Market Research Before Launch: Four Questions to Answer Before You Spend on Ads

You research a market before launching a new product by answering four questions with evidence: who actually buys, what they compare you with, what they pay and when they decide, and what the market is missing. Before the four questions, you write down the decision the answers will feed, because research that serves no specific decision ends up as a file nobody opens.

Market research fills the first boxes of a go-to-market plan: the first segment, the problem in the buyer's words, and the proof you will sell with. Much of what ranks for market research, especially in Arabic, confuses it with a feasibility study or starts with a survey. This guide reverses the order: the decision first, then behavioral evidence, then a survey only if you still need one.

What is market research, and how is it different from a feasibility study?

Market research is the evidence that answers a specific commercial decision: who buys, what they compare, what they pay and when, and what they lack. A feasibility study is the financial calculation that decides whether the project deserves the investment. Research feeds the feasibility study with demand and price inputs; it does not replace it.

	Market research	Feasibility study
The question	Who buys, why, for how much, and instead of what?	Is the project worth the money, and when does it break even?
Output	Written findings with their evidence and a confidence grade	Costs, projected revenue, break-even and financing
Used by	Marketing, sales and the product owner	Management, finance and investors
When	Before the go-to-market plan and before any ad spend	Before the investment decision

Start from the decision, not the survey

Write the decision as one sentence: we will launch [what] for [whom] in [where] on [which terms] by [when]. Then ask of each part: what evidence would make me change this? That evidence is your research plan. Everything else is curiosity.

Evidence is not equal, so rank it by how close it sits to real behavior:

Strength	Type of evidence	Examples
Strongest	What people actually paid	Invoices, orders, paid registrations, deposits
Strong	What people write without being asked	Search terms, first WhatsApp messages, competitor reviews
Medium	What they tell you about a past experience when asked	An interview about the last time they bought something similar
Weak	What they say about the future	"Would you buy this?" in a survey

Surveys come last because people are polite about their intentions, and what they say differs from what they do. Use a survey to measure something you found another way, not to discover it.

Who actually buys?

The buyer is the person who makes the purchase decision, and that person may be neither the user nor the one who pays. In coding courses for children, a parent decides and pays while the child uses the product. In corporate training, the employee attends, the manager decides, and HR or finance pays. In online stores in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, a large share of seasonal orders are gifts, so the buyer is choosing for someone else.

Start with data you already hold: invoices for related products, CRM fields, and who is messaging you on WhatsApp and in what capacity. Then interview people from the segment and ask about the past, not the future:

• When did you last try to solve this problem? What did you do?
• Who was involved in the decision, and who paid?
• What did you nearly buy instead, and why didn't you?
• What annoyed you after you bought?

Stop interviewing when the answers start repeating: the same alternatives, the same objections, the same words. At that point you have enough for that segment.

What does the buyer compare you with?

Buyers compare you with anything that solves the same problem, not only with competitors who look like you. There are usually five alternatives: doing nothing, a free fix such as YouTube videos, solving it in-house, a direct competitor, or a different category that does the same job.

Give each alternative one row in this table:

Alternative or competitor	Who it sells to	Main promise	Its proof	Terms (price, payment, delivery)	Recurring complaint
...	...	...	...	...	...

The sources are practical. Search Google for the category the way a buyer types it. Open the Meta Ad Library to see competitors' active ads and their messages. Browse the top ads in your category in TikTok Creative Center, which is free and works without logging in. Read competitors' one-, two- and three-star reviews on Google Maps and on their store pages: that is where you find what nobody does well. Then ask a competitor for a quote as any buyer would, and note how long the reply took and what they asked before mentioning price.

What do they pay, and when do they decide?

You learn the price a buyer accepts from what they have paid before and from what alternatives charge publicly, not by asking "how much would you pay?". Record three things:

1. The real price range. Published prices of alternatives, and what your interviewees paid last time.
2. Payment method. In Saudi Arabia that means mada (the national debit card network), Apple Pay, cash on delivery, and instalments through services such as Tabby and Tamara. In Jordan, cash on delivery remains common in e-commerce. In business-to-business sales, it means purchase orders and an approval cycle. The payment method changes the offer as much as the price does.
3. Decision timing. Payday (in the Saudi public sector, salaries are paid on the 27th of each Gregorian month), the start of the school term, Ramadan and the two Eids, and companies closing their budgets at year end.

For seasonality, use Google Trends, remembering that it shows relative interest on a 0 to 100 scale drawn from a sample of searches, not the number of people searching. For monthly search volume, use Keyword Planner, which gives estimates of searches and cost and requires a Google Ads account with billing set up.

