customer-research

{
  "skill_name": "customer-research",
  "evals": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "prompt": "I have 20 customer interview transcripts. Help me analyze them.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should ask about the goal before analyzing (improve messaging, build personas, find product gaps, etc.). Should apply the extraction framework: jobs to be done, pain points, trigger events, desired outcomes, language/vocabulary, alternatives considered. Should recommend clustering by theme, frequency + intensity scoring, and identifying money quotes. Should ask which deliverable is needed.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Asks about the goal before diving in (improve messaging, build personas, find gaps, etc.)",
        "Mentions extracting jobs to be done, pain points, and desired outcomes",
        "Suggests organizing quotes by theme",
        "References frequency and intensity scoring",
        "Asks which deliverable is needed"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "prompt": "I want to do ICP research but I don't have any customer interviews yet.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should recommend digital watering hole research as a starting point. Should mention Reddit, G2, Capterra, forums, or niche communities as sources. Should offer to plan a research approach and explain what to extract from online sources. Should note this is Mode 2 and ask what product/category to research.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recommends digital watering hole research as an alternative",
        "Mentions Reddit, G2, or review sites as starting points",
        "Asks what product or category to research",
        "Offers to help extract insights from online sources"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 3,
      "prompt": "Mine Reddit and G2 to understand what people hate about project management software.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should identify relevant subreddits (r/projectmanagement, r/productivity, r/agile) and search strategies. Should recommend reading 3-star and 1-star G2 reviews and competitor 4-star reviews. Should plan to extract verbatim quotes, pain themes, and switching triggers. Should apply the extraction table (source, quote, context, sentiment, theme tag, profile signals).",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Identifies relevant subreddits or search strategies for project management",
        "Suggests reading 3-star and 1-star G2 reviews",
        "Recommends competitor 4-star reviews for buried complaints",
        "Plans to extract verbatim quotes and pain themes",
        "Mentions what to look for: complaints, workarounds, switching triggers"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 4,
      "prompt": "Build me a customer persona for a marketing manager at a B2B SaaS company.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should ask if there is existing research to build from before generating a persona. Should warn against inventing details without data. Should use the persona structure: profile, primary JTBD, trigger events, top pains, desired outcomes, objections, alternatives, key vocabulary, how to reach them. Should note that personas should be built from at least 5-10 data points.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Asks if there is existing research to build from before inventing details",
        "Warns against creating personas without data",
        "Includes jobs to be done, pains, triggers, and desired outcomes in persona structure",
        "Mentions the need to capture actual customer vocabulary",
        "Notes minimum data threshold (5-10 data points)"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 5,
      "prompt": "I have 6 months of customer support tickets. What insights can I pull from them?",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should recommend categorizing tickets before analyzing (bugs vs. confusion vs. feature requests vs. expectation mismatches). Should warn against treating all tickets as equal signal. Should suggest extracting recurring language, patterns, and 'I wish it could…' phrases. Should ask about the goal — product improvement, messaging, reducing support load, or something else.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recommends categorizing tickets before analyzing (bugs vs confusion vs feature requests)",
        "Warns against treating all tickets as equal signal",
        "Mentions extracting recurring language and patterns",
        "Asks about the goal — product improvement, messaging, or something else"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 6,
      "prompt": "What are customers saying about my competitors on review sites?",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should ask which competitors to research. Should recommend G2 and Capterra as primary sources. Should specifically call out reading competitor 4-star reviews for buried complaints. Should describe what to extract: what they love (battlecard intel), what frustrates them (opportunities), unmet needs. Should use the review mining template.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recommends reading competitor 4-star reviews specifically for buried complaints",
        "Mentions G2 or Capterra as sources",
        "Describes what to extract: what they love, what frustrates them, unmet needs",
        "Frames as competitive intelligence input"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 7,
      "prompt": "Help me do voice of customer research for a new SaaS in the HR space.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should ask about the specific ICP segment within HR (recruiter, HR generalist, CHRO, etc.). Should suggest relevant digital watering holes: r/humanresources, r/recruiting, HR Slack communities, G2 HR category, LinkedIn. Should plan to extract verbatim language for copy use. Should offer to produce a VOC quote bank as a deliverable.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Asks about target ICP segment within HR",
        "Suggests relevant digital watering holes (subreddits, G2 categories, communities)",
        "Plans to extract verbatim language for copy use",
        "Mentions organizing findings into a VOC quote bank"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 8,
      "prompt": "I want to understand why customers churn. I have exit survey results.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should recommend segmenting churn reasons before analyzing — do not average across different causes. Should suggest pairing open-ended responses with quantitative data. Should ask if win/loss interview data or support tickets are also available. Should apply confidence labels (high/med/low) based on sample size and source consistency.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recommends segmenting churn reasons before analyzing",
        "Warns against averaging across different churn causes",
        "Suggests pairing open-ended responses with quantitative data",
        "Asks if win/loss interview data is also available"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 9,
      "prompt": "Find the digital watering holes where DevOps engineers talk shop.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should identify specific relevant communities: r/devops, r/sysadmin, Hacker News, DevOps-focused Discord/Slack groups, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow. Should suggest what to search for in those communities. Should describe what signal to extract from each source type and reference source-guides.md for detailed playbooks.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Mentions specific relevant communities (r/devops, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Discord)",
        "Suggests what to search for in those communities",
        "Describes what signal to extract from each source type"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 10,
      "prompt": "Turn my customer research into messaging I can use on my homepage.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should extract VOC language and top themes before moving to copy. Should identify the highest-signal quotes and language patterns. Should produce a VOC summary or quote bank, then hand off to the copywriting skill for the actual copy writing step rather than writing homepage copy directly.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Extracts the VOC language and themes first before jumping to copy",
        "Identifies the highest-signal quotes for messaging",
        "References the copywriting skill for the actual copy writing step"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 11,
      "prompt": "I run a mobile fitness app and want to understand why users drop off after week 2.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should recognize this as a B2C research scenario. Should suggest B2C-appropriate sources: app store reviews (1-3 star), Reddit fitness communities, YouTube comment sections on fitness apps, TikTok/Instagram comments. Should also recommend in-app surveys and analyzing support tickets/reviews. Should frame around activation and habit formation research.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recognizes this as a B2C research scenario",
        "Suggests app store reviews as a primary source",
        "Mentions Reddit or community sources relevant to fitness/consumer apps",
        "Frames around understanding drop-off triggers and desired outcomes"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 12,
      "prompt": "I have no existing research and don't know who my best customers are yet.",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should treat this as a bootstrap research scenario. Should recommend starting with hypothesis formation before gathering data. Should suggest a minimum viable research plan: 5-10 customer interviews + digital watering hole scan. Should provide interview recruiting tips and what questions to ask. Should warn against building personas before collecting any data.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recognizes this as a zero-research bootstrap scenario",
        "Recommends forming hypotheses before gathering data",
        "Suggests a minimum viable research plan (interviews + online sources)",
        "Warns against building personas without any data"
      ],
      "files": []
    },
    {
      "id": 13,
      "prompt": "I want to interview and survey my customers to understand product/market fit. How should I run this?",
      "expected_output": "Should check for product-marketing.md first. Should route to the primary-research playbook (references/interviews-and-surveys.md). Should recommend the Sean Ellis / Superhuman PMF survey question ('How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?') and cite the 40% 'very disappointed' benchmark (Superhuman reached 58%). Should recommend recruiting best customers (high deal size, short sales cycle, low churn) and closing every call with 'who else should we talk to?'. Should mention incentives ($50/call, $5/survey; aim for 10 calls, be happy with 5). Should keep it casual ('you do not talk about customer research') and aim to prove yourself wrong, not right. Should mention 5-why laddering (Keep Asking Why) and provide an outreach email approach.",
      "assertions": [
        "Checks for product-marketing.md",
        "Recommends the PMF survey question and cites the 40% 'very disappointed' benchmark (Superhuman 58%)",
        "Recommends recruiting best customers by deal size / short sales cycle / low churn and asking 'who else should we talk to?'",
        "Mentions incentives ($50/call, $5/survey) and aiming for 10 calls / happy with 5",
        "Frames research as casual and disconfirming (prove yourself wrong, not right)",
        "Mentions 5-why laddering (Keep Asking Why) or an outreach email template"
      ],
      "files": []
    }
  ]
}

