Market Research Workflow

Customer interviews, competitor teardowns, trend scans — running continuously, synthesized into memos, not decks.

Updated 2026-04-17
Tycoon solution

Tycoon runs market research as a continuous workflow. The AI Researcher scans competitor moves weekly, runs customer interviews monthly, pings specialist communities daily, and produces one synthesized memo a week. You read 2 pages on Sunday instead of burning a weekend reading research docs that don't connect to decisions.

How it runs

  1. Weekly competitor scan

    AI Researcher monitors 3-5 direct competitors — their site changes via Visualping, their pricing via weekly screenshots, their job postings via LinkedIn (signal of hiring direction), their funding via Crunchbase, their social activity via X. Anything material gets flagged same-day.

  2. Monthly customer interview cycle

    AI Researcher recruits 5-10 customers per month via your customer list, offering $50-$100 gift cards. Handles scheduling. Founder runs the 30-minute call live — this is the non-delegable part. AI transcribes, synthesizes, extracts verbatim quotes for marketing use.

  3. Community + signal scanning

    Daily pass across relevant subreddits, Discord servers, podcast transcripts (via Whisper), and industry newsletters. AI Researcher flags weak signals: new complaints, emerging buying criteria, novel use cases, competitor mentions in unexpected contexts.

  4. Quarterly ICP refresh

    Cross-references interview data, Stripe LTV by segment, PostHog usage patterns, and churn reasons. Updates the ICP document with sharpened criteria, removes assumptions that no longer hold, identifies any new segments worth testing.

  5. Weekly synthesis memo

    Every Friday, AI Researcher produces a 2-page memo: this week's notable competitor moves, any themes from interviews, 2-3 weak signals to watch, 1 decision the founder should consider based on research findings. No decks, no 40-page reports — just the answer.

  6. Decision coupling

    When the founder or Manager has an open question (pricing, positioning, feature bet), AI Researcher produces a focused decision memo with primary and secondary data. Research feeds decisions directly instead of sitting in a repo nobody reads.

Who runs it

  • hire/ai-researcher
  • hire/ai-cmo
  • hire/ai-product-manager

What you get

  • You stay current on 5 competitors without reading their blogs yourself
  • Customer interviews happen monthly instead of 'when we get around to it'
  • ICP stays accurate as your customer base evolves — no more 18-month-stale personas
  • Weak signals surface early — before they become strategic surprises
  • Every decision has a research memo, not just a gut call
  • Founder spends 30 minutes on interviews and 15 minutes reading memos per week
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.

Can AI really run customer interviews, or is that still a human job?

The right split: AI runs everything around the interview, the founder runs the interview itself. AI recruits from your customer list, sends the outreach with incentive, books the calendar slot, sends prep materials, transcribes via Grain or Fathom, and synthesizes the transcript into themes and quotes. The founder shows up for 30 minutes and asks good questions. This preserves the highest-leverage founder activity — hearing the customer's voice directly — while eliminating the 4-5 hours of coordination and synthesis around it. Pieter Levels and Matthew Gallagher (Medvi) both run this model; neither has ever fully automated the call itself and both credit this as a key reason their products stay on target.

How is this different from hiring a research agency?

Agencies produce a 40-page deck per project, cost $15K-$40K, and take 6-8 weeks. This workflow runs continuously, costs a fraction, and produces 2-page memos you'll actually read. The insight isn't that AI is smarter than agency analysts — it's that continuous cadence beats periodic depth for operational decisions. You'll still hire an agency for a one-off deep-dive (a market sizing for a fundraise, a positioning overhaul before a big launch), but 90% of research needs are 'what's happening this week' questions the continuous workflow handles natively.

What if I don't have a customer list yet for interviews?

Pre-PMF, the workflow shifts: AI Researcher focuses on target-prospect interviews instead of customer ones. Uses Clay or Apollo to source profiles matching your hypothetical ICP, sends outreach offering a $75 gift card for a 30-minute call about their current solution to [problem]. Response rates are typically 3-8% — enough to fill 5-10 interview slots per month. This is how early Medvi, Polsia, and other one-person companies validated their ICP before they had paying customers. The workflow survives zero-to-one; it doesn't require you to already be at scale.

How does the AI avoid bias when synthesizing interviews?

Two mechanisms. First, every theme surfaced in the synthesis carries the raw evidence — verbatim customer quotes with interview IDs — so you can audit whether the synthesis is faithful. Second, the AI Researcher is prompted to name disconfirming evidence, not just the dominant theme. If 8 customers say one thing and 2 say the opposite, the memo names both. This is the opposite of the sycophantic synthesis junior researchers produce when they want to tell the founder what they think they want to hear. Tycoon's prompt calibration over the last year emphasizes this heavily — disagreement signals are deliberately amplified in the memo output.

What if I want to do a deeper research project — a market sizing or positioning study?

Step outside the continuous workflow for that. Ask the AI Researcher to run a one-off deep-dive in chat: 'Size the US market for X, pull 8 primary interviews with Y segment, produce a positioning memo with 3 positioning options ranked.' The AI will scope the project, estimate timeline (typically 2-3 weeks for deep-dives), and run it while the continuous workflow keeps running in the background. This is the mode Polsia used for their positioning refresh at $2M ARR — a 3-week focused study on top of the normal continuous cadence.

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