(Picture Source: British Library, LinkedIn)
We’re excited to be working with the British Library this year leading the product and service training and support for the Get Ready for Business Growth programme cohort, working alongside friends and mentors including financial experts Friendly CFO.
Funded by Arts Council England and The British Library, the scale-up programme has helped over 400 individuals to innovate and grow their creative businesses through one-to-one mentoring, tailored workshops and access to bespoke research.
You can find out about the British Library’s wider offer of business support here: www.bl.uk/bipc
In 2020 we supported the market research contract for the Library’s then Innovating for Growth scale-up businesses to help them plan for growth and prioritise opportunities. We supported businesses across sectors, from social care to fashion, publishing, retail and business services.
“Chris provided one-to-one support and advice sessions followed by bespoke market research and analysis to businesses from a wide range of sectors, from social care to fashion, publishing, retail and business services. We were very impressed by the quality of the work and the research reports, as well as the responsiveness of the support. We are happy to recommend Chris.” ~ Nigel Spencer, then Research & Business Development Manager, British Library Business and IP Centre.
Market research tips and guides
Here are some our guides on conducting market research for start-ups. They are pre-AI but the principles and mental models remain, and the suggestions will help you with prompts and working with AI’s strategic brainstorming power as your research and strategy sparring partner.
- Five steps for getting started with market research . (Nb. Our ‘think beyond Google’ advice applies equally now to AI tools. Remember that there will be many useful data sources that are not indexed and have not been fed into AI learning. Doing some investigative and research-led legwork first can help you prompt AI to support you with your research in a more targeted way).
- How to conduct secondary market research
- Market Sizing
- Customer Profiling: Tips For Understanding Your Customers
- Competitor Analysis
- Case Studies
- Market research for growing
Feedback from start-ups.
Our comprehensive market sizing and competitor research has helped a range of start-up clients make their case for investment and expand their services offers.
SoloTrvlr is the first global network of travel advice for women, by women. SoloTrvlr provides essential advice for all of your solo trips – getaways, business trips, work-cations & more.
We were thrilled to work with co-founder Kim Callender to provide market research support to help the team define their markets and audience segments. The support has helped the team move forwards with their plans to scale and grow the network.
“Chris’s thorough research of the market, astute insights, and speedy turnaround helped us make key decisions about where to invest our energies from a product and marketing perspective as we look to launch our startup into the market. He also helped us build up our story for investment, showing the potential upside, and risks. He was great to work with – fast on turnaround and extremely detailed in his analysis. Thanks Chris!” – Kim Callender, Founder, SoloTrvlr