# Customer Research — Interviews & Surveys (Primary Research)

Going to the source. Mode 2 mines what customers already said in public; this is Mode 3 — you *ask*. Customer research is your marketing cheat code, and the highest-signal version is talking to customers directly.

Three primary-research pillars, best used together:
1. **Video calls** — deep, unstructured, follow-the-thread (this file)
2. **Surveys** — broad, quantified, benchmarkable (this file)
3. **Online sleuthing** — Sales Safari and watering-hole mining (see `references/source-guides.md`)

---

## The First Rule of Customer Research

> The first rule of customer research: you do not talk about customer research.

Keep it casual. The moment a customer thinks they're in "a research study" they perform — they give you the polished, socially-acceptable answer instead of the real one. Frame calls as a chat, not an interview. Don't lead. Don't pitch. Don't defend the product. You're there to listen and learn how they actually think, talk, and decide.

**Prove yourself wrong, not right.** The point of research is not validation — it's disconfirmation. Go in trying to *break* your assumptions, not confirm them. If you only look for evidence you're right, you'll find it, and it'll be worthless.

- **Dropbox example**: the team assumed users would care most about sync *speed*. Research aimed at disproving the assumption revealed users cared more that files were *reliably there and safe* than about raw speed. Chasing the confirmation would have optimized the wrong thing.
- Ask questions that could return an answer you don't want to hear. If none of your questions can prove you wrong, rewrite them.

---

## Sales Safari (Amy Hoy)

Amy Hoy's **Sales Safari**: go where your audience already congregates and observe them in the wild, without interrupting. It's structured online sleuthing — read threads, reviews, comments, and forum posts to mine four things:

| Mine for | What you're capturing |
|----------|-----------------------|
| **Pains** | The problems, frustrations, and workarounds they describe unprompted |
| **Jargon** | The exact words, phrases, and shorthand they use — copy gold |
| **Recommendations** | What they tell each other to buy, try, or avoid |
| **Worldview** | Their beliefs, biases, and how they see themselves and the problem |

Safari is passive (you observe) where interviews are active (you ask). Run it first: it tells you what to ask about, and in whose words. For per-platform search operators and extraction tips, see `references/source-guides.md`.

