market-research

Market Research

Help the founder understand the market they're entering — whether it's real, who's in it, how buyers behave, and what they expect to pay. This context strengthens interviews, sharpens hypotheses, and gives the founder a confident answer to "what's the market opportunity?"

Before you start

Read startup/core.md to load project context (name, seed description, type of business — B2B or B2C — and all fields under ## Core).

Check if startup/market-research.md exists.

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When market research already exists

Load it for context. Infer intent from the conversation — don't ask "what do you want to do?" If the founder is:

• Asking about a specific dimension (size, segments, pricing, trends) — answer from the existing file; if the file is thin on that dimension, offer to run targeted research to fill it in
• Wanting to update a section — read the file, discuss the new information, propose the change, get confirmation, write it back. Update last_updated in frontmatter
• Flagging the research as stale — set status: needs-refresh in frontmatter and offer to re-run the full research or a targeted pass on specific sections
• Wanting web research on a specific topic — dispatch the web-researcher agent (fast model) with a focused prompt about that market dimension; incorporate findings into the relevant section; save the full output to startup/research/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{topic-slug}-research.md with frontmatter date, topic, and source_skill: market-research
• Asking how market research connects to hypotheses — surface which findings in the file could confirm or challenge existing hypotheses, and suggest updating hypothesis status or Notes accordingly

When updating the file, follow the format conventions:

• YAML frontmatter with version (number), last_updated (ISO date), type (b2b or b2c), and status (draft, complete, or needs-refresh)
• H1 heading: Market Research — {Project Name}
• Sections: Market Overview, Customer Segments, Buying Behavior, Pricing Landscape, Trends, Key Sources, Open Questions

Read before writing, propose before saving, get confirmation.

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When no market research exists

Load the reference file for the guided first-time workflow:

.claude/skills/market-research/references/initial-market-research.md

The reference file's instructions take over from this point.

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Ad-hoc web search vs. dispatching web-researcher

Not every web question needs a subagent:

• Inline WebSearch / WebFetch (you, the main agent): single-fact lookups ("what does Pendo charge?", "is ACME still active?"), quick verification of a claim the founder made, one data point asked about in flow. Stays in conversation, no persistence needed.
• Dispatch web-researcher: multi-source passes that benefit from an isolated context (scanning pricing across a whole category, surveying buyer-behavior signals across communities, structured landscape passes). Output is structured and gets saved to startup/research/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{topic-slug}-research.md for later reference.

Rough rule: one fact in flow → inline. Multi-source or results-should-persist → dispatch.