market-research

name	market-research
description	Conduct market research, competitive analysis, investor due diligence, and industry intelligence with source attribution and decision-oriented summaries. Use when the user wants market sizing, competitor comparisons, fund research, technology scans, or research that informs a business decision. Do NOT use for building the investor-facing documents themselves (investor-materials) or for campaign copy derived from the findings (marketing-campaign).
origin	ECC

Market Research

Produce research that supports decisions, not research theater.

When to use

• researching a market, category, company, investor, or technology trend
• building TAM/SAM/SOM estimates
• comparing competitors or adjacent products
• preparing investor dossiers before outreach
• pressure-testing a thesis before building, funding, or entering a market

When NOT to use:

• the deliverable is the deck, memo, or model — that is investor-materials; this skill feeds it
• the deliverable is campaign copy — that is marketing-campaign
• no sources are reachable (offline, no web access, paywalled). Research written from model memory is indistinguishable from fabrication and carries no evidence tag — say so and stop

Inputs

Required before writing a single finding — absent input = stop, never fill the gap from memory:

1. The decision the research serves. "Should we enter X", "is fund Y a fit", "do we build or buy". Without a decision, the output is a summary, not research.
2. Reachable sources. Every important claim needs one. Use web search / Exa / vendor docs and record the URL and the retrieval date. A claim whose source cannot be opened is deleted or relabelled as an assumption.
3. Internal facts, from the SOT — for SkyyRose sizing or competitive positioning, product and price reality comes from wordpress-theme/skyyrose-flagship/data/skyyrose-catalog.csv, never from recollection.
4. A stated as-of date. Data ages; the reader needs to know how stale.

Procedure

1. State the decision, then the questions that would change it.
2. Gather sources. For each mode, collect:
   • Investor / fund diligence — fund size, stage, typical check size; relevant portfolio companies; public thesis and recent activity; fit and non-fit reasons; red flags.
   • Competitive analysis — product reality (not marketing copy); funding and investor history if public; traction metrics if public; distribution and pricing clues; strengths, weaknesses, positioning gaps.
   • Market sizing — top-down from reports or public datasets, bottom-up sanity check from realistic acquisition assumptions, and an explicit assumption for every leap in logic.
   • Technology / vendor — how it works; trade-offs and adoption signals; integration complexity; lock-in, security, compliance, and operational risk.
3. Label every line as fact (sourced), inference (reasoned from facts), or recommendation. Append (Source: <url or dataset>, <date>) to every number as you write it, so the sourcing check below runs mechanically.
4. Include contrarian evidence and the downside case. A brief with no counterargument was not research.
5. Write the output in this structure: executive summary · key findings · implications · risks and caveats · recommendation · sources.
6. Run the Verification checks on the brief file before delivering.

Verification

Run against the written brief. A check that errors on a bad path exits 2 — a dead gate, not a pass (bug-230).

1. Every number carries a source — the check that separates research from assertion:

grep -nE '[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?%|\$[0-9]|[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?[BMK]\b' research-brief.md | grep -v 'Source:'

PASS: exit 1, no lines returned. Acceptable labels include (Source: <url>, <date>) and (Source: operator-supplied; unverified) — an unlabelled number is deleted or relabelled, never left standing. [repro]

2. Every cited URL actually resolves — a citation that 404s is worse than no citation:

grep -ohE 'https?://[^ )]+' research-brief.md | sort -u | while read -r u; do
  printf '%s -> ' "$u"; curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' --max-time 15 "$u"
done

PASS: every line ends in 200 (or a documented 301/403 for known paywalls, called out in the brief). Any 000 or 404 — remove the claim or find a live source. [live]

3. The required structure exists — a brief missing risks or a recommendation is a summary:

grep -ciE '^#+ .*(executive summary|key findings|implications|risks|recommendation|sources)' research-brief.md

PASS: prints 6. Fewer means a required section is missing — most often "risks and caveats", which is exactly the section that makes the brief falsifiable. The -i is load-bearing: without it the pattern never matches a ## Executive summary heading and the check silently prints 0 for every input, which is a dead gate, not a finding. [repro]

Checks 1 and 3 were both proven able to fail before being trusted (rule 3) — see the worked example for check 1, and check 3 was run against a brief with the risks section removed, which printed 5 instead of 6 [repro]. A SKIP is not a PASS: whether the recommendation actually follows from the evidence is a human judgment no command grades — state it as open and name the decision-maker who closes it.

Worked example

Real run, 2026-07-28. Brief drafted to the session scratchpad as research-brief.md with three findings. First pass, the sourcing gate went red — proving it can fail:

$ grep -nE '[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?%|\$[0-9]' research-brief.md | grep -v 'Source:'
3:- Average luxury-streetwear AOV is $240

The other two lines already carried (Source: ThredUp 2025 Resale Report) and (Source: Morning Consult, 2025) and were not returned. After relabelling the AOV line (Source: operator-supplied; unverified) — the honest label, since no external source backed it — the same command exits 1:

$ grep -nE '[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?%|\$[0-9]' research-brief.md | grep -v 'Source:'; echo "exit=$?"
exit=1

Both states observed this session [repro]. Note what the fix was: the number was relabelled as unverified, not silently kept. That is the difference between the gate working and the gate being gamed — and the AOV figure now carries [inferred] scope, so it cannot support a severity claim in any downstream deck.

Failure modes

Failure	What it looks like	Rule
Numbers from model memory	a plausible market size with no citation	Indistinguishable from fabrication. Check 1 catches unlabelled numbers; a fabricated label is caught by check 2
Dead citations	source URL 404s or was never opened	Check 2 [live]. Remove the claim or replace the source
Stale data presented as current	a 2019 report cited without a date	Always state the as-of date and flag stale data explicitly
Fact / inference / recommendation blurred	an inference reads as a finding	Label each line. [inferred] never carries severity (bug-287)
No counterargument	every finding supports the desired conclusion	Include contrarian evidence and the downside case, or the brief is advocacy
Summary instead of decision	reader still cannot act	Check 3 requires implications, risks, and a recommendation
Mechanical greens read as a full pass	"research verified" with no human judgment on the logic	A SKIP is not a PASS — name the open judgment and its owner
Internal facts from recollection	SkyyRose price or SKU quoted from memory	The catalog CSV is the SOT; plausible ≠ sourced (bug-096 shape)

Related skills

investor-materials (turning findings into deck/memo/model) · marketing-campaign (Phase 1 research brief) · seo (keyword and competitor search-visibility data)