How to Do Market Research with AI in 60 Minutes (Without a Big Budget)

You have a brilliant idea for a business. It’s a concept that excites you, one you believe could genuinely help people. But in the quiet moments, a nagging fear creeps in: What if nobody wants this?

This single question is what separates successful ventures from failed projects. Answering it is the job of market research.

Traditionally, this meant expensive surveys, time-consuming focus groups, and weeks spent compiling data. For a non-technical founder on a tight budget, it felt like an impossible task.

But not anymore.

In this guide, I will walk you through a simple, 4-step process to validate your idea, understand your customers, and analyze your competition using powerful AI tools. You don’t need a big budget or a background in data science. All you need is about an hour and a willingness to ask the right questions.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer with ChatGPT

First, we need to move from a vague idea of “our customers” to a sharp, detailed profile of a single person. This is called a customer persona, and it’s the most important tool in your marketing toolkit. A persona helps you understand your customer’s real-world problems, their goals, and the language they use, so you can craft a message that truly resonates with them.

The Tool: We’ll use ChatGPT, the world’s most popular AI chatbot. Its power lies in its ability to adopt different roles and generate creative, detailed descriptions based on a simple prompt.

The Process: Open ChatGPT and use the following prompt template. Replace the bracketed text with the details of your own business idea.

Within seconds, ChatGPT will give you a rich, detailed profile. This persona is no longer a faceless member of a target market; it’s “Sarah, the 32-year-old project manager” who you can now speak to directly in all of your marketing.

Step 2: Map Your Competition with Perplexity AI

No business exists in a vacuum. Your customers are already using other solutions to solve their problems, even if those solutions are imperfect. You need to know who these competitors are to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and where you can carve out your own unique space in the market.

The Tool: For this task, we’ll use Perplexity AI. Think of it as a super-intelligent search engine. Unlike a simple Google search, Perplexity gives you direct answers to your questions and, most importantly, provides citations and sources for its information. This is perfect for research.

The Process: Perplexity is designed for asking direct questions. We will use a simple but powerful prompt to get a bird’s-eye view of the market.

Perplexity will generate a clean, organized list that serves as your competitive map. Because it provides sources, you can click through to explore each competitor’s website, giving you a starting point for the next step.

Step 3: Analyze Competitor Messaging with Claude

Your competitors’ websites are a goldmine of information. Their homepage copy, in particular, is the result of countless hours and dollars spent trying to perfect a message that converts visitors into customers. We can use AI to deconstruct that message in seconds.

The Tool: For this, we’ll use Claude. While similar to ChatGPT, Claude has a key strength: it can analyze very large amounts of text at once (you can paste an entire article or webpage into it). This makes it perfect for summarizing and dissecting long-form content.

The Process: This is a simple, three-part process.

1. Go to the website of one of the top direct competitors you found in Step 2.
2. Select and copy all the text from their homepage.
3. Open Claude and use the following prompt.

Repeat this process for your top 2-3 competitors. In less than 15 minutes, you will have a deep understanding of how the key players in your market are positioning themselves. You’ll know what messaging is common, and more importantly, you’ll start to see gaps where your brand can say something new and different.

Step 4: Uncover Real Customer Pain Points on Reddit

The best market research comes directly from the voice of the customer. You need to find where your target audience is having conversations and listen in. For almost any niche, that place is Reddit. Here, people speak candidly about their frustrations and what they’re looking for in a product.

The Tool: We’ll use a combination of Reddit for finding the conversations and an AI summarizer (like ChatGPT, Claude, or a dedicated summarizer tool) to quickly extract the key insights.

The Process:

1. Find Your “Watering Hole”: Go to Reddit and search for subreddits related to your industry or the customer persona you created in Step 1. If your persona is a project manager, search for r/projectmanagement. If you’re in the coffee niche, search for r/espresso.
2. Look for “Pain” Keywords: Within that subreddit, search for terms that indicate a problem, such as “frustrated,” “annoyed,” “wish I had,” “alternative to,” or “help.”
3. Find a Rich Discussion: Look for a thread with many comments where people are sharing their experiences. Open the thread.
4. Copy the Conversation: Select and copy the original post and a large number of the top comments.
5. Summarize with AI: Paste the entire text into your AI tool of choice and use the following prompt.

The AI will instantly distill hours of reading into a concise, actionable summary of your customers’ true needs. The language it extracts—the exact words people use to describe their problems—is the language you should use on your website and in your marketing.

Conclusion: From Fear to Confidence

Let’s pause and look at what you’ve just accomplished. In about an hour, you have moved from the fear of the unknown to a place of data-driven confidence.

You haven’t just done “market research”; you have:

1. Created a clear picture of your ideal customer.
2. Mapped out your competitive landscape.
3. Deconstructed your competitors’ marketing messages.
4. Listened directly to the voice of your future customers.

This is the strategic foundation upon which great businesses are built. You now know who you’re serving, what they need, and how to position your product in a way that stands out. The best part? You did it all in about an hour, with tools that are mostly free.

The only thing left to do is start.

Now I’d love to hear from you: What was the most surprising insight you discovered during your own research? Share it in the comments below!

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