Erik Wolf6 min read
The deal review is on a Tuesday.
The pipeline is up on the screen, and three opportunities that were supposed to close last month are marked lost. The owner asks what happened. The rep on the biggest one says the buyer went with a competitor who came in lower. The rep on the second one says the same. The third was “budget,” which is price wearing a different hat.
Nobody argues. Price is the one explanation everyone in the room can accept without it being anyone’s fault. Twenty minutes later the meeting has moved on, and somewhere in next quarter’s quotes, a few points of margin quietly disappear.
I sat in that meeting, in one form or another, for eighteen years. I ran a marketing agency for owner-led companies, and the three lost deals were never researched. Nobody called the buyers. The owner had a theory, the sales team had the same theory, and the theory went straight into the price list.
Here’s the part that took me a long time to understand. That owner would spend $40,000 on a campaign without blinking. Propose spending $8,000 to find out whether the theory behind the campaign was true, and you’d get a look. I know, because I proposed it many times and I got the look many times.
This is about that look.
The numbers
When CB Insights went through more than a hundred startup post-mortems between 2014 and 2021, the single most common reason founders gave for failing was “no market need.” Forty-two percent. Not cash, not competition, not the team. They built something and the market didn’t want it.
Those are startups. Here’s the small-business version. In 2025, Constant Contact asked 2,500 small-business decision-makers how they felt about their marketing. Eighteen percent said they were very confident it was working. A year earlier it had been twenty-seven. Confidence fell by a third in twelve months while more than a third of them increased their spend. Their top frustration, globally: “not knowing what’s working.”
Read those together. Companies fail most often because they didn’t understand what the market wanted. Small businesses are spending more and trusting it less, and their chief complaint is that they can’t tell what’s working. Both problems have the same cure, and it’s the thing almost nobody does.
What “market research” means to an owner
Say the words to the owner of a $12 million company and watch their face. You won’t see curiosity. You’ll see a calculation:
This is going to take a quarter. It’s going to cost what a good salesperson costs. At the end I’ll get a deck that tells me what I already know, or something I can’t do anything about. Meanwhile the thing I actually wanted — the campaign, the brand, the launch — sits and waits.
That calculation isn’t stupid. It’s a fairly accurate description of how research has been done for fifty years: built by and for research departments inside large companies, then scaled down to a business where the owner is also the CFO. What survives the scaling is the cost and the delay. The insight gets lost somewhere on the way down.
So research becomes an obstacle. Not a step in the project. A wall between the owner and the thing they want. And people go around walls.
“I don’t need research, I need a website”
I’ve heard a version of that sentence more times than I can count, and the owner saying it is making a reasonable argument. The business works. The owner knows the customers — has lunch with some of them. The website is six years old and embarrassing. The ask is specific, the cost is knowable, the result is visible. Research, by comparison, is a process whose output is a document.
Put that way, I’d pick the website too.
Here’s what the argument misses. The website is going to say something. It’s going to lead with a headline, make a promise, choose which three things go on the home page. Every one of those is a guess about what the people in your market care about. The owner doesn’t experience them as guesses, because the owner has twenty years of lunches to draw on. But the lunches were with the customers who stayed. The ones who left, the ones who chose a competitor, the ones who never called back after the proposal — those people aren’t at lunch, and they’re the ones the website is for.
So the choice was never research or website. It was a website built on what the owner already believed, or a website built on what the market actually said. Research doesn’t delay the website. It decides what the website is.
The cost of the guess is invisible, which is why it’s so easy to keep making. A headline that’s wrong doesn’t send you a note. A few more prospects don’t call than would have. A guess that’s wrong by thirty percent looks exactly like a market that’s a little soft this year.
The quieter reason
There’s a second reason owners skip research, and it’s the one nobody says in the deal review.
Nobody commissions a study hoping to be told their idea is unwanted.
By the time an owner is ready to launch something, they’ve already fallen for it. They’ve imagined the customers and the revenue. They’ve told their spouse and their peer group and probably a banker. The idea has a shape in their mind, and that shape is a yes.
Research is the only part of the process that can say no.
So underneath the obstacle is a fear of No. It’s the reason the owner approves the campaign without the research, and the reason research, when it does happen, so often gets commissioned after the decision as reassurance rather than before it as an input.
I understand this completely. I’ve felt it about my own businesses. The owners I’ve watched grow aren’t the ones who don’t feel it. They’re the ones who’ve been through the No a few times and discovered it was cheaper than the alternative.
Where this goes
I don’t think owners are wrong to hate market research. I think they’ve mostly met the wrong kind, at the wrong time, priced and paced for a different kind of company. The hate is rational.
What I’d argue instead is this: research as an obstacle deserves to be gone around. Research as the thing that decides what you build is a different proposition. And the part that’s changed in the last few years is that it no longer has to take a quarter or cost a salesperson.
That’s the argument I’m going to be making here for a while. Next time: the room you’re never in.
This is adapted from a book I’m working on. If you’d rather see what the research actually produces than read about it, there’s an anonymised sample study at ophea.ai/samples.