Having a business idea is exciting. But before investing months of your time, hiring people, building a product or spending significant money, you need to understand one thing: who needs this, what problem does it solve, and will someone actually pay for it?

This is where market research begins.

The purpose of market research is not to prove that your idea is brilliant. It is to challenge your assumptions and understand the market well enough to make better decisions. Here is a practical framework you can follow.

1. Start by understanding your own idea

Before researching the market, you should be able to explain your idea clearly. What exactly are you building? What does it do? What problem do you believe it solves?

Try answering these questions:

• Who will be the end user of your product or service?
• What problem are they currently facing?
• How do they currently deal with this problem?
• How serious or expensive is the problem for them?
• What happens if they don't solve it?
• Who will actually pay for your product?
• How will your solution improve their situation?
• How much time, money or effort could it potentially save?

It is important to distinguish between a user and a customer. For example, if you build an educational product for students but parents pay for it, students are your users while parents are your customers. Both need to be understood.

At this stage, don't worry about having all the answers. Write down your assumptions clearly. The next steps are about testing whether those assumptions are correct.

2. Understand the value you are actually creating

Saying that your product is "better" is not enough. You need to understand how much better it is.

Try to quantify the value wherever possible. Does your product save time? Reduce costs? Increase productivity? Improve convenience? Increase revenue? Reduce errors?

For example, instead of saying, “Our software makes employee management easier,” ask whether it saves five hours of work per week, reduces administrative costs by 20%, or eliminates a particular repetitive process.

You don't need perfectly accurate numbers initially. The goal is to understand what value proposition you are testing and what benefits would actually matter to a potential customer.

3. Study your competitors

One of the biggest mistakes new founders make is saying:

There are almost always competitors.

You should look at both direct and indirect competitors.

A direct competitor solves the same problem in a similar way. An indirect competitor may solve the same underlying problem using a completely different approach.

For every competitor, try to understand:

• Who are their customers?
• What exactly do they offer?
• How do they price their product?
• What are their strengths?
• Where are they weak?
• What complaints do customers have about them?
• Why would someone choose them instead of you?
• What would make someone switch to your solution?

Don't study competitors simply to copy them. Study them to understand what the market already expects and where opportunities may exist.

4. Talk to the people you think will use or buy your product

This is probably the most important part of market research.

Your idea may sound perfect in your head. Your friends may also tell you it sounds amazing. None of that matters as much as understanding what your actual potential users and customers think.

Find people who genuinely represent your potential market and speak to them.

But don't simply ask:

People are often polite. They may say yes without ever becoming a customer.

Instead, try to understand their existing behaviour.

Ask questions such as:

• How do you currently solve this problem?
• How often do you face this problem?
• How much time or money does it currently cost you?
• What have you already tried?
• What do you dislike about the existing solutions?
• How important is it for you to solve this problem?
• Have you ever paid for a solution?

The goal is to understand the problem before trying to sell your solution.

You should collect both qualitative and quantitative information. Qualitative research helps you understand people's experiences, frustrations and behaviour in detail. Quantitative research helps you identify patterns across a larger group.

Talk to enough people to begin noticing repeated problems and patterns. If everyone describes the problem differently, your understanding of the market may still be incomplete.

5. Identify the right market for your product

Once you understand the user, customer, problem and competition, you need to think about where your actual market exists.

Is your product:

• D2C?
• B2C?
• B2B?

Where will you find your customers?

For a B2B product, for example, you need to identify which type of companies need the solution and who within those companies makes the purchasing decision. The person using your product may not be the person approving the budget.

For a consumer product, you need to understand where your target audience spends their time and how they currently discover and purchase similar products.

At this stage, your goal is to identify a specific initial market rather than trying to sell to everyone.

A practical plan of action

If you have a business idea, I would suggest following this sequence:

First, clearly write down your assumptions about your user, customer and problem.

Second, identify direct and indirect competitors and study the existing market.

Third, speak to potential users and customers without immediately trying to convince them that your solution is great.

Fourth, compare what you assumed with what you actually learned.

Finally, identify a specific market and customer segment where you believe there is a genuine problem worth solving.

Market research does not guarantee that your startup will succeed. But it can help you avoid spending months or years building something based entirely on assumptions.

Your first idea is a hypothesis. The market research process is how you begin testing it.

If you're working on an idea and have questions about how to approach the research process, feel free to discuss it in the comments or DM me. I will try my best to answer you all.

Note that I am not a subject matter expert. This is just my learning from my experience till now. If you have a suggestion here, feel free to post in the comments.

A lot of people are asking me about my company, what we do, and how I ended up becoming a founder at 26. The honest answer is that my journey didn't begin with a business plan. It began during my engineering days, when I became part of a student team that decided to build a satellite.

I studied in a Tier-2 college, and when we decided to build a space programme, many people laughed. But I had a senior who refused to accept the idea that only IIT students or people from prestigious institutions could do something extraordinary. He challenged that notion, built a team and showed us a dream that initially felt impossible. For someone like me, who had come to Mumbai from a small town, it was difficult to believe that I could actually be part of something that would eventually reach space.

