Most SaaS products fail not because of bad code but because they built something nobody wanted. According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail due to “no market need.”
The reality that a lot of SaaS founders ignore at their own peril is that no one cares about their shiny new solution. They only care about solving THEIR problems.
This guide shows you how to uncover those problems before you waste months building. We’re going to cover:
How to run SaaS market research step-by-step
The exact methods, tools, and frameworks that work
How to analyze competitors and spot underserved opportunities
P.S., this is exactly why we built ValidateMySaaS, a tool that automates 90% of this research upfront, pulling competitor data, pricing, SEO keywords, and more, so that you can confidently build knowing there is proven demand for your product. Click here to build your first report.
SaaS market research is what separates ideas that scale into unicorns from products that quietly die after launch. The difference isn’t in the product but rather in the clarity founders have before they build.
Unlike broad tech research, SaaS market research drills into five brutal realities:
Competition: Who’s already in the space, and where are they vulnerable?
Pricing: What do buyers expect to pay? Where can you position yourself profitably?
Audience: Who feels this pain most acutely? What exact problem are they trying to solve?
Positioning: How are others framing their solutions? Where can you differentiate?
Demand Signals: Are people actively searching, talking, or buying solutions like this?
Most failed SaaS products make blind bets, hoping someone out there will want their product.. Winners enter the market knowing exactly where the gaps are.
Most SaaS founders underestimate just how unstable this market really is. Unlike traditional products, SaaS operates under constant pressure from multiple directions:
Rapid Market Shifts (Example: AI Writing Tools)
A founder might build a brilliant AI-powered writing tool in Q1. By Q3, five new tools hit the market using better models (like GPT-5), bundling SEO features, offering lifetime deals, or integrating with platforms like Notion and Slack natively. Suddenly, your once-unique feature set feels outdated. This is exactly what happened when Jasper AI was dominating early, and competitors like Copy.ai, Writesonic, and ChatGPT-native tools started eroding their differentiators almost overnight.
High Saturation (Example: CRM Tools)
Look at CRMs. HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, Zoho, and dozens of niche players all compete in a market that feels overcrowded. Even if your CRM is “better,” buyers have seen every pitch imaginable: better dashboards, AI-powered sales insights, improved onboarding. Unless you find a clear underserved pocket (e.g., CRMs built specifically for solopreneur coaches, or for industrial B2B sales teams), your "new CRM" will sound like noise to your target buyers.
High Churn Risk
Let’s say you run a video conferencing SaaS. Zoom starts dominating post-pandemic. Then Google Meet, Teams, and even Discord start eating market share by bundling video into larger platforms people already use. A small SaaS in this space faces brutal churn risk if customers discover they can get 80% of your features for free bundled elsewhere. Customers cancel subscriptions instantly when switching cost is zero and perceived value fades.
Subscription Model Dependency (Example: Project Management Tools)
You finally land 500 users for your project management SaaS. But if your average customer churns after 5 months due to weak onboarding or feature gaps, your MRR flatlines. Worse, acquisition costs rise as you saturate easy channels like Facebook or Google Ads. This exact dynamic forced tools like Clubhouse (project management, not social audio) to pivot aggressively after struggling to sustain early momentum. Without tight acquisition–activation–retention alignment, recurring models collapse.
Why Market Research Isn’t Optional in SaaS
You can’t out-code volatility. You need to know:
How many serious competitors already exist?
What features are most common?
Which pricing models feel saturated?
Who are your competitors actually targeting?
Where is market attention shifting?
ValidateMySaaS was built to give you that picture fast. In under 2 hours, you’ll have full competitor feature maps, pricing breakdowns, SEO opportunities, and even psychographic data on who your competitors serve all before you waste months building blind.
You’ve heard you need “research” but most founders don’t actually know how to run research that produces actionable insights. This is your playbook for executing world-class SaaS market research.
Every guide tells you to “talk to customers.”
But if you're pre-launch, or your customer list is tiny, the real question is:
Where do you find these people?
Here’s how real SaaS founders solve this:
Start with loose networks
→ Existing LinkedIn connections
→ Founder Slack communities
→ IndieHackers, r/SaaS, Product Hunt comments
→ Even Twitter/X DMs (ask: “I’m researching X problem, mind sharing 10 minutes?”)
Use lead list scraping tools
→ Use Apollo, Clay, or Similarweb to scrape lists of target companies.
→ Cold outreach not to sell, but to interview:
“Hey, I’m building something in your space and would love to understand your workflow.”
Leverage customer discovery platforms
→ UserInterviews.com
→ Respondent.io
→ Askable
Even with these methods, expect a 10–20% response rate at best. You will have to hustle for 5-10 interviews.
Most SaaS founders start with secondary research. It feels productive. A few Google searches, some competitor websites, maybe a Crunchbase scan. But surface-level research often creates a false sense of confidence. You feel like you have clarity, but you are actually missing most of the real signals.
Bad secondary research is dangerous because it only confirms what is obvious.
Good secondary research finds the gaps, the white space, and the asymmetries your competitors missed.
