Yes, there's a huge supply of companies offering market research for startups.

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No, you don't have to pay one to validate a new product, business or hypothesis.

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Here's the dead-simple, low-cost tech stack I use to conduct market research for startup clients. These are not affiliate links, so I get zero money from recommending these.

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Pain Identification - GummySearch

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This incredibly cool tool aggregates pain points, solution requests and discussion topic trends in subreddits. It's first on the list because it trains you to start with the pain points of a particular audience, which is where the most successful startups began. It's especially powerful because the Redditors are not being sold to, so it's honest, raw behavioural data that's quite possibly the cleanest you can get.

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Finding Traffic Sources - SEMrush

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Okay, this tool isn't cheap - but it is arguably the best in the business at monitoring domain traffic. I use it extensively to find where competitors and established companies in a given space are getting their traffic from. Using the traffic analytics tool, I also look for the pages on a particular domain that get the most traffic.

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In companies with a lot of products/services, the volume of traffic to a particular page highlights both what their prospective customers are most interested in, and where that company's ads are pointing to.

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Example - 68% of an AI company's domain traffic goes to its email subject line AI page, and only 9% to its email signature AI page. If this pattern appears on several AI company domains, I know that email subject lines are a popular use for AI tools.

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Product Features - Google Ads Keyword Planner

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This process can take longer than the ones above, but given enough data can be extremely useful for understanding what qualities consumers want in a particular product and service.

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Keyword planner is a free tool in every Google Ads account (free) which shows volume estimates for particular keywords and variations. The trick here is to notice which modifiers are added to searches for a given product or service, and whether the volume is increasing.

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Example - I run an AI startup with a tool that writes college papers. In Keyword Planner, "college paper writing AI" is top (no surprise), but then I see a notable volume and growth for "college paper writing AI for civil engineers." If it's large enough, I would test a variation of the tool that's trained on civil engineering papers.

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It's tough to give an exact number for what "large enough" is, but I use the threshold of whether the total of "civil engineering" related variations is more than 10% of the volume of the main keyword.

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Problem & Solution Awareness- Google Trends

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As I said, you don't need to shell out hundreds of dollars a month for quality market research tools. Google Trends is a classic, completely free, and so powerful when used correctly. I should also preface by saying that jumping on trends is a dangerous and usually fruitless game for founders.  Truly massive opportunities lie in solving pain points of a particular group of people, whereas lifestyle businesses tend to follow trends. And there is nothing wrong with lifestyle businesses, by the way!

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Find the highest volume, most relevant keyword for your area (IE - "college paper writing AI"), and plug it into Google Trends in your largest market. If you're in a small market, just use the US because they dictate many trends anyways. See if searches for that keyword are gaining momentum or losing it over time. Remember that this isn't giving you the raw volume, but the relative popularity of the search over time (IE - a score of 100 for a given month means the search was most popular in that month during the time period you select).

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Why is this valuable? Because it shows if people in your target audience are problem-aware, solution-aware or completely unaware of that space. If you're identified a critical pain point using GummySearch, but you don't see the search in Google Ads or Trends, that could be a major opportunity to build something new that creates a category.

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If there's searches with that pain point, but the results appearing in Google aren't useful or properly tailored to the pain point, then that's also a major opportunity. People are looking for the solution, but a good one doesn't exist - so go build it!

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I purposely didn't make a long list of tools you need because, frankly, using these four can identify and validate product ideas amazingly thoroughly. No, they do not substitute for the groundwork of talking to literal people and hitting the road to meet with your audience in person, but they can absolutely tell whether ideas are worth exploring, if there's a market there, and if you're touching on an actual pain point worth building something to solve.

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Does each tool take some playing around with to learn? Of course. But the speed of identifying pain points, knowing where audiences hang out, and what features are valuable is unmatched.

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For under $100, you can accomplish what agencies will charge tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

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And if you need any help, or tips on using this stack, send me a message. I'm always here to help founders go from 0 to 1.