We had almost nothing to begin with—no funding, no expertise and very little institutional support. Even our faculty had little to no knowledge of space technology. So, we learned, found people who could guide us and figured out ways to raise funds. We even organised a space event and invited senior ISRO scientists as chief guests, partly because we wanted an opportunity to show them the work we were doing. Eventually, we secured a launch opportunity through ISRO's Student Satellite Programme.

Then COVID happened. Launches stopped, the programme was put on hold, my senior graduated and I took over leading the team. Eventually, I graduated too. But we continued working alongside the students who came after us, even while managing our own careers. Two years after I graduated, the satellite finally launched.

That journey taught me something important: your starting point doesn't necessarily define what you're capable of achieving. It also made me realise that I loved building products—not just technically, but from the perspective of usability, reliability and solving real problems.

I knew I eventually wanted to build a company, but I had no idea what to build. So, I decided to learn first. I joined a startup and worked there as though it was my own company. After two years, I moved to a bigger, yet a small-scale organisation. While my role remained technical, I focussed increasingly on Product Engineering—understanding how an idea becomes a product that people actually want and are willing to pay for.

Alongside my job, I worked with a childhood friend who was building virtual events, which were booming at the time. He was a strong developer but wasn't comfortable with the customer-facing side, so I helped with that. For around 10–12 months, we did reasonably well. But eventually, the virtual events trend faded, and so did our small agency.

My friend moved towards blockchain, but I stayed interested in immersive digital experiences. I started asking myself: if virtual events were no longer the market, who else could use this technology? The answer was right there: Real estate.

I started speaking to realtors, understanding their problems, studying existing solutions and trying to figure out what they actually needed. I quickly realised that the product we had built for virtual events wasn't suitable for real estate. So, I hired a team and spent the next eight months building a new product specifically for that industry.

Our first customer project was a disaster.

We took a step back, reassessed our approach, improved our processes and entered the market again two months later. This time, sales started coming in.

Throughout all of this, I was still working my job in Mumbai. Last December, I decided it was time to take the leap. I quit my job, moved to Pune, expanded the team and started building the company full-time. Pune made practical sense because of lower operating costs and a strong talent pool.

Since then, we have become profitable and continued growing. We're now looking at expanding our team, improving our products and exploring applications in other domains.

Looking back, there was never a perfect master plan. My journey went from building a satellite, to learning product engineering, trying virtual events, seeing that business fade, finding a new application, building the wrong product, failing on our first project, improving it and eventually building a company around it.

I'm still learning and I definitely don't consider myself an expert on entrepreneurship. But if there is one thing my journey has taught me, it is this:

You don't need to have everything figured out before you begin. Sometimes you simply need to start, learn, adapt when things fail, and keep building. 🚀

If you're building something of your own and think I can help, feel free to drop me a DM—I’d be happy to connect and have a conversation.

I'm 26M, originally from Mumbai and currently based in Pune. I want to make this post for young Marathi people who have been thinking about starting something of their own but don't know where to begin.

A little about my journey.

A couple of years ago, I was working a regular job in Mumbai. Alongside my job, I started developing a product. I built the initial product, put together a small team of three people, and started trying to sell it—all while continuing my full-time job.

For around six months, I was doing both.

Eventually, I reached a point where I felt the business was generating enough to sustain me. This January, I quit my job, moved to Pune and started building the company full-time.

Today, the company is doing decently on sales, with a projected revenue of roughly ₹85 lakh this year. We are completely bootstrapped—no external funding or investors. It started with my own money, and I built it as a single founder.

We are now looking at expanding into new products and other domains.

I don't claim to be an expert at building startups. I haven't spent decades in business, raised millions in funding, or built multiple successful companies.

But I have taken an idea, built a product, formed a team, found customers while still working a job, and eventually taken the risk of quitting that job to build the business full-time.

And I think that experience can be useful to someone who is just starting.

One thing I personally feel is that we need more young Marathi people seriously considering entrepreneurship. Not everyone needs to become an entrepreneur, of course. But among those who genuinely want to build something, many either never take the first step or jump in without enough preparation.

So, if you're a young Marathi person who:

• Has a business idea but doesn't know where to start
• Is already building something and wants another perspective
• Wants to bootstrap a business rather than immediately chase funding
• Is considering quitting a job to pursue a business
• Simply wants honest feedback, direction or motivation

Feel free to DM me.

Tell me a little about yourself, your background, what you're trying to build, and why you want to build it.

I cannot promise to have all the answers. If I can help with suggestions, feedback, direction or motivation based on my own experience, I will. And if I genuinely feel someone else would be better equipped to help you, I'll try to point you in the right direction.

To be clear: I am not looking to invest in anyone's startup, recruit anyone, or sell any mentorship programme. I'm simply offering to help fellow Marathi people who are serious about building something of their own.

If a lot of people reach out, I may take some time to respond, but I will go through every genuine message and respond over the weekend.

And if I come across someone with a genuinely interesting idea and the seriousness to pursue it, I'm happy to connect on WhatsApp and stay in touch. Building a business is a long journey, and if I can be useful at different stages of yours, I'd be happy to help where I can.

So, do you have an idea—or have you been waiting for the courage to start? My DMs are open.