GUIDE
Who to hire? The right research partner for your budget, stage & project type
Some of your business questions can be answered with information that already exists. Others hinge on direct customer insight.
Which audience should you target?
What product should you build next?
What price resonates with customers?
Why are qualified buyers walking away?
When the answer to these questions requires new evidence—not assumptions or industry averages—you may need custom market research.
But that doesn’t mean a market research firm is always the right partner. Sometimes you need a panel provider, a product development company, a creative agency, or a paid media firm. So how do you know what kind of support you actually need?
Need original data about a particular audience and expert help deciding what it means for your business? Hire a custom market research firm like Bixa. Companies often engage a custom market research firm when publicly available data still leaves an important question unanswered. Maybe two teams disagree about the target customer. Perhaps you’re trying to find out what features to prioritize before development begins. It could be that your marketing team knows its churn rates are high, but doesn’t understand why or what to do about it.
In cases like these, a custom market research firm can tailor the research to your needs, find the right participants, analyze the evidence, and help you decide what to do next.
Do you just need to take action on data you already have? If so, a different partner might be better. That could be a development company building the product, a creative agency launching the campaign, or a performance marketing team managing ads
This guide will help you decide who–and when–to hire and which partner is right.
First, let’s talk about the landscape of market research companies
Upon first glance, the research market looks more crowded than it really is. Many product, design, development, and creative agencies include some form of research in their process, though it’s not a core service or specialization.
For example, a development company may interview stakeholders before it builds a platform, or a creative agency may run a quick test or experiment to find out which campaign concepts resonate before choosing one. Those activities can be useful, but they’re different from commissioning an independent study designed to answer a high-impact business question.
The most useful way to compare vendors starts with articulating the outcome you need. From there, you can identify how much you already know based on what data you already have, and then determine what expertise your team has in-house (and if you have in-house expertise, how much bandwidth they have to work on your project).
The marketing and research partner landscape
A quick guide to the types of partners in the landscape—and what they do best.
provider
market research firm
development company
government source
Bureau
agency
marketing agency
Group
Next, match your immediate need to the right partner
Here are some common scenarios, and who to call for each.
If you’re a bootstrapped founder validating an early idea… Start with DIY discovery and by accessing public data.
At this stage, you’re likely poking holes into an idea and looking for reasons it might be wrong or need to pivot. Just because you’re bootstrapping at this point doesn’t mean you can’t do research.
We personally love a lean business model, where the founder initially does all the research as they’re figuring out the company. Read The Lean Startup if you haven’t already, and do everything that Eric Reis says:
Talk with prospective customers
Study how they solve the problem today
Look closely at competitors, substitutes, and the workarounds people have invented for themselves
Bottom line: If this is the stage you’re in, start small. Interview prospective customers yourself. Some useful resources you can use as a starting point at little to no cost include:
Free or low-cost demographic and economic sources such as US Census, Census Business Builder, or Statista
Interviews or simple surveys you conduct yourself
Sarah Weise’s library of nearly 30 LinkedIn Learning courses on how to conduct DIY market research
It may be too early to hire a boutique research firm if the product changes every week, the target audience is still as broad as “women ages 18–45,” or the research budget would come directly out of building the MVP.
The calculation changes when a decision becomes expensive to reverse. Before committing meaningful capital, setting a price, choosing a priority segment, or taking a product to market, a defensible study may be worth the investment. At that point, set up a free consult with a company like Bixa and ask as a part of that first meeting if they have startup rates.
Already have a survey and only need qualified respondents?
Try a participant recruiting or panel provider.
A participant-recruiting or panel provider may be all you need if someone on your team already knows how to design an unbiased survey, choose the right survey methodology, calculate the appropriate sample size, monitor data quality, clean the data, analyze the results, and distinguish a real finding from noise. It also requires enough internal time to manage the work, which can easily extend over 10 weeks. If this sounds like you, consider a panel provider like Centiment who can provide you access to consumer and B2B survey respondents in more than 100 countries.
However, keep in mind that recruiting people isn’t the same as designing research. A panel provider simply helps get your survey out to people. This type of company is generally not responsible for ensuring that the research question, survey design, sample, analysis, and conclusion all support one another. They also won’t advise you on writing all the right screener questions you’ll need if you want to find the most targeted participants.
A custom research firm, on the other hand, would help you decide what to ask, how to ask it, whom to include, and how to translate the results into data you can use to inform real business decisions. Most research companies like Bixa can also recruit specialized audiences, combine qualitative and quantitative methods, and handle advanced analysis.
If you are refining an MVP
First decide whether the missing piece is evidence or
execution. Then choose a provider based on the answer
If you know with certainty and clarity what should be built, and all you need is engineers, designers, QA specialists, and delivery support, then perhaps look for a product development company such as Vention or EPAM.
On the other hand, if your team is still debating about which problems or pain points matter most to potential customers, which features customers value, where a prototype creates friction, or what buyers will pay, these are research problems. Bixa can test concepts and prototypes, observe usability problems, use MaxDiff to prioritize features, or evaluate tradeoffs through specialized survey techniques like conjoint analysis.
On many projects, these two partners work in sequence. Here’s how it could work:
Bixa identifies what the audience needs and the direction that real customer data supports
1
A product development partner designs and builds it.
2
Bixa tests the experience and helps refine it before or after launch
3
If you’re a marketing leader and your team is trying to understand its customers (or decide which customers to target)…
Hire Bixa. This is our bread and butter
Marketing teams often have plenty of information but still lack a coherent (or realistic) picture of their ideal buyer. Sales anecdotes point in one direction, website behavior points in another, and any existing personas they might have are based more on intuition than evidence.
Any of that sounding familiar? If so, Bixa combines qualitative depth and quantitative validation to help you understand who your customers are, and how they think and make buying decisions. That work can reveal where opportunities exist across the buying journey, what customers value, and what they are willing to pay.
For persona and segmentation work, Bixa uses quantitative segmentation through cluster analysis. This means we can identify meaningful groups based on behavior, motivations, attitudes, and needs. We then use interviews and diary studies to give those segments depth and context. The result gives marketing, product, sales, and customer-experience teams a shared basis for making decisions.
Turn to Bixa when you need to answer questions like these:
Which audience segments should we prioritize?
What moves people to enter the category?
What language do buyers use to describe the problem?
Which barriers or objections prevent conversion?
How do customers compare us with alternatives?
Which messages will resonate with each segment?
How should our customer journey, positioning, or go-to-market plan change?