How to Investigate a Market for a New Tech Product: A Guide for Entrepreneurs and Enterprise Teams

Before you invest time, money, and resources into building your next software product, ask yourself: Is there truly a market for this?

It’s a critical question — yet one that’s often overlooked in the excitement of building. Whether you’re a startup founder dreaming of a disruptive platform, or an enterprise leader championing a new internal tool, the success of your tech product hinges on early market investigation.

In this guide, we’ll walk through a practical, step-by-step approach to researching your market, validating your idea, and preparing for a successful launch. We'll also highlight how no-code tools like Bubble and AI-powered research techniques can supercharge the process.

And if you're serious about understanding the no-code ecosystem, download our 2024 Bubble Developer and Client Insights Survey — it's packed with real-world data from hundreds of founders and teams building with Bubble.

Why Most Tech Products Fail

According to CB Insights, the #1 reason startups fail is "No Market Need." The same applies to corporate innovation projects that don’t gain traction.

Too many teams fall in love with a solution before confirming that a real, urgent problem exists. Skipping market validation often leads to overbuilding, misaligned features, and ultimately, wasted investment.

Step 1: Define the Problem — Not the Product

Don’t start with your idea. Start with the problem.

Whether you're building a B2B SaaS platform or an internal workflow tool, you need to identify:

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• Who your ideal customer is (ICP): the specific user or organization that needs your solution most.
• What job they are hiring your product to do: apply the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework - what task are they trying to complete, and what outcome do they want?
• What pain point is so urgent they would pay for a solution: pinpoint the pain point they care enough about to pay for a fix.

To get this insight, talk to real users. Conduct problem interviews, not product pitches. Ask open-ended questions about their workflows, frustrations, and hacks. Let them guide you to the problem worth solving. That’s your starting point.

Step 2: Explore the Competitive Landscape

Your idea doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a broader market ecosystem filled with competing products, manual workarounds, and evolving customer expectations.

Understanding this landscape is essential not only to avoid duplicating existing solutions but to identify real opportunities for differentiation.

Here's what to research:

• Direct competitors: What features do they offer? How do they position themselves? More importantly, what are users complaining about in reviews on sites like G2 or Capterra? Negative feedback often reveals gaps your product can fill.
  
  
• Indirect substitutes: These aren’t necessarily apps—they might be spreadsheets, manual processes, or cobbled-together workflows. Are people solving the problem manually or with workarounds? If customers are using inefficient methods to solve a problem, that’s a strong indicator of unmet demand.
  
  
• Pricing models: What’s the perceived value of solving this problem? What are customers already paying to solve this problem? This helps you gauge the perceived value and position your offering competitively.
  
  
• Industry trends: Are there new regulations, technologies (like AI), or industry shifts that change how this problem is approached? These insights can influence timing and product direction.
  
  

Tools to use:

• Google, G2, Capterra
  
  
• LinkedIn search
  
  
• Reddit, Twitter, and product forums
  
  
• AI research tools like Perplexity.ai for summarizing market activity

Thorough competitive research ensures your product stands out—not just because it exists, but because it solves the right problem better than what’s out there.

Step 3: Validate the Demand with Real Behavior

Don’t rely on opinions. Instead of asking people if they would use your product, ask them to take a meaningful real-world action. This is the only way to confirm genuine interest.

True validation comes when potential users engage with your idea in a way that costs them time, effort, or money. Some examples include:

• Joining a waitlist for your MVP
• Clicking on a landing page that outlines your product
• Filling out a survey that ends with a sign-up or lead capture
• Booking a demo call or requesting a prototype
• Paying (even a small amount) for early access or to reserve a spot

These behaviors are clear signals that your solution resonates. If people take action, they’re interested. If they don’t, you may need to revisit your messaging, audience, or problem focus.

To test quickly, build a simple landing page using no-code tools like Carrd or Softr. Highlight the problem, your proposed solution, and a compelling call to action. Then drive traffic through email, LinkedIn, or small paid campaigns.

Track conversions. See where users drop off. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s early insight. Validate before you build.

Step 4: Build a No-Code MVP with Tools Like Bubble

You don’t need to invest in a full engineering team or wait six months to see if your idea works. Thanks to no-code platforms like Bubble, you can design and launch a functional MVP in a matter of days—allowing you to test your concept with real users much faster and at a fraction of the cost.

Bubble gives you the power to:

• Build real workflows and simulate how users will interact with your product
• Customize UI and logic to match your product vision
• Collect feedback from early adopters through live usage
• Iterate quickly as you validate or refine features

This isn’t a throwaway prototype—it’s a testable version of your actual product. You can launch fast, gather insights, and pivot based on what you learn—without waiting on developers or racking up technical debt.

At Big House, we help startups and enterprises use Bubble to turn ideas into usable software, accelerate their go-to-market timeline, and keep development lean. Whether you’re building a customer-facing SaaS app or an internal tool, no-code gives you speed, flexibility, and control.

💡 Curious about what others are building with Bubble? Download our 2024 Developer & Client Insights Survey for trends, costs, and strategies from top-performing teams.

Step 5: Leverage AI to Research Faster and Smarter

AI isn’t just hype—it’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to speed up and enhance market research. Whether you're a solo founder or part of a large enterprise team, AI can significantly reduce the time it takes to generate insights and help you make smarter product decisions faster.

