Research Is The Secret Sauce Of Success. Here's How To Do It As A Solopreneur.

Without research, you're just another person with an opinion.

Photo by Lukas: Pexels

Bushra Azhar is a 7-figure solopreneur offering digital courses on building online success. 

She likes to start her webinars by saying she wasn’t “supposed to” succeed. She’s from the wrong place, has the wrong accent, and worked from a windowless walk-in closer for years. 

But she made people take her seriously by managing to sell millions of dollars worth of digital products. 

Bushra is a marketing wizard; research is one of the magic spells she relies on. 

Before she creates a course, Bushra makes sure there’s demand for it. She knows exactly how to research her ideas, so she ensures that anything she invests time & money in will be worth it. 

In this newsletter, I’ll tell you exactly how she does it and how you can also master research to: 

• Come up with more & higher quality ideas — for businesses, products, content and more. 

• Validate your ideas before you spend time developing them.

• Come up with innovative solutions to problems. 

• Boost your creativity. 

• Give your content extra credibility. 

• Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. 

Let’s begin. 

Without research, you’re just another person with an opinion. 

Secret to Success: Master Research, Master Success

In this newsletter: 

• The different types of research and when to do what. 

• How to use exploratory research to become your industry's most relevant, creative person. 

• How to evaluate every idea and quantify its potential: business ideas, product ideas, content ideas. This one is for paid subscribers only.

Author’s drawing.

The different types of research and when to do what.

Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin says he does two types of research.

1. Research where he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

2. Research where he knows what he’s looking for.

Aaron, who loves to do movies based on true events, like Molly’s Game, says his first steps are always just conversations with the people who’ve inspired the movie. No specific questions, no looking for agendas. He just lets people talk.

Only after he’s gathered enough information and a plot idea starts to develop in his mind does he start asking more specific questions.

In marketing, this is called exploratory research. 

We categorize market research into two main types: Primary and secondary. Primary research is research that you conduct yourself (or by a hired agency) to gather new information on current or potential customers, commonly through focus groups and surveys. This form of research gathers two kinds of information: Exploratory and Specific. Exploratory research is open-ended and qualitative, helping businesses identify trends and opportunities they were unaware of. — Forbes

Specific research is more targeted and aims to address a specific problem or examine a new concept. It often follows exploratory research to dig deeper into a particular result or evaluate the best course of action.

Secondary research refers to using existing information that has been published by others. 

You can also use secondary research as a type of exploratory research — I’ll mention how below. However, secondary research is mostly used as specific research — more to validate an idea than to come up with it. 

Read on to understand how to do all types of research as a solopreneur. 

How to use exploratory research to become your industry's most relevant expert.

Primary exploratory research is one of the best ways to generate business & content ideas. 

According to Rune Toldam, a partner at foresight studio Bespoke: “Exploratory research is an important starting point for innovation. Innovation is about connecting the dots, yet to do so, you need those dots in place, and you need to be exposed to the things you did not know existed.”

By mastering primary exploratory research, you’ll become a highly relevant solopreneur who always seems to be talking about “the right thing.”

Here’s how you can do primary exploratory research as a solopreneur: 

• Ask open-ended questions on social media. X and relevant FB groups are perfect for that. 

• Test ideas on social media. Instead of asking questions, you can share a statement and observe your post's engagement. My most popular X posts have become a starting point for successful Medium articles & digital products. 

• Create a poll for your e-mail subscribers. If you have an e-mail list, you can create a poll to see what interests people most. While exploratory research is best done with open-ended questions, polls garner higher engagement and can give direction. 

• Talk to people you meet online. I’ve had calls with several people I’ve met online “just because”. Some were behind me on their solopreneurship journey and gave me ideas based on what they struggled with. Some were ahead and gave me ideas about what to focus on. All were useful. 

• Use user-testing platforms. If you plan to invest a lot of time in developing a product, allocate some budget to research. In this case, you can use popular user testing platforms to ask your target market whatever you want. My go-to user-testing platform is Usability Hub / Lyssna. I’m not affiliated.

If you want to do secondary exploratory research, a good way to do it is to follow as many people in your industry as you can. Even if you don’t ask them for information, people share information freely online, and you can use that as the basis for your business, content or decisions. 

No good decisions were ever made in a vacuum. If you want to reach thought leadership status in your industry, it is essential that you become a part of the conversation. 

Then, you’ll never have to worry about not having ideas ever again.

How to evaluate every idea and quantify its potential: business ideas, product ideas, content ideas.

Some people say you should start with the audience. 

Winning entrepreneurs know to start with the research. When you have the right idea, it will be easy to attract the audience.