Research

What our market research services include

Research reports have a failure mode: they get filed. Ours are built backwards from a decision: you enter the engagement knowing what you need to decide, and leave knowing what to do. The scope covers both halves of the discipline, the market and the user:

• Market and competitor analysis: market sizing, competitor teardowns, pricing scans, and positioning maps for the specific decision on your desk.
• Customer research: one-on-one interviews and surveys that establish who buys, why they buy, and what they compare you against.
• UX research and usability testing: moderated and unmoderated tests of your product or prototype, focused on the flows where revenue is won or lost.
• Concept and prototype validation: evidence on whether an idea deserves a budget, gathered before development commits one.
• Customer satisfaction and churn research: why users stay, why they leave, and what would bring them back.
• Synthesis and recommendations: findings ranked by impact and confidence, each tied to a concrete next step.

Teams hire a market research firm at three moments: before building something (is this worth building?), before entering a market (who is already there?), and when growth stalls (what are we not seeing?). All three are cheaper to answer with data than with a launch.

What does the research process look like?

1. Define the decision. Every engagement starts with the question you need answered: enter this market, fix this funnel, price this product. No decision, no study.
2. Choose methods to fit. Interviews for depth, surveys for scale, usability testing for behavior, desk research for context. Usually a mix. Never everything.
3. Recruit the right people. Findings are only as good as the participants, so we recruit real buyers and users, not whoever is cheapest to reach.
4. Run the fieldwork. Interviews, tests, and surveys, recorded and structured against the original question rather than transcribed into a heap.
5. Deliver decisions, not data. A ranked set of findings, a recommendation for each, and a working session with your team, because a report nobody argues with is a report nobody read.

UX research or market research: which one do you need?

A market research consultant tells you whether the demand exists. A UX research agency tells you whether your product converts the demand you already have. Buy the wrong one and the study answers a question you never asked.

The symptoms usually point clearly. Trial signups that never activate: UX research. Confident pitches to an audience nobody can define: market research. A checkout that leaks: usability testing. A new country on the roadmap: both, in sequence.

Budgets suggest teams have learned this the hard way: 42% of organizations increased UX research spending by 10–30% year over year, and a further 30% by more than that, according to Userlytics’ State of UX report, 2025. We run both disciplines as one practice, so what the market wants and what the product does get decided together, and the findings feed straight into UI/UX design rather than waiting in a slide deck.

Why skipping research costs more than doing it

The most expensive research is the study you skipped. In CB Insights’ 2024 post-mortem analysis of 431 VC-backed companies that shut down, 43% failed on product-market fit: they built something without a real market need. That is not an engineering failure. It is a research failure, paid for at engineering prices.

The inverse is measurable. A 2025 Forrester Total Economic Impact study, commissioned by UserTesting, found enterprises earned a 415% ROI on user research over three years, with payback in under six months; validating concepts before launch shortened iteration cycles by 25% and avoided $2.5 million in developer rework. And the wins are often narrow: Baymard Institute’s checkout benchmark, built on 41,000+ UX performance scores, shows large e-commerce sites can lift conversion by 35% through better checkout design alone (Baymard, 2025). One flow, researched properly, is sometimes the whole business case.

Research for startups, MVPs, and new market entry

Europe is the world’s second-largest insights market at roughly US$34 billion, according to ESOMAR’s Global Market Research report, 2024. Most of it is built for enterprise buyers: panels, trackers, year-long retainers. Product teams and startups need something smaller and sharper: a defensible answer to one question in about two weeks.

That is the gap we work in. Before an MVP, a validation study tells you whether to build at all, groundwork that makes MVP development a bet with evidence behind it. Before a market entry, customer and competitor research maps who is already there, what they charge, and where the opening is. As a Slovakia-based studio working across the EU and internationally, we are used to running studies in more than one language and market at a time. When the findings land, they flow into product strategy work on positioning, pricing, and roadmap instead of a drive folder.

What market research costs

Scope drives price, and three things drive scope: how many methods the question needs, how hard the right participants are to recruit, and how many markets or languages the study covers. A ten-interview study in one country is a different project from a three-country pricing survey, and it should be priced like one.

Every engagement is quoted as fixed deliverables at a fixed price before work starts: no day rates, no open-ended discovery. The best way to start is a one-question research sprint: a single method aimed at your riskiest assumption, about a week of work, ending in a written recommendation. If the answer justifies going deeper, the sprint’s findings carry forward into the larger study.

If a guess is about to make an expensive decision for you, talk to us. We will scope the smallest study that answers it.