Here are several ways entrepreneurs and corporate teams are using AI to investigate markets:

• Generate customer personas: By feeding AI tools information about your target segment, you can instantly generate detailed persona profiles that include demographics, goals, pain points, and buying behaviors.
  
  
• Summarize and cluster interview notes: Use tools like ChatGPT to process transcripts from customer interviews, pulling out themes, pain points, and feature requests. This helps you quickly spot patterns across multiple conversations.
  
  
• Run AI-powered surveys: Some platforms now offer dynamic surveys that personalize follow-up questions in real time based on responses—leading to more insightful data.
  
  
• Analyze competitors: AI tools can crawl public websites, forums, reviews, and product descriptions to help you understand how competitors position themselves, what users like and dislike, and how pricing models vary.
  
  

Example prompt:
“Summarize the top pain points SaaS founders face when managing customer onboarding.”

This can return a useful, organized list in seconds—saving hours of manual research.

While AI should never replace talking directly to users, it can enhance your research by synthesizing large volumes of data, identifying insights you might miss, and helping you work faster with fewer resources. Use it to augment your strategy, not to automate your intuition.

Step 6: What Enterprises Can Learn from Startup Validation Tactics

Many large organizations struggle to bring new tools or ideas to life—not because they lack vision, but because they default to lengthy planning cycles, internal meetings, and top-down assumptions. This leads to what’s often called “innovation theater”—where there’s movement, but no validated learning.

Startups, on the other hand, are forced to validate quickly because time and resources are limited. And enterprises can adopt many of these agile validation techniques to make internal initiatives more effective.

Here’s how:

• Treat internal teams like customers: Interview employees to understand their pain points. Don’t assume—ask.
  
  
• Prototype with no-code tools: Instead of requesting six months of development time, build a testable version in weeks.
  
  
• Measure adoption before scaling: Release a pilot to a small group and track real usage data.
  
  
• Involve end users early and often: Let employees shape the solution, which increases buy-in and relevance.

At Big House, we work with enterprise teams who start with no-code prototypes to validate functionality, gather stakeholder feedback, and build alignment—before committing to full-scale IT implementation. It’s lean, smart, and faster than traditional methods. Check out a sample product that we built at Big House: Motovolt, an electric motorcycle inventory management platform. 

Step 7: Avoid These Market Research Pitfalls

When investigating your market, it’s easy to make mistakes that can lead to costly missteps down the road. Here are some of the most common pitfalls teams encounter:

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• Relying only on opinions, not actual behavior: Asking people if they think they would use your product is far less reliable than observing what they actually do. Behavior-driven validation—such as signing up for a waitlist or clicking through a landing page—provides stronger evidence of demand.
  
  
• Skipping interviews because surveys seem easier: While surveys can scale well, they often lack the depth and nuance that come from real conversations. Interviews allow you to uncover unspoken needs, emotional triggers, and unexpected insights.
  
  
• Overbuilding before validating the problem: Building a fully featured product before confirming there’s a real market need wastes resources and time. Early validation with lightweight prototypes or no-code MVPs helps you avoid this trap.
  
  
• Ignoring pricing conversations early on: Understanding what customers are willing to pay—and how they perceive value—is critical. Neglecting this can result in products that solve problems but can’t sustain a viable business.
  
  
• Failing to define clear success metrics: Without measurable goals, such as “100 signups,” “10 pre-sales,” or “5 pilot customers,” it’s hard to know if your market research is successful or when to pivot.
  
  

By avoiding these common errors, you’ll conduct more meaningful research and increase your chances of building a product people truly want.

Step 8: Understand the No-Code Product Ecosystem

If you’re planning to build a software product, understanding the rapidly evolving no-code ecosystem is essential. No-code platforms like Bubble are transforming how quickly products can launch and who can build them.

Key factors affected by no-code include:

• Speed to market: No-code enables launching functional MVPs in days or weeks, dramatically shortening development cycles.
  
  
• Talent requirements: You don’t always need experienced developers; product managers and designers can build and iterate independently.
  
  
• Cost efficiency: No-code reduces upfront costs compared to traditional engineering, making product development accessible to startups and enterprises alike.
  
  

Our 2024 Bubble Developer and Client Insights Survey dives deep into this landscape, revealing:

• The types of teams leveraging Bubble, from solo founders to enterprise groups
  
  
• Average project size and complexity being tackled with no-code
  
  
• Developer salary expectations in the no-code world
  
  
• Real case studies highlighting successful no-code implementations in various industries
  
  

This data provides invaluable context for deciding if no-code fits your product strategy and how to plan your development roadmap effectively.

Conclusion: Start With the Market, Not the Code

The most successful tech products don’t begin with brilliant ideas — they begin with validated market insights.

Before you commit to building, invest in learning:

• Who your real users are
  
  
• What problems they urgently want solved
  
  
• What they’re willing to pay for
  
  
• What alternatives already exist
  
  

And when you're ready to move fast and validate your idea without a massive engineering team, consider no-code platforms like Bubble and expert help from teams like Big House.

📊 Want data on no-code trends, developer rates, and product strategy? Download the 2024 Bubble Developer and Client Insights Survey →

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