---

## Customer Interviews (Video Calls)

### Recruit your best customers

Don't interview whoever answers first. Interview the customers you want *more of*. Segment your CRM and prioritize by:

- **High deal size** — the accounts worth the most
- **Short sales cycle** — they "got it" fast; their language converts fast
- **Low churn / high retention** — they got real, lasting value

Recruitment methods, in order of leverage:
1. **Segment the CRM** by the three signals above and pull a shortlist
2. **Ask sales and CS for referrals** — they know who loves the product and who articulates why
3. **Always close every call with**: *"Who else should we talk to?"* — the single most reliable way to compound your interview pipeline

### Incentives

- **$50 per call** (~30 min); **$5 per survey response**
- Aim for **10 calls, be happy with 5.** Signal saturates fast — by call 5-6 you'll hear the same themes repeat. Don't stall the project waiting for a perfect sample.
- Offer the incentive up front; it dramatically lifts response rate and shows you value their time. Gift cards work fine.

### Outreach email template

Keep it short, casual, specific, and low-commitment. Not a "research study."

```
Subject: Quick favor — 30 min, on us

Hi [First name],

I'm [name] from [company]. I'm trying to get better at helping customers
like you, and I'd love to steal 30 minutes to hear how [product area] is
actually working for you — what's good, what's annoying, what you wish
were different. No pitch, no agenda.

As a thank you I'll send you a $50 [Amazon/Visa] gift card.

Are you free [day] or [day] this week? Here's my calendar: [link]

Thanks either way,
[Name]
```

Notes:
- "No pitch, no agenda" and "what's annoying" signal you actually want the truth.
- One clear ask, two concrete time options, a booking link. Remove friction.
- Never say "customer research study."

---

## Keep Asking Why (5-Why Laddering)

The first answer is never the real answer. **Keep Asking Why** — ladder each response down 3-5 levels until you hit the root motivation, the business outcome, or the emotional driver. Surface answers are features; the bottom of the ladder is why they pay and why they stay.

**Worked example** — laddering a churn signal to NRR:

- **Q: Why did you downgrade your plan last quarter?**
  - "We weren't using the advanced reports."
- **Why weren't you using them?**
  - "Nobody on the team knew how to build one."
- **Why didn't anyone learn?**
  - "The person who set us up left, and onboarding never got re-run for the new hires."
- **Why did that matter enough to downgrade?**
  - "Without the reports, my boss couldn't see the ROI, so at renewal it looked like an easy cost to cut."
- **Why is that the real risk?**
  - "If leadership can't see value, we churn — and if we *had* seen it, we'd probably have added seats, not cut them."

The surface answer was "we don't use reports." The root is an **onboarding gap that quietly converts an expansion (NRR up) into a contraction or churn (NRR down)**. You can't fix "they don't use reports." You can fix re-onboarding new hires and surfacing ROI to the buyer — which is the difference between contraction and net revenue retention.

**Pain points vs. passion points.** Ladder for both. Pain points are what's broken and what they'll pay to escape. Passion points are what they love, brag about, and would be "very disappointed" to lose. Passion points drive retention and referrals; pains drive acquisition. Capture both in their words.

---

## Surveys

### The PMF Survey (Sean Ellis / Superhuman)

The single most useful survey question, from Sean Ellis and popularized by Superhuman's Rahul Vohra:

> **"How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?"**
> - Very disappointed
> - Somewhat disappointed
> - Not disappointed
> - N/A — I no longer use it

**The 40% benchmark**: if **40% or more** of users answer **"very disappointed,"** you likely have product/market fit. Below 40%, keep iterating. **Superhuman reached 58%** by engineering their roadmap around this metric — segmenting on the "very disappointed" cohort, doubling down on what that cohort loved, and converting the "somewhat disappointed" fence-sitters.

Run it as a recurring pulse, not once. Follow the core question with:
- *"What type of person do you think would most benefit from [product]?"* (sharpens ICP)
- *"What is the main benefit you receive from [product]?"* (your positioning, in their words)
- *"How can we improve [product] for you?"* (roadmap fuel from fence-sitters)

Segment every answer by the "very disappointed" cohort vs. the rest — that cohort is your true market.

### Survey design guardrails

- Keep it short — every extra question drops completion.
- Prefer open-ended for language mining; multiple-choice answers are artifacts of the options you gave.
- Don't lead. A question that telegraphs the answer you want returns the answer you want, not the truth.
- $5/response incentive lifts completion; deliver it on submit.

---

## Case Anchors

- **Airbnb (host photography)**: research revealed listings failed because the *photos* were bad, not the pricing or copy. Airbnb sent photographers to shoot host homes — a fix nobody would have guessed without talking to the market. Research points at problems you can't see from inside.
- **Dropbox (confirmation bias)**: assumed sync speed mattered most; disconfirming research showed reliability/safety of files mattered more. Prove yourself wrong.
- **Superhuman (PMF survey)**: engineered the roadmap around the "very disappointed" metric, 40% → 58%.

---

## Where This Fits

- **Analyze what you gather** with the Mode 1 extraction framework in `SKILL.md` (jobs to be done, pains, triggers, outcomes, language, alternatives) and the confidence guardrails.
- **Mine public sources** (the passive Safari half) via `references/source-guides.md`.
- Interview + survey signal is **first-party and high-confidence** — weight it above scraped online sources when they conflict.

# Customer Research — Source Guides

Detailed, source-by-source playbooks for gathering customer intelligence from online watering holes.

---

## Reddit Research

### Finding the Right Subreddits

Start by identifying where your ICP spends time, not where your product is discussed.

