You walk into a business support office ready to talk about the thing you’re really good at. Someone asks if you have a business plan. Then: “Have you don’t your market research?” and your mind goes blank. It sounds like a math problem. Like there’s a formula you were supposed to learn in a class you never took.
You didn’t start this business because you love spreadsheets. You started it because you’re good at your craft. Enough people told you so that you started believing it might be a business. “Market research” isn’t why you wanted to do this. It’s the vague, intimidating gate someone puts between you and doing.
The good news is that market research isn’t a formula and it’s not a class you missed. It is a question, asked honestly, that most people are too afraid to ask out loud. And it requires you to pay attention to the signals.
To make this process a little less intimidating, this blog post walks you through the process I used for Aducate. Spoiler alert: it took me years, and a lot of my own failed attempts to truly appreciate.
Where I started: Teaching the Story, Not Testing the Idea
Aducate started in 2021 as a branding and marketing agency. I was here to educate small business owners in advertising strategies. The goal was that they could learn how to do marketing on their own. Marketing is easy if you have a good story, a good product or service, or are a good leader with a vision.
I found that people struggled to tell their own story because they couldn’t answer foundational questions about their mission and vision. They hadn’t thought that deeply about the “why” behind the work. Services or products they offered solved their own problems with little consideration for the markets; they had a supply but didn’t consider if the demand existed first. Directionless and ineffective leadership was the result of an untested idea. A focus on branding and marketing, therefore, proved unproductive. We first had to solidify the foundation.
The Pivot That Didn’t Stick
In 2023, my work transitioned to business development that solved the story questions and better aligned the offerings to the markets. That worked to an extent, but my strategic guidance only lasted about a year and a half before clients defaulted back to their old habits. The strategies I created sat unused in drawers because their behaviors hadn’t changed. I was curious if you could teach someone how to be an entrepreneur or if that’s an innate skill. Does the word “entrepreneur” even still fit this post-COVID landscape?
What the Case Studies Kept Showing Me
That led me to focus on affecting true behavioral change in 2024 and 2025. Through rigorous case studies, I appreciated why someone would launch a business before fully testing an idea. Their identities were so fused with the outcomes of their business that any setback felt like an existential threat. That dread was triggered by such basic questions like “would anyone actually want this?” Many started a business because they recently experienced job loss, for example. They didn’t have the luxury to question if it would work; it simply had to.
Whatever the case, a commonality was that they were running from something rather than toward a market-facing solution. Without formal training on “how to be a business owner,” they lacked the confidence to lead with their own vision. This insecurity presented itself regardless of industry or stage. They sought external validation as a quick fix, wanting desperately to receive homework or be told what to do. Seeking guidance is understandable. However, self-trust to act under pressure is a pre-requisite for any entrepreneur and many seemed to have skipped this step entirely.
Zooming Out: Why This Kept Happening
These traits were common enough across clients that I started suspecting a larger context was at play. Something bigger than any one person’s habit.
My artistic work explores the theme of Post Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome (PASS) as an overly dramatic way to explain mundane annoyances. PASS is the shock left behind when an economy collapses and takes a community’s sense of self with it. I used PASS satirically in art, but there was truth in connecting the anecdotal evidence to Midwest Rust Belt cities, like Akron Ohio. In 2026, I searched for historical data that might provide the missing economic context and found a report from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) that the city of Akron commissioned in 2017.
With 10 years hindsight from the report and my own position in Akron’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, I have a particularly sharp perspective. This first-hand experience comes from a business owner navigating the resources and as an organizer providing the resources. What I found left me deeply disappointed but not surprised. An economically struggling city itself lacking an identity means that the leadership in survival mode is attempting to provide solutions to people also in survival mode. If your perspective is cloudy, how can you provide clear insight for others? I won’t claim to know what went on in the minds of Akron’s leadership over the 10 years, but I do feel the effects of their decisions. The Closed Loop Non-Profit Ecosystem and Big Bet Mentality resulting from the 2017 directives led to an environment far too tenuous to build on. It’s no wonder people continue to feel defeated and chose to opt-out instead.
Where That Leaves Market Research
Put together, this told me the need was real and persistent, and that nothing currently available was addressing it. It’s not that the people running these support organizations don’t care. It’s that they’re offering logical solutions to what is, underneath, an emotional problem. And neither side is really hearing the other. The existing programming also skips the earliest stage entirely: the place where someone grows into the role of a business owner, tests where the idea has a market, and builds the self-trust to act on what they find. Without that groundwork, you can’t expect a healthy pipeline of the bigger businesses everyone claims to want.
I’ve since seen this pattern hold up enough times that I trust it. People understand surveys and competitor analysis. That’s not the part that makes their brain go blank at the question of “market research.” The question makes someone freeze because it pokes at whether someone can tolerate finding out the answer might be no.
The Market Research Fix
Market research is more than one thing. It’s an umbrella and under it are two very different focal points depending on whether you’re looking at yourself or looking at everyone else.
- One on end is Internal Inventory – the internal work of getting honest about your own motivations, capacity, and what you want out of this.
- The other end is External Inventory – the external work of studying your market, your competitors, and your audience.
Most business support services live almost entirely on the external end. They’ll hand you a competitor analysis template before they ever ask why you’re doing this in the first place. Aducate starts on the other end. The internal inventory is harder to address because it can’t be answered neatly with a template. But, it’s usually the part that’s been blocking you.
You can find more on how I approach the Internal Inventory here.