What is the market missing?

A gap is a problem people pay to solve today that nobody solves well. A gap nobody pays to close is an observation, not an opportunity. Look for it in four places:

• Recurring complaints in competitor reviews. A complaint that appears across several competitors is a gap in the whole category.
• Questions nobody answers. The Search Console performance report shows the queries your site appeared for and their click-through rate. Queries with many impressions and few clicks reveal a question your pages don't answer.
• Loss reasons in the CRM. "Bought elsewhere because…" is more honest than any survey.
• The objection log. What prospects repeat before they buy or walk away.

Sources you already have, free

Source	What it answers	Question	Watch out for
Search Console	The queries people find you with, and demand you don't serve	4	Shows your site's search only, not the whole market
Keyword Planner	Estimated search volume and cost	3	Estimates only, and needs billing set up
Google Trends	Seasons, and comparisons between terms and regions	3	Relative interest from 0 to 100, not counts
Meta Ad Library	Competitors' active messages and offers	2	Shows no ad results
TikTok Creative Center	Trending ads and hashtags in your category	2	Trending does not mean profitable
Competitor reviews	What frustrates buyers about the alternatives	2 and 4	Extreme reviews are overrepresented
CRM objections	What stops the purchase	1 and 4	Only as accurate as whoever logs them
Sales call notes	The buyer's words and questions	1 and 2	Ask for verbatim words, not summaries
WhatsApp messages and support tickets	The problem in the customer's language	1 and 4	Represents only people who contacted you
Lost-deal reasons	Which alternative won, and why	2 and 3	Needs a mandatory field in the CRM

To size a population segment, go to the official sources: the General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) in Saudi Arabia and the Department of Statistics in Jordan, including its household expenditure and income survey.

The four-question worksheet

This worksheet is the tool that puts the whole study on one page. Fill in the conclusion and evidence columns for each question, and don't move on to the go-to-market plan until every question has a written confidence grade.

Question	What you are looking for	Conclusion	Evidence and source	Confidence	The decision it changes
1. Who actually buys?	The buyer, the user and the payer, and the situation that triggers the purchase				First segment and channel
2. What do they compare you with?	The five alternatives, each one's promise and its most common complaint				Message and proof
3. What do they pay, and when?	Real price range, payment method and decision timing				Terms and launch date
4. What is the market missing?	A problem people pay to solve that nobody solves well				The offer itself

Writing the finding: conclusion, evidence, confidence

Every market research finding is written in three parts: the conclusion in one sentence, the evidence behind it with its source, and a confidence grade. There are three grades:

• Strong: behavioral evidence from at least two independent sources, such as competitor reviews and CRM loss reasons.
• Medium: behavioral evidence from one source, or several interviews that agree.
• Weak: an opinion, a single case, or survey answers about the future.

A weak finding is not deleted. It becomes a small test before the large spend.

Hypothetical example, rounded numbers. A Riyadh store on Salla (a Saudi e-commerce platform) sells home fragrance and is considering a line of car fragrances.

• Who buys: most likely buyers are existing customers buying a gift rather than for themselves. Evidence: 120 of the last 600 orders asked for gift wrapping, and WhatsApp messages ask about gifts for a husband or father. Confidence: medium.
• What they compare with: the main alternative is cheap fresheners from petrol stations, not a competing store. Evidence: 9 of 12 interviews mentioned petrol stations, and competitors' one- and two-star reviews complain that the scent fades within a week. Confidence: strong.
• What they pay, and when: the accepted gift price range is SAR 39 to 79, and demand rises before the two Eids and after payday. Evidence: prices at six competing stores and the Google Trends curve for the term. Confidence: medium.
• What is missing: nobody sells a car fragrance in the same scent the customer already loves at home. Evidence: only three WhatsApp messages asked for "the same scent for the car". Confidence: weak.

Decision: no full line yet. A small batch sold as a gift bundle with the home fragrance to existing customers before Eid, with full production conditional on the result.

From my work

At CoderZ I run the market, competitor and audience research that new programs, market gaps and commercial opportunities are chosen on. Because I also build the CRM workflows there, I treat prospects' objections and lost-deal reasons as research data rather than as separate sales reports. The effect of this research has not been measured as a number, so I don't quote one. What I can show you is the method.

What to do next

Write your decision sentence today, fill in the worksheet from the free sources within a week, and grade each finding. Then carry the findings into how to write an offer buyers understand on first read, and if your decision includes Saudi Arabia, read what changes in marketing and sales when you enter the Saudi market. If you would like to run the research together, that is my market research service.

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