The Bad Version
Google "[your SaaS idea] competitors"
Skim the first two pages of search results
Look at pricing tables and basic feature lists
Skim a few G2 reviews
Assume you have your landscape mapped
That’s just confirmation bias.
How to Do It Well
Most people only look at total funding amounts. Real research means asking deeper questions:
How recent is the funding? Is the company still in its growth stage or slowing down?
What stage are they at: Seed, Series A, Series B, or public?
Are they entering new verticals?
Are they acquiring smaller companies?
Are they geographically expanding?
Funding data gives you a sense of how aggressively your competitors will fight for market share. A heavily funded competitor can afford to undercut pricing for years, which changes how you enter the space.
Founders often skim feature pages and move on. Instead, break down:
Who are they targeting?
What problems are they solving?
What promises are they leading with?
Where are they vague or generic?
Where do they sound highly specific?
Your goal is to reverse-engineer their positioning and find gaps. Gaps are your entry points.
Do not just copy headline market size statistics from Gartner or Statista. The gold is in the details:
Which sub-segments are growing fastest?
Which industries or roles are adopting new tools?
What regulatory shifts are introducing new pain points?
Which customer profiles are underserved?
Cross-reference multiple reports to confirm patterns. One report is rarely enough.
G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, Reddit, Quora are goldmines. Look for repeated themes in complaints:
"Slow onboarding"
"Lack of integrations"
"Poor reporting"
"Bad UX"
These complaints are the market telling you exactly what they want. Use this to build your roadmap.
Pay attention to who leaves the reviews. Is it mostly enterprise teams? SMB founders? Non-technical users? That tells you which customer segments are struggling.
Secondary research at this depth takes time. Public data is fragmented. Much of it is outdated, biased, or incomplete. And because most founders only search what they already know, they miss competitors slightly outside their initial frame. You do not know what you are missing, which is where the real risk lies.
This is where ValidateMySaaS can shortcut the process for you - with just 5 minutes of work on your end, you will get a thorough and comprehensive market report with a list of your competitors, their funding, their features, how many employees they have, G2 reviews, and general market sentiment for your product. Without any effort.
Quantitative research tells you what people are doing. Qualitative research tells you why. Most failed SaaS products are because nobody truly understood the user’s internal decision-making process.
If you skip qualitative research, you are building blind.
The Bad Version
Assume you already know what your users want
Read a few reviews and think you “get the pain points”
Pull generic “customer personas” from a template
Talk to your friends or coworkers for feedback
Surface-level opinions create false confidence. The real signal is always in specific user language, patterns of frustration, and trade-offs people make when evaluating options.
How to Do It Well
Instead of guessing what users struggle with, observe them:
Watch onboarding sessions
Sit in on customer support calls
Review support tickets
Use session replay tools to see where users get stuck
Analyze drop-off points in onboarding funnels
The goal is not to diagnose everything yourself. Let the friction points reveal themselves naturally.
If you only interview your own users, you limit your perspective. The most powerful insights often come from:
Users who churned
Competitor users frustrated with alternatives
Prospects who evaluated your space but didn’t convert
This is where most founders fail because reaching these groups takes intentional effort.
Structured interviews are great. But forums reveal what people actually say when nobody is watching. Look for raw, unfiltered feedback in:
Reddit threads
G2 reviews
Capterra reviews
Indie Hackers
Product Hunt discussions
Twitter/X threads
Pay attention to repeated phrases like:
"I hate when..."
"If only they..."
"This makes no sense..."
"We ended up switching because..."
These are not complaints. They are exact playbooks for your positioning, onboarding, and product design.
The real power of qualitative research is understanding what users are hiring your product to do. Not just “save time,” but:
"I need to generate pipeline before my board meeting next quarter"
"I want to prove ROI to my CFO so we can justify another headcount"
"I’m trying to replace three disconnected tools into one"
The more specific the job, the stronger your product-market fit becomes. The Golden rule of copywriting - outcomes sell, features don’t.
Why Most Founders Fail Here
Founders are biased. You want your idea to work. So you hear what you want to hear. If you don't have a structured qualitative process, you will interpret scattered feedback as validation.
Vague research leads to vague products. You need sharp, specific questions before you collect a single data point. Every SaaS research sprint should start by locking in the exact decisions you’re trying to make.
Validate New Product Ideas
Here, you’re trying to find undeniable evidence that people are already spending money (or time) trying to solve this problem. Start by mapping adjacent products, pain points, and workarounds.
Prioritize Feature Expansion
Not all feature requests are equal. Some drive revenue, others burn dev time for zero ROI. Use competitor feature breakdowns to spot what’s considered table stakes, where gaps exist, and what real differentiators look like. The strongest founders tie feature prioritization directly to retention triggers and expansion pathways, not just wishlist noise.
Optimize Pricing Models
Pricing is a positioning weapon. If you’re guessing, you’re bleeding money. Analyze competitor pricing models to find where you can lean premium, bundle creatively, or simplify tiers
Sharpen Positioning
The clearest message wins, not always the best product. Review how competitors frame their value - who they serve, what pain they solve, and which buyers they speak to.