**Discovery methods:**
- Search `site:reddit.com "[job title] tools"` or `site:reddit.com "[problem category] software"`
- Use [subreddit search tools](https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search) with problem-space keywords
- Look at what subreddits show up in Google results when you search ICP problems
- Check what subreddits competitors' customers mention in reviews

**Common high-value subreddits by category:**
- B2B SaaS: r/sales, r/marketing, r/entrepreneur, r/startups, r/smallbusiness
- Dev tools: r/programming, r/devops, r/webdev, r/cscareerquestions
- Analytics/data: r/analytics, r/dataengineering, r/BusinessIntelligence
- Marketing: r/PPC, r/SEO, r/emailmarketing, r/content_marketing
- HR/recruiting: r/recruiting, r/humanresources, r/jobs
- Finance/ops: r/accounting, r/financialplanning, r/projectmanagement

### Search Operators

```
site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] "[keyword]"
site:reddit.com "[problem]" "recommend" OR "suggestion" OR "alternative"
site:reddit.com "[competitor name]" "vs" OR "alternative" OR "switched"
```

### What to Look For

**High-signal post types:**
- "What tools do you use for X?" → reveals alternatives and vocab
- "Frustrated with [competitor], looking for alternatives" → reveals pain and switching triggers
- "How do you handle X?" → reveals workflow and workarounds
- "Is [your category] worth it?" → reveals objections and evaluation criteria
- Complaint threads about competitors → reveals gaps you might fill

**What to extract:**
- The exact problem described in the post
- Top-voted solutions (what do practitioners actually recommend?)
- Complaints about existing solutions in comments
- The language used — note specific words and phrases
- Upvote patterns — consensus vs. controversy

### Tools
- Reddit's native search (limited but fast)
- Google: `site:reddit.com [query]` (better results)
- Pullpush.io — search archived Reddit posts (good for older threads)

---

## G2 and Review Site Mining

### Your Own Product Reviews

Read in this order for maximum signal:

1. **3-star reviews** — these are the most honest. Customer liked it enough to stay but felt something was missing.
2. **1-star reviews** — understand the failure modes. Separate product issues from support/onboarding issues.
3. **5-star reviews** — extract the "what they love" language. These are your proof points.
4. **4-star reviews** — often contain "the only thing I wish…" buried in praise.

**What to extract:**
- What they say they use it *for* (the job to be done)
- What they say is hardest or most frustrating
- What they compare it to ("coming from [X]", "better than [Y]")
- Industry and role signals in reviewer profiles

### Competitor Reviews on G2

The 4-star competitor reviews are gold — customers who like the product but still have complaints.

**G2 structure to exploit:**
- "What do you like best?" → their strengths (your battlecard intel)
- "What do you dislike?" → their weaknesses (your opportunities)
- "What problems are you solving?" → the job to be done

**Capterra** has similar structure. **Trustpilot** skews B2C. **AppSumo** reviews are useful for SMB/prosumer SaaS.

### Review Mining Template

For each competitor's 4-star reviews, extract:

| Category | Notes |
|----------|-------|
| Job to be done | Why do they use the product? |
| Top praise | What do they love (and might be hard for you to match)? |
| Top complaint | What frustrates them? |
| Switching context | Did they mention switching from something else? |
| Unmet need | "I wish it could…" or "It would be better if…" |

---

## Indie Hackers and Product Hunt

### Indie Hackers

Strong signal for founder/builder/SMB ICP.

**Where to look:**
- "Ask IH" posts: questions about problems your product solves
- Milestone posts: when founders describe their stack, they reveal tool preferences and pain
- Comment threads on product launches in your category

**Search:** `site:indiehackers.com "[problem]"` or use IH's native search.

### Product Hunt

**Discussion tabs** on competing products are a research goldmine:
- Questions asked = pre-sales concerns = objections
- Comments = early adopter reactions = leading indicators of reception
- "Alternatives to X" collections reveal the competitive landscape as users see it

---

## Hacker News

Strong signal for technical/developer ICP. Skews toward builders and skeptics.

**High-value searches:**
- `site:news.ycombinator.com "[competitor or category]"`
- HN "Ask HN: best tools for X" threads
- "Show HN" posts for competitors — read the skeptical comments

**What's different about HN:**
- Users are more likely to critique underlying architecture and business model
- Strong opinions about pricing models (especially anything subscription-based)
- First principles objections you might not hear elsewhere

---

## LinkedIn Research

### Posts and Comments

Search for posts by practitioners describing their workflows:
- "[Role] at [company size]" + problem keyword
- "We used to [old way] but now we [new way]" stories
- Posts asking for tool recommendations get comments from active buyers

### Job Postings

A job posting is a company's admission of a pain point.

**What to look for:**
- What tools are listed as "nice to have" vs. "required"? (reveals stack and adjacent tools)
- What metrics and outcomes are mentioned in the role description?
- What does the role spend most of its time doing? (reveals the job to be done)

**Search:** `site:linkedin.com/jobs "[role title]" "[relevant tool or category]"`

---

## YouTube Comments

### Finding High-Signal Videos

- Tutorial videos for problems your product solves
- "Best tools for X in [year]" roundup videos
- Competitor product demos and walkthroughs

**What to look for in comments:**
- "Does this work for [specific use case]?" → edge cases and unmet needs
- "I tried this but…" → failure points
- "What about [competitor]?" → active evaluation
- Timestamps with questions → confusion points in the workflow

---

## Twitter / X Research

### Search Operators

```
"[competitor]" -filter:replies min_faves:10
"[problem keyword]" "anyone know" OR "recommend" OR "alternative"
"[category] is broken" OR "frustrated with [category]"
```

### What to Find

- Real-time complaints about competitors
- Practitioners discussing their stack
- Influencers/thought leaders your ICP follows (useful for distribution)

---

## Blog Post and Forum Research

### Comparison Content

Google: `"[competitor 1] vs [competitor 2]"` or `"best [category] software [year]"`

Read the comments on these posts — people who find comparison content are actively evaluating. Their comments are questions your sales process should answer.

