This Guide introduces resources to help you learn how to identify your customer, understand their needs, build customer personas, and find product market fit through experimentation.

The courses selected can be audited for free and you can find the audit instructions for Coursera and Edx courses.

Entrepreneurship 101: Who is your customer? (MITx)

Based on case studies of MIT startup companies and their founders, you’ll have the skills to conduct market segmentation, select your beachhead market, develop end user profiles, calculate your total addressable market size, and understand your customer persona.

Marketing Fundamentals: Who Is Your Customer? (Babson College)

Learn key marketing concepts to implement customer acquisition strategies to find the right customers and grow your business.

Customer Centric Marketing for Entrepreneurs (Babson College)

Learn how to better understand your customers’ needs and use this knowledge to develop and launch a marketing campaign that engages consumers and creates traction using the right marketing channels.

Marketing Innovative Products and Services (University of Maryland)

With learning modules on product strategy, go-to-market strategies, and growth strategies, you will build your skills in understanding and applying the latest marketing strategies and tactics. We’ll explore how to develop an informed marketing plan that aligns with customer needs based on real market research.

Market Research Specialization (University of California, Davis)

By the end of the specialization, learners will create and scope a research proposal, conduct desk research, design and test a focus group guide, interpret focus group results, design and implement a survey in Qualtrics, analyze quantitative data, develop insights by synthesizing findings across research methods, create data visualizations in Excel, and develop a presentation of findings with recommendations to stakeholders.

Steve Blank on Customer Development: The Second Decade

Steve Blank's Customer Development process, detailed in the indispensable and best-selling Four Steps to the Epiphany , was the foundation for the Lean Startup revolution. Steve provided an exclusive peek "under the covers" at some of the many new rules and advancements that he and the ecosystem of thousands of entrepreneur, marketer and investor practitioners have developed over the past several years.

Testing Business Ideas with David Bland

David Bland explains how systematically testing business ideas can dramatically reduce the risk and increase the likelihood of success of any new venture or business project. David also gives practical tips designed to help teams make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process, and provides plenty of valuable insights from his book “Testing Business Ideas” along the way.

The Basics of Testing Business Ideas

Strategyzer co-founder Alex Osterwalder wants to share some crucial basics to testing. This session includes important elements like how to select the best hypothesis, how to design experiments, how to run them, and how to learn from them.

How to build great customer personas (The Marketing Meetup)

Adele Revella, the author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business, shares her expertise on the topic.

Key Methods for Optimal Market Segments

Learn how to reimagine your customer segments (or uncover new ones) with a fresh approach, sound methodology, and a little help from automation.

The Surprising Power of Business Experiments

HBS professor Stefan Thomke’s conference closing speech in London (2019). Covers some ideas of his new book "Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments" (HBR Press 2020).

How to Set Up - and Learn - from Experiments (Harvard Business Review)

A conversation with HBS professor Stefan Thomke on building a culture of experiments.

David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit

David Rusenko details the story of how Weebly developed one of the most popular website creation and hosting sites on the web today.

The Real Product Market Fit by Michael Seibel

Michael Seibel is a partner and the CEO of YC. He co-founded Justin.tv, which was in the winter 2007 batch and Socialcam, which was in the winter 2012 batch.

How to Find Product Market Fit

Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment, shares his experience on finding product market fit.

Testing Business Idea (Strategizer)

A resource library for testing business ideas from Strategizer based on the publication from Bland, David J, Alexander Osterwalder, Alan Smith, and Trish Papadakos, Testing Business Ideas, 2020.

Market Research Topics and the Monthly Dose of Design (Greenbook.org)

Browse all market research topics for our most relevant articles, webinars, events, and company listings. Take a deep dive into market research methods, trends and hot topics.

Buyer Persona Institute Blogs and resources including:

• Buyer Persona Infographic: How to Create Insightful and Actionable Buyer Personas (Buyer Persona Institute)

• Mind the GAP: Using Buyer Insights to Drive Product Development, Design Market Strategy, and Develop Sales Plays (Buyer Persona Institute)

Market Research Resources, including Your ultimate guide to market research and how to conduct it like a pro (Qualtrics).

You can search Harvard Business Review to learn more articles on this topic. You can also check if your university library has a subscription to the Business Source Complete database, which provides full-text access to Harvard Business Review articles, or use the library’s interlibrary loan service to access the article.

Founders, Apply the Scientific Method to Your Startup (Harvard Business Review)

In this article the authors describe their findings from research into the application of scientific decision-making methods on new venture success in the Lean Start-up context.

Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” (Harvard Business Review)

According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done.

The only thing that matters (Marc Andreessen’s 2007 blog)

Consumer and market research is a very complex process that often involves searching diverse sources such as research databases, handbooks, trade association’s websites, consulting reports, news articles and conducting strategic online searches. You can seek assistance from business librarians to help you with this task or if you want to do some online exploration yourself, here are some research guides:

• Empower Market Analysis with Research

• Library of Congress: Consumer Research

Subscribed Databases:

The following subscribed databases would allow you to do in-depth research on consumer demographics, consumer demand and behavior, check if they are available at the academic or public libraries near you:

• Mintel Reports: U.S. consumer market studies and primary and secondary data analysis for topics including food, beverage, apparel, beauty, retail, and travel. Demographic specific reports are also available.

• RKMA Market Research Handbook: Market research reports covering business to business, healthcare, and consumer markets.

• Statista: Statista is a searchable database of statistics, studies, dossiers, infographics and more.

• Passport: Market research reports on consumer products and industries worldwide from Euromonitor International.

Free Online Research Tools:

• ESRI Tapestry Segmentation
  Enter a ZIP Code and explore up to 10 different consumer spending, demographic, lifestyle, and behavioral trends and tap into spatial analytics to see your neighborhood. Segmentation Methodology with 67 market segments.

• Claritas My Best Segments - Zip Code Lookup

• Census Business Builder: Search by industry keyword or NAICS code. Create a report for local business profiles, which include Potential Customers, Demographic Characteristics, Business Summary, Consumer Expenditure, Social Economic Characteristics, Housing Characteristics, etc.

• American Community Survey Narrative Profile: Narrative Profiles are short, analytic reports derived from the ACS 5-year estimates. Each Narrative Profile covers 15 different topic areas and provides text and bar charts to display highlights of selected social, economic, housing and demographic estimates for a selected geographic area.

• 37 Digital Tools for Running Business Experiments (strategyzer.com)

Here are 9 experiments from Testing Business Ideas by David Bland and Alex Osterwalder, along with 37 digital tools to get you started.

• Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey in Qualtrics

Learn to create a basic Customer Satisfaction survey in Qualtrics.

• How to Use Buyer Persona Canvas to Understand Customer Needs

Buyer Persona Canvas is a 10-block model that helps us understand the archetypal behaviors, activities, mental models, and contextual situations that buyers use to accomplish specific goals.

• Create Customer Personas in Canva

Create a template for creating customer personas in Canva.

• Create Customer Personas in Adobe XD

Learn how to start a project with Adobe XD including getting a free account, how to select the right artboards, how to define and develop buyer personas, and other basics that will help learners get their projects off to a good start.

• Buyer Persona Templates (Buyer Persona Institute)

• Buyer Persona Example (Buyer Persona Institute)

Click the link to find a Worldcat book record; enter a zipcode to check which library nearby has the book you can borrow. When the record is not available, a link to Amazon is provided.

• Bland, David J, Alexander Osterwalder, Alan Smith, and Trish Papadakos. Testing Business Ideas. 2020. Print.

• McQuarrie, Edward F. The Market Research Toolbox: A Concise Guide for Beginners. Los Angeles, Calif: Sage, 2016. Print.

• Revella, Adele. Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer's Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2015. Print.

• Sharon, Tomer. Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research. Brooklyn, New York: Rosenfeld Media, 2016. Print.

• Thomke, Stefan H. Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. 2020. Print.

Read More Books on This Topic

Stefan Thomke is an authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has worked with firms on product, process, and technology development, customer experience design, operational improvement, organizational change, and innovation strategy. The author of the book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments and Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation.

Alexander Osterwalder ranked No. 4 on the Thinkers50 list of management thinkers worldwide. Author of the books including Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and High-Impact Tools for Teams.

David Bland is an author and founder based in Silicon Valley. In 2015, he founded Precoil to help companies find product market fit using lean startup, design thinking and business model innovation.

Adele Revella, CEO of Buyer Persona Institute and the author of How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business.

SCORE mentors offer market research-related consultation via video, email, phone, or in-person.

Business Librarians at either public libraries or academic libraries would be able to help you find the information sources for specific industry/market research with the resources available to them. Majority of libraries offer free consultation services to the general public often without geographic restrictions and libraries often subscribe to different sources, so you can check multiple libraries around you and if it is worthwhile, plan a trip to the Library of Congress.

Connect with Diversified Customers and Drive Sales