Customers & Research

As a non-technical founder, how do I research a market where I don't understand the technical products my competitors sell?

A starting point

You don't need to understand the internals to research well, you need to understand what the product does for the buyer and where it falls short, which is a customer question, not an engineering one. Book demos as a prospective customer, read the one-star reviews closely (they explain the pain in plain language), and find one honest technical friend to translate the jargon on a call. Your edge as a non-technical founder is that you'll hear the buyer's real complaint instead of getting lost in the specs.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

2 resources 2 link-checked Read Use

Read

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it Written by a non-technical founder who built a tech company, this piece draws the line that matters: you need the concepts (front end vs back end, what an API does, what is possible) but not the coding. That framing is exactly what lets you research a technical market, because you learn just enough vocabulary to ask sharp questions and read a competitor's product honestly. Treat it as a starting point for building your own technical literacy, not a full course.

What Non-Technical Founders Really Need To Know About Tech

From Forbes by Sophia Matveeva ~7 min read

  • Aim for conceptual fluency, not coding skill: knowing what the pieces are and how they connect is enough to size up a competitor's product.
  • Your outsider view is an asset, because you tend to start from the customer's problem rather than the engineering, which is often where the market gap sits.
  • Pair the reading with someone technical you trust who can explain things in plain terms, so you can sanity-check what you find during research.
Open forbes.com →

Use

🛠️ Tool
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it When you cannot read the code or the spec sheet, real buyers can. G2 lets you pull up any technical competitor, sort to the one and two star reviews, and read exactly where the product frustrates people in plain language. You do not need to understand the technology to understand "onboarding took six weeks" or "the API kept breaking", and that is the signal you are actually hunting for.

G2 (business software review directory)

From G2 by G2.com

  • Go straight to the low-star reviews of each competitor: the complaints are your market's unmet needs, written by people who paid for the product.
  • G2 breaks ratings into fields like ease of setup and quality of support, so you can spot a repeatable weakness without decoding a single technical feature.
  • Cross-check the same product on Capterra and Trustpilot, since each site skews to a different buyer, and treat any one glowing or scathing review as noise until a pattern shows up.
Open g2.com →

People also ask

How do I research my competitors properly? Go beyond their homepage: sign up, read their reviews, their churned-customer complaints, their