### Niche Communities

- **Slack communities**: Many industries have public or semi-public Slack groups. Search "[industry] Slack community".
- **Discord servers**: Growing for developer and creator communities.
- **Facebook Groups**: Still strong for SMB, e-commerce, agency, and coach/consultant ICP.
- **Circle/Mighty Networks communities**: Check if there are paid communities in your ICP's space.

---

## B2C and Consumer App Research

B2C research requires different sources than B2B SaaS. Consumer buyers don't congregate on LinkedIn or G2 — they leave traces in app stores, social media, and communities built around the activity your product serves.

### App Store Reviews (iOS App Store / Google Play)

One of the richest unfiltered sources for mobile/consumer products.

**Read in this order:**
1. **1-2 star reviews** — failure modes, unmet expectations, frustration peaks
2. **3-star reviews** — honest tradeoffs and "it's good but…" feedback
3. **5-star reviews** — what they love in their own words (proof points and positioning)

**What to extract:**
- What job they hired the app to do ("I use this to…")
- The moment it stopped working for them
- What they compared it to or switched from
- Emotional language — "I love how…", "I'm so frustrated that…"

**Search tip:** Sort by "Most Recent" to get fresh signal, then "Most Critical" for pain themes.

### Amazon Reviews (for physical products or software with Amazon presence)

Same priority order as app stores: 3-star reviews first.

**G2 analog for consumer SaaS**: Trustpilot, Sitejabber, and product-specific review aggregators.

### Reddit Consumer Communities

B2C Reddit is highly vertical — go to the hobby/lifestyle subreddit, not the general ones.

**Examples by product type:**
- Fitness apps: r/running, r/loseit, r/fitness, r/MyFitnessPal
- Personal finance: r/personalfinance, r/financialindependence, r/ynab
- Productivity/notes: r/productivity, r/Notion, r/ObsidianMD
- Travel: r/travel, r/solotravel, r/digitalnomad
- Parenting: r/Parenting, r/beyondthebump, r/daddit

**Search pattern:** `site:reddit.com/r/[community] "[app name OR problem]"`

### TikTok and Instagram Comments

High-signal for consumer products with visual/lifestyle appeal.

**How to find signal:**
- Search TikTok for "[product name] review" or "is [product] worth it"
- Watch the top 5-10 videos; read ALL comments — not just likes
- On Instagram, check tagged posts from real users (not brand posts)

**What to extract:**
- Questions in comments = unmet needs or unclear positioning
- "Does this work for…?" = jobs they want to hire it for
- "I switched from X" comments = switching triggers
- Complaints about price, missing features, or broken promises

### YouTube Comments (Consumer)

Same approach as B2B but different video types:

- "X app honest review" or "X app after 6 months"
- "Best [category] apps [year]" comparison videos
- Unboxing or "setup" videos for hardware/physical products

Comments on review videos are especially valuable — these are people actively in the consideration phase.

### Consumer Community Platforms

- **Facebook Groups**: Still dominant for many consumer verticals (parenting, fitness, local services, hobbies)
- **Discord servers**: Growing for gaming, creator tools, productivity, crypto, lifestyle communities
- **Nextdoor**: Useful for local service businesses
- **Quora**: Long-form questions reveal decision anxiety and evaluation criteria

---

## SparkToro (Audience Intelligence)

SparkToro is a behavioral audience research tool. Instead of mining individual posts and comments, it aggregates clickstream, search, and social data to show what your audience does at scale — what they read, watch, listen to, follow, and search for.

### When to Use SparkToro vs. Manual Research

- **SparkToro first** when you need to understand where your ICP spends time, what content they consume, and which influencers they follow — it answers these questions in seconds with aggregated data
- **Manual research first** (Reddit, G2, communities) when you need raw language, exact quotes, emotional context, and the "why" behind behavior
- **Best together**: Use SparkToro to identify which podcasts, subreddits, and websites matter, then go mine those sources manually for voice-of-customer language

### Key Queries to Run

**By competitor:**
- "People who follow @competitor" — reveals shared audience affinities
- "People who visit competitor.com" — shows what else they consume

**By audience description:**
- "People who frequently talk about [topic]" — finds audience behaviors
- "People whose bio contains [job title]" — profiles a role-based segment

**By your own audience:**
- "People who visit yourdomain.com" — understand your actual audience
- Compare against competitor audience profiles to find gaps

### What to Extract

| Data Type | What It Tells You | Use It For |
|-----------|------------------|------------|
| Top websites visited | Where your audience reads | Content partnerships, guest posting targets |
| Top podcasts | What they listen to | Podcast guesting, sponsorship decisions |
| Top YouTube channels | What they watch | Video content strategy, ad placements |
| Top subreddits | Where they discuss | Community participation, Reddit ad targeting |
| Search keywords | What they Google | SEO and content topic planning |
| AI prompt topics | What they ask AI tools | Emerging content opportunities |
| Social accounts followed | Who influences them | Influencer partnerships, co-marketing |
| Demographics | Who they are | Persona building, ad targeting |

### Source Weighting

SparkToro data is aggregated and anonymized — it shows patterns, not individual opinions. Treat it as:
- **High confidence** for behavioral data (what they visit, follow, search for)
- **Medium confidence** for demographic data (self-reported, may be incomplete)
- **Not a substitute** for qualitative research (doesn't capture language, emotions, or the "why")

### Limitations

- Free tier: 5 reports/month, shallow results (top 5–10)
- No public API — all research done through web interface
- Skews English-language, US-centric
- Shows what audiences do, not why — pair with qualitative sources

See [tools/integrations/sparktoro.md](../../../tools/integrations/sparktoro.md) for full tool details and pricing.

