Embracing "Guerrilla" research

When serious professionals need to do serious research, they usually resort to serious solutions:

• Long calls with expensive experts

• $1,000 "industry reports" made by global research firms

• Custom, statistically significant surveys

Now, these tools have their place.

If you need the information to be credible to a broad array of people, it's often useful to have a lot of money and effort behind the information.

But sometimes we just need to learn a lot of stuff quickly.

And we often forget more – hmm – "rustic" forms of research.

One example? Fellow reader Yana used a lot of Youtube in her M&A jobs:

And you know what?

So have I.

I was once working on a project where I needed to learn all about train wheel manufacturing.

Obscure topic, hard to find good information about it. Even harder to find the right questions to ask in the off chance I'd find specialists that knew about it.

Youtube was my savior.

You'd be surprised how many metallurgic geeks there are showing videos of different manufacturing practices used by different companies.

Not only that, the companies that'd make the machines used to make train wheels also had technical videos about those machines.

Seeing them in action along with the information was a much faster learning experience than trying to decode technical documents written for engineers.

But you don't have to stop with Youtube...

This type of "guerrilla" research can have multiple shapes and forms.

A few examples I've used myself:

Podcasts: Great for getting to know someone important before you even meet them.

Need to impress someone? Need to know how they think? What do they like?

Just search for their "name + podcast". Many people have gone into at least one. The more obscure the podcast the better, as they tend to talk more "secrets".

Reddit: Great to know what "the masses" think.

Sure, Reddit has its biases.

But say you want to know how customers of skincare products feel about different brands… Or what are the main unsolved problems of triathletes… Or, god forbid, honest opinions about your products/stores…

Reddit is the part of the internet where anonymity-driven honesty meets long-form write-ups meets (at least some) civility imposed by the moderators.

Amazon Reviews: Great to know customers’ problems, objections, and how they see specific products.

Beware of the review bots, but if you want to know what people think of specific products, Amazon reviews are the place to go. You'll also see what problems they still have unsolved, what rare failures happen to each product and what edge cases people use them for.

Google PDF Search: Great for finding rare PDFs / technical information.

Just add "filetype:pdf" before your search terms, and you've transformed Google into a PDF search engine.

Searching for PDFs only is useful when you need highly technical stuff that's dense in information (vs. the average webpage that's SEO optimized and doing all sorts of things to rank higher).

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The benefit of these forms of research is that you trade off some precision/rigor for A LOT of speed and insight.

There's a time and place for each method, sure. But this one is under-used by most people.

And I like under-used powerful tools.

It's the kind of thing that keeps you working smarter.