Making Research Less of a Hurdle and More of a Habit

Here’s what they have in common:

• Research timelines are always too long. The ideal time for data collection is “yesterday”.
• Research is never the end goal. The point of research is to get you closer to your business goal.
• Research always goes through a cost-benefit analysis. Why? Because it’s expensive, time-consuming, and only indirectly impacts top- and bottom-line revenue. Most worthy research projects never happen because the known cost of research outweighs the hypothetical, unprovable, non-deterministic benefits.
• Research is monolithic…and therefore chronically underutilized. Because research projects usually have a specific end-goal, organizations leave useful data on the cutting room floor. This is incredibly inefficient.

At GetWhys, we’re building a platform that helps with these problems, delivering immediate or near immediate research, tools to help with whatever is coming next, while reducing cost and making sure that nothing goes to waste.

Compass — Optimizing Your Time and Resource Investments

Historically, market research requires significant investment in both time and budget—generally, an absolute bare minimum of $15,000 and 3+ weeks. While this investment (and the hand holding that goes along with it) makes sense for major strategic decisions, those are the exception, not the norm. The available lower-budget alternatives are either securing expert network budget and conducting DIY interviews (depending on seniority, hundreds or thousands of dollars per interview), or access to enough customers, not to mention the time to conduct these interviews.

Picture this scenario: A product marketing manager needs to prepare their revenue organization to sell to a new market segment. This will require foundational work (e.g., industry research, positioning strategy), collateral for Sales (e.g., battlecards, industry briefing docs, etc.), and messaging for their different marketing channels—sometimes, they’ll even need to draft copy for landing pages!

They know research could provide clarity and theoretically save them time, but the traditional process requires them to:

1. Pause current work to spin up a research project
2. Spend thousands of dollars
3. Wait.
4. Eventually, receive a static report that answers the questions they had weeks ago (and is quickly forgotten); OR analyze the research themselves

These challenges drove us to build Compass. Here’s how Compass solves them: solving those problems.

First, we’ve abstracted away the research process. Instead of context-switching to commission a study, our product marketer can shortcut that process and instantly access the information they need.

Second, we’ve flipped and flattened the research business model. We gather data before our customers ask questions*, and we sell access to it at a flat cost. This inversion dramatically reduces cost barriers, eliminating the need to decide what research is strategically important enough to pursue, and making sure that all output is customer centric.

Third, we’ve created a constantly growing repository of customer knowledge. Traditional research almost always starts from scratch, meaning anything that has been learned in past projects doesn’t show up in new projects, even if it is highly relevant! We’ve created a model where research can be repurposed and reused for as long as it’s useful.

This approach reduces costs and accelerates access to insights, transforming research from a discrete, expensive process to an integrated, accessible resource.

To the product marketer trying to figure out how to build all of those assets in time—Compass is here to handle the research, validate your existing assets, and assist in asset building, so you can handle the strategy.

Echo — Bringing Research To Your Work

Research is exceptionally difficult to apply to your work. Research always collects more data than you think, and internalizing all of it requires a herculean effort.

As a consultant, I repeatedly witnessed a frustrating cycle: researchers would invest significant time and resources into a comprehensive study. That research readout would be well-attended. The insights, and the raw data they were based on, would be saved to some folder, and begin gathering digital dust. Teams would inadvertently restart similar research projects, unaware that valuable information already existed within their organization, simply because that existing research wasn't easily accessible or memorable. In some scenarios—similar research projects happen in parallel at the same organization.

Customer research can be transformative. But most of the people who benefit from research aren’t researchers. To get the full value of these research investments, people need insights applied directly to their work. We’re building tooling to ensure research has a seat at the table while that work is occurring.

Echo is our first step down this path. Echo applies customer insights directly to the content creation process—think of being able to run an instant focus group on your drafts—by connecting:

• Our proprietary behavioral dataset (in-depth interviews with their target audience)
• A customer organization’s Buyer Personas, along with other foundational documents

Echo uses this knowledge to help customers create content that resonates specifically with their target audience. By integrating the research directly into the content creation process, customers don’t need to constantly refer back to a persona research project from 5 months ago. Instead of context-switching, we’re bringing relevant insights directly to them.

Customer-centric content is better when it’s informed by research; Echo is just the first step towards fulfilling that vision.

* We’ve created a feature called “Research Requests”; when data isn’t already in our system, we do fast-turn in-depth interviews at no additional cost. That information is added to our dataset within 10 business days—and customers can opt for a faster turnaround.