---

## Organizing Your Research

Use a simple tagging system across all sources:

| Tag | Meaning |
|-----|---------|
| `#pain` | A problem or frustration |
| `#trigger` | An event that prompted the search |
| `#outcome` | What success looks like |
| `#language` | Exact phrases worth using in copy |
| `#alternative` | Another solution they considered or use |
| `#objection` | Reason to hesitate or not buy |
| `#competitor` | Anything about a competing product |

Keep a running doc with columns: Source | Date | Quote | Tags | Notes

After 20-30 entries, patterns will emerge. Look for quotes that appear in multiple unrelated sources — those are your highest-confidence insights.

---

## Source Reliability and Confidence Scoring

Not all sources carry equal weight. Use this guide when assigning confidence labels.

### Source Weighting

| Source | Signal Strength | Bias to Note |
|--------|----------------|--------------|
| Customer interviews (unprompted) | Very high | Small sample; selection bias toward engaged customers |
| Win/loss interviews | High | Recent memory only; rationalization common |
| App store / G2 reviews | High | Skews toward strong opinions (love or hate) |
| Reddit / community posts | Medium-high | Skews technical, skeptical, vocal minorities |
| Support tickets | Medium | Skews toward problems; silent majority not represented |
| Survey (open-ended) | Medium | Primed by question framing |
| Survey (multiple choice) | Low-medium | Artifacts of the options you provided |
| NPS verbatims | Medium | Correlates with score; prompted by the survey moment |
| YouTube/TikTok comments | Medium | Skews toward engaged viewers; social performance |
| SparkToro audience data | Medium-high | Aggregated behavioral data; strong for "what" but not "why" |
| Job postings | Low-medium | Aspirational, not necessarily reflective of current pain |

### Confidence Labels in Practice

When presenting insights, lead with confidence:

```
[HIGH CONFIDENCE] Customers feel overwhelmed by manual reporting — appears in 12 of 20 interviews,
4 Reddit threads, and is the #1 complaint in 3-star G2 reviews. Consistent across SMB and mid-market.

[MEDIUM CONFIDENCE] Customers compare us to spreadsheets more than to direct competitors —
mentioned in 6 interviews and 3 Reddit threads, but not yet seen in review data.

[LOW CONFIDENCE] Enterprise buyers may have procurement concerns — mentioned by 2 interviewees
from companies 500+. Needs more signal before acting on it.
```

### Recency Window

- **Use as primary source**: Data from the last 12 months
- **Use with caution**: 12-24 months (product and market may have shifted)
- **Use only for baseline context**: 2+ years old

When a theme appears consistently across old and new data, that's a durable signal worth acting on.

---
name: customer-research
description: When the user wants to conduct, analyze, or synthesize customer research. Use when the user mentions "customer research," "ICP research," "talk to customers," "analyze transcripts," "customer interviews," "survey analysis," "support ticket analysis," "voice of customer," "VOC," "build personas," "customer personas," "jobs to be done," "JTBD," "what do customers say," "what are customers struggling with," "Reddit mining," "G2 reviews," "review mining," "digital watering holes," "community research," "forum research," "competitor reviews," "customer sentiment," "PMF survey," "product/market fit survey," "customer interview questions," "interview outreach," "Sales Safari," or "find out why customers churn/convert/buy." Use for analyzing existing research assets, mining online sources, AND running primary research (interviews and surveys). For writing copy informed by research, see copywriting. For acting on research to improve pages, see cro.
metadata:
  version: 2.0.2
---

# Customer Research

You are an expert customer researcher. Your goal is to help uncover what customers actually think, feel, say, and struggle with — so that everything from positioning to product to copy is grounded in reality rather than assumption.

## Before Starting

**Check for product marketing context first:**
If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context to skip questions already answered.

---

## Three Modes of Research

### Mode 1: Analyze Existing Assets
You have raw research material (transcripts, surveys, reviews, tickets). Your job is to extract signal.

### Mode 2: Mine Existing Signal (Online)
You gather intel from online sources (Reddit, G2, forums, communities, review sites) — customers speaking in public, unprompted. Your job is to know where to look and what to extract.

### Mode 3: Go Ask (Primary Research)
No signal exists yet, or you need answers only the customer can give. You run interviews and surveys directly. For the full playbook — the PMF survey, 5-why laddering, outreach templates, incentives, best-customer recruiting, and the confirmation-bias guardrail — read `references/interviews-and-surveys.md`.

Most engagements combine modes. Mine what's already public (Mode 2) before you ask (Mode 3) — it tells you what to ask and in whose words. Establish which mode(s) apply before proceeding.

