable products launched and what worked, the problem in strangers' own words, and the rivals and openings the user never mentioned. Saves docs/gtm-cofounder/market-research.md with a link for every finding. Use right after start-here and before strategy-and-roadmap, before picking channels in first-50-users or planning launch-it, or whenever the plan feels like it only repeats what the user already said.
skills/19-research-the-market/SKILL.md
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- agent-skills Repository topic
- ai-founders Repository topic
- claude-code Repository topic
- claude-skills Repository topic
- dev-tools Repository topic
- developer-marketing Repository topic
- founder-tools Repository topic
- go-to-market Repository topic
- gtm Repository topic
- positioning Repository topic
- docs Derived category
- research Derived category
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# Research the market (what you didn't tell me)
> The brief is what you know. A plan built only from the brief can only rearrange your own answers back to you. This is the step where the agent goes out and finds what you don't know yet: where your users actually are, how products like yours got their first users, and the openings you haven't seen.
**Use this when:** you've just written the brief and want a plan grounded in the real market, not just your own read. Or you're about to pick channels or plan a launch and "post on Reddit and HN" is the best idea on the table. Or the roadmap you got back felt like a tidy summary of what you said.
## The core idea
The interview pulls out what's in your head. Research brings in what isn't: the specific subreddit where your ICP complained about this exact problem last week, the newsletter they all read, the three products in your space that launched in the last two years and what actually brought their first users, the competitor you didn't name.
**Research is planning-grade evidence, not proof.** Public evidence that 40 people asked for this in a GitHub issue is strong enough to plan a channel around. It is not strong enough to call the pain validated or to set a price. So it gets its own tag, `[researched]`, between `[assumption]` and `[validated]`. Only a real conversation with a real user who is not a friend earns `[validated]`.
## Before you start: can your agent see the web?
