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EXACTLY how I do market research for new products

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Ramit Sethi says most founders are asking the wrong questions before they ever build a product.

In “EXACTLY how I do market research for new products,” GrowthLab founder Ramit Sethi lays out the process his company uses to validate an idea before a single line of sales copy gets written. Sethi built his reputation as a bestselling author and the voice behind GrowthLab, an online platform for entrepreneurs, and in this video he walks through why he skips the tools most business owners default to — SMART-goal survey templates, broad industry reports, abstract competitor breakdowns — in favor of sitting down with real prospects and listening to how they actually talk about their problems.

• Sethi’s framework rejects generic SMART survey questions and industry-report research in favor of direct, one-on-one conversations with real prospective buyers.
• The core technique is the customer discovery interview: Sethi listens for emotional language and specific pain points rather than asking people to fill out a form.
• He instructs founders to record prospects’ exact phrasing — not corporate jargon — and feed that language directly into product design and sales copy.

Sethi Rejects Conventional Strategic Playbooks

Most market research advice tells founders to build a survey, distribute it widely, and crunch the results into a spreadsheet. Sethi argues that approach produces data that sounds reasonable but rarely predicts whether anyone will actually pay for something. Surveys let respondents answer in the abstract, he says, while a real buying decision happens when someone is under pressure from a specific, immediate frustration.

That’s the same instinct behind a lot of the sharper marketing-research critiques floating around GrowthLab’s orbit — including the case for avoiding certain stock questions entirely, a point covered in 3 Questions You Should Never Ask in Marketing Research. Sethi’s version of that critique is blunter: if your research method can’t tell you what someone is willing to pay to fix, it isn’t research, it’s a survey people filled out to be polite.

The Customer Discovery Interview

The center of Sethi’s method is the one-on-one interview with a real target buyer — not a focus group, not a panel, but a single conversation where the goal is to get the person talking about a problem they’re already living with. He tells founders to stop pitching during these calls entirely. The moment you describe your product, he says, you contaminate the data, because people will start reacting to your idea instead of describing their actual pain.

Instead, Sethi pushes founders to ask about specific moments: the last time this problem cost them money, time, or stress, and what they tried to do about it. The value isn’t in whether they say “yes, I’d buy that” — it’s in whether they can describe, unprompted, a situation where the problem actively hurt.

Capturing the Exact Words

Sethi’s second rule is almost mechanical: write down what people actually say, word for word, and resist the urge to translate it into cleaner, more “professional” language. He argues that the emotional, sometimes messy phrasing customers use in an interview is more valuable to a founder than any polished takeaway, because that raw language is what eventually goes into headlines, ad copy, and landing pages.

The interview isn’t done until you’ve written down the customer’s pain point in their own words — not your paraphrase of it.

This is where Sethi’s process diverges most sharply from a conventional research report. A competitor analysis or an industry trends deck can tell a founder where the market sits in aggregate, a step covered in general terms in guides like How To Find Products To Sell Online. But Sethi’s interviews are built to surface the specific sentence a customer would use to describe their frustration to a friend — the kind of line that never shows up in a market report but converts perfectly in an ad.

Turning Interviews Into Product and Copy

Once the interviews are done, Sethi maps the recurring language directly onto two things: the product itself and the sales page selling it. If five different prospects independently describe the same frustration in similar terms, that phrase becomes a headline candidate. If the interviews reveal that people are already spending money on a workaround, that’s the signal Sethi treats as validation — not enthusiasm, not survey scores, but existing spend on solving the problem badly.

That distinction is the backbone of his pitch: research should find people who are already trying to solve the problem and already paying for an imperfect fix, because that’s the buyer who converts once you show up with something better.

Sethi doesn’t frame this as a one-time step before launch — he treats it as the ongoing habit that keeps a product’s messaging honest, which is why the video keeps circling back to the same instruction: put down the templates, get on the phone, and write down exactly what the customer said.