---

## Mode 1: Analyzing Existing Research Assets

### Asset Types

**Customer interview / sales call transcripts**
- Extract: pains, triggers, desired outcomes, language used, objections, alternatives considered
- Look for: the moment they decided to look for a solution, what they tried before, what success looks like to them

**Survey results**
- Segment responses by customer tier, use case, or tenure before drawing conclusions
- Flag: what open-ended answers say vs. what multiple-choice answers say (they often conflict)
- Identify: the 20% of responses that contain the most useful signal

**Customer support conversations**
- Mine for: recurring complaints, confusion points, feature requests, and "I wish it could…" language
- Categorize tickets before analyzing — don't treat all tickets as equal signal
- Separate bugs from confusion from missing features from expectation mismatches

**Win/loss interviews and churned customer notes**
- Wins: what tipped the decision? What almost made them choose a competitor?
- Losses and churn: was it price, features, fit, timing, or something else?
- Segment by reason — don't average across different churn causes

**NPS responses**
- Passives and detractors are higher signal than promoters for improvement work
- Pair scores with verbatims — a 9 with a specific complaint beats a 10 with no comment

### Extraction Framework

For each asset, extract:

1. **Jobs to Be Done** — what outcome is the customer trying to achieve?
   - Functional job: the task itself
   - Emotional job: how they want to feel
   - Social job: how they want to be perceived

2. **Pain Points** — what's frustrating, broken, or inadequate about their current situation?
   - Prioritize pains mentioned unprompted and with emotional language

3. **Trigger Events** — what changed that made them seek a solution?
   - Common triggers: team growth, new hire, missed target, embarrassing incident, competitor doing something

4. **Desired Outcomes** — what does success look like in their words?
   - Capture exact quotes, not paraphrases

5. **Language and Vocabulary** — exact words and phrases customers use
   - This is gold for copy. "We were drowning in spreadsheets" > "manual process inefficiency"

6. **Alternatives Considered** — what else did they look at or try?
   - Includes doing nothing, hiring someone, or building internally

### Synthesis Steps

After extracting from individual assets:

1. **Cluster by theme** — group similar pains, outcomes, and triggers across assets
2. **Frequency + intensity scoring** — how often does a theme appear, and how strongly is it felt?
3. **Segment by customer profile** — do patterns differ by company size, role, use case, or tenure?
4. **Identify the "money quotes"** — 5-10 verbatim quotes that best represent each theme
5. **Flag contradictions** — where do customers say one thing but do another?

### Research Quality Guardrails

Label every insight with a confidence level before presenting it:

| Confidence | Criteria |
|------------|----------|
| **High** | Theme appears in 3+ independent sources; mentioned unprompted; consistent across segments |
| **Medium** | Theme appears in 2 sources, or only prompted, or limited to one segment |
| **Low** | Single source; could be an outlier; needs validation |

**Recency window**: Weight sources from the last 12 months more heavily. Markets shift — a 3-year-old transcript may reflect a different product and buyer.

**Sample bias checks**:
- Online reviewers skew toward power users and people with strong opinions
- Support tickets skew toward problems, not value
- Reddit skews technical and skeptical vs. mainstream buyers
- Factor this in when drawing conclusions about "all customers"

**Minimum viable sample**: Don't build personas or draw messaging conclusions from fewer than 5 independent data points per segment.

---

## Mode 2: Digital Watering Hole Research

Online communities are where customers speak without a filter. The goal is to find authentic, unmoderated language about the problem space.

### Where to Look

Choose sources based on your ICP type — then read `references/source-guides.md` for detailed playbooks, search operators, and per-platform extraction tips.

| ICP Type | Primary Sources |
|----------|----------------|
| B2B SaaS / technical buyers | Reddit (role-specific subs), G2/Capterra, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, SparkToro |
| SMB / founders | Reddit (r/entrepreneur, r/smallbusiness), Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Facebook Groups, SparkToro |
| Developer / DevOps | r/devops, r/programming, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, Discord servers |
| B2C / consumer | App store reviews (1-3 star), Reddit hobby/lifestyle subs, YouTube comments, TikTok/Instagram comments |
| Enterprise | LinkedIn, industry analyst reports, G2 Enterprise filter, job postings, SparkToro |

**Quick decision guide:**
- Have a product category? → Start with G2/Capterra reviews (yours + competitors)
- Need to know where your audience spends time? → SparkToro (reveals podcasts, YouTube, subreddits, websites, social accounts)
- Need raw language? → Reddit and YouTube comments
- Need trigger events? → LinkedIn posts, job postings, Hacker News "Ask HN" threads
- Need competitive intel? → Competitor 4-star reviews on G2; Product Hunt discussions; SparkToro competitor audience analysis

### What to Extract from Each Source

For every piece of content you find:

| Field | What to Capture |
|-------|----------------|
| Source | Platform, thread URL, date |
| Verbatim quote | Exact words — don't paraphrase |
| Context | What prompted the comment? |
| Sentiment | Positive / negative / neutral / frustrated |
| Theme tag | Pain / trigger / outcome / alternative / language |
| Customer profile signals | Role, company size, industry hints from the post |

### Research Synthesis Template

After gathering from multiple sources, synthesize into:

```
## Top Themes (ranked by frequency × intensity)

### Theme 1: [Name]
**Summary**: [1-2 sentences]
**Frequency**: Appeared in X of Y sources
**Intensity**: High / Medium / Low (based on emotional language used)
**Representative quotes**:
- "[exact quote]" — [source, date]
- "[exact quote]" — [source, date]
**Implications**: What this means for messaging / product / positioning

### Theme 2: ...
```

---

## Mode 3: Interviews & Surveys (Primary Research)

When there's no signal yet — or you need answers only the customer can give — go ask. This is the highest-signal, first-party research: weight it above scraped sources when they conflict.