A vague ICP is how you end up with bloated features, confusing positioning, and high churn. The goal is knowing exactly who will buy, why they'll buy, and who you should ignore entirely.
Stop thinking in broad verticals like “healthcare” or “finance.” That’s not how buying happens. Segment by pain. Are you solving compliance headaches for mid-market healthcare SaaS? Or slashing onboarding times for fast-growing fintech startups? The tighter the segment, the better your marketing and sales will be.
SaaS buying committees aren’t just buyers. They’re landmines. The end user cares about ease of use. The manager wants team efficiency. The CFO wants predictable costs. The CTO worries about integrations and security. Great research isolates each role’s emotional hot button so your messaging hits all layers at once.
They default to lazy demographic profiles: “Companies with 50-500 employees.” This tells you nothing about urgency, friction points, or who controls the budget. Without clarity here, every subsequent sales conversation feels like guesswork.
In this stage, we’re working to extract exactly what features we should prioritise on our roadmap and how our competitors are positioning themselves. This is the most in-depth phase so far:
Feature Sets
You need a gritty breakdown. What exact features exist? Which ones are table stakes? Which ones are deeply differentiated? Don’t settle for "They have AI." You want: They use AI for X, but ignore Y and Z.
Pricing Models
Are your competitors using freemium to dominate bottom-of-funnel search terms? Are they bundling onboarding into enterprise plans to lock in expansion revenue? Every pricing model tells you how mature (or fragile) their market play is.
Positioning Angles
Pay close attention to the words they use. Are they selling speed? Security? Cost savings? Are they targeting early adopters or laggards? Positioning reveals who they’re optimizing for and who they’re leaving behind.
Funding Levels
A competitor sitting on $50M in VC money will behave differently than a bootstrapped indie hacker. Funding data helps you anticipate market aggression, sales headcount, ad spend, and pricing flexibility.
It’s easy to often burn days jumping between 20 browser tabs trying to piece together this information manually. The data exists, but organizing it into an actionable format quickly is where most get bottlenecked. ValidateMySaaS does this heavy lifting instantly. The system generates:
Bullet-point feature maps across all identified competitors
Side-by-side pricing breakdowns
Clear target audience profiles
Verified funding rounds via Crunchbase
High-level product summaries for fast scanning
Get your ValidateMySaaS report here
Demographics don’t close deals. Understanding why customers buy is where real leverage lives. That’s where Jobs-To-Be-Done comes in. You’re not just selling “CRM software.” You’re selling "peace of mind with having sales data organised," or "avoiding churn when onboarding new customers." The job is bigger than the tool.
Start with the functional drivers. What specific task does your product help them accomplish? Maybe it’s automating onboarding flows or eliminating manual reporting. This is the rational hook that justifies purchase.
But most SaaS buying decisions aren’t purely functional. There are emotional drivers too. Is the buyer trying to look smart to their board? Reduce anxiety about data accuracy? Feel confident during budget meetings? These emotions shape urgency and willingness to pay.
Then layer in contextual drivers. A mid-market SaaS CFO buying during a downturn is thinking differently than a hypergrowth founder burning VC money. Timing, environment, and internal pressures all influence which “job” matters most at that moment.
When you map these jobs correctly, everything else sharpens: your messaging, your onboarding, even your pricing model.
You’ve got the full process now. From defining who you're targeting to collecting real customer insights and decoding your competitors' positioning, every step builds toward clarity. But even with the right process, execution comes down to the tools you put in your stack.
Let’s break down the essential SaaS market research tools that make this entire system actually work in the real world.
| Category | Tools | How They Help You Win |
| Competitor & Market Validation | ValidateMySaaS | Instantly maps competitors, pricing, audiences, features, funding levels all before you waste a second building. |
| Customer Surveys | Userpilot, Pollfish | Source qualified survey participants fast. Userpilot triggers in-app surveys; Pollfish gets you broader market data quickly. |
| Product Analytics | Mixpanel, Amplitude | Tracks user flows, feature adoption, friction points, shows how people actually behave inside your product. |
| User Feedback | Hotjar, ScoreApp | Heatmaps, recordings, structured quizzes which reveals UX issues users won’t mention directly. |
| SEO Research | Ahrefs, Semrush, ValidateMySaaS | Identifies content gaps, competitor SEO weaknesses, and keyword opportunities to dominate organic traffic. |
Most failed SaaS products weren’t bad ideas — they were simply built blind. You now have the full playbook to avoid that fate and validate your market upfront.
Pinpoint real customer pain through interviews, forums, and Jobs-To-Be-Done insights.
Map competitor feature gaps, pricing models, and positioning angles before writing a single feature spec.
Use secondary sources like Crunchbase, G2, and SEO data to find white space others are missing.
Build your Ideal Customer Profile so every marketing and product decision targets buyers with money and urgency.
The fastest way to shortcut all of this? ValidateMySaaS does 90% of this heavy lifting automatically. Get your full competitor map, pricing breakdowns, and SEO gaps in under 2 hours. Your future self (and your P&L) will thank you.