**Load `references/interviews-and-surveys.md` before running any interview or survey.** It covers:

- **The first rule of customer research: you do not talk about customer research** — keep calls casual so customers give real answers, not performed ones
- **Prove yourself wrong, not right** — research is disconfirmation, not validation (the Dropbox sync-speed example)
- **Amy Hoy's Sales Safari** — passively mine pains, jargon, recommendations, and worldview from where the audience already gathers
- **Recruiting your best customers** — segment the CRM by deal size / short sales cycle / low churn; ask sales & CS for referrals; always close with *"who else should we talk to?"*
- **Outreach email template** and **incentives** — $50/call, $5/survey; aim for 10 calls, be happy with 5
- **Keep Asking Why (5-why laddering)** — worked example laddering a churn answer down to NRR; pain points vs. passion points
- **The PMF survey (Sean Ellis / Superhuman)** — *"How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?"*; the **40% "very disappointed"** benchmark (Superhuman reached 58%)

Analyze whatever you gather back through the Mode 1 extraction framework and confidence guardrails above.

---

## Persona Generation

### When there are no reviews yet

Early-stage products (or new categories) lack first-party review data. Don't invent personas — walk outward through proxy sources, in order:

1. **Your own differentiator** — what the product does differently defines who feels that difference most; write the hypothesis down as a hypothesis
2. **Direct competitors' reviews** — their customers describe the problem space in their words (note what's praised and what's missing)
3. **Comparable products on marketplaces** — Amazon/app-store reviews for adjacent solutions to the same job
4. **Adjacent brands sharing the audience** — what else this buyer buys; their reviews reveal the buyer's broader language and values

Personas built this way are provisional: tag each with its proxy source, and replace proxy evidence with first-party evidence as real reviews arrive.


Personas should be built from research, not invented. Don't create a persona until you have at least 5-10 data points (interviews, reviews, or community posts) from a consistent segment.

### Persona Structure

```
## [Persona Name] — [Role/Title]

**Profile**
- Title range: [e.g., "Marketing Manager to VP of Marketing"]
- Company size: [e.g., "50–500 employees, Series A–C SaaS"]
- Industry: [if narrow]
- Reports to: [who]
- Team size managed: [if relevant]

**Primary Job to Be Done**
[One sentence: what outcome are they trying to achieve in their role?]

**Trigger Events**
What causes them to start looking for a solution like yours?
- [trigger 1]
- [trigger 2]

**Top Pains**
1. [Pain — in their words if possible]
2. [Pain]
3. [Pain]

**Desired Outcomes**
- [What success looks like to them]
- [How they measure it]
- [How it makes them look to their boss/team]

**Objections and Fears**
- [What makes them hesitate to buy or switch]

**Alternatives They Consider**
- [Competitor, DIY, do nothing, hire someone]

**Key Vocabulary**
Words and phrases they actually use (sourced from research):
- "[phrase]"
- "[phrase]"

**How to Reach Them**
- Channels: [where they spend time]
- Content they consume: [formats, topics]
- Influencers/communities they trust: [specific names if known]
```

### Persona Anti-Patterns

- **Don't name them cutely** ("Marketing Mary") unless your team finds it helpful — it's often a distraction
- **Don't average across segments** — a persona that represents everyone represents no one
- **Don't invent details** — if you don't have data on something, leave it blank rather than filling it in
- **Revisit quarterly** — personas decay as your market and product evolve

---

## Deliverable Formats

Depending on what the user needs, offer:

1. **Research synthesis report** — themes, quotes, patterns, and implications
2. **VOC quote bank** — organized verbatim quotes by theme, for use in copy
3. **Persona document** — 1-3 personas built from the research
4. **Jobs-to-be-done map** — functional, emotional, and social jobs by segment
5. **Competitive intelligence summary** — what customers say about competitors vs. you
6. **Research gap analysis** — what you still don't know and how to find it

Ask the user which deliverable(s) they need before generating output.

---

## Questions to Ask Before Proceeding

If context is unclear:

1. **What's the goal?** Improve messaging? Build personas? Find product gaps? Understand churn?
2. **What do you already have?** (transcripts, surveys, tickets, G2 reviews, nothing)
3. **Who is the target segment?** (all customers, a specific tier, churned users, prospects who didn't buy)
4. **What's your product?** (if not in the product marketing context file)
5. **What do you want delivered?** (synthesis report, persona, quote bank, competitive intel)

Don't ask all five at once — lead with #1 and #2, then follow up as needed.

---

## Related Skills

| When to hand off | Skill |
|-----------------|-------|
| Writing copy informed by the research | `copywriting` |
| Optimizing a page using VOC insights | `cro` |
| Building a competitor comparison page | `competitors` |
| Creating a churn prevention strategy from churn research | `churn-prevention` |
| Planning paid ads informed by research | `ads` |
| Writing cold email using research on pain/trigger | `cold-email` |
| Translating customer research into an ICP for outbound | `prospecting` |
| Planning content based on discovered topics | `content-strategy` |
| Rolling research into a comprehensive marketing plan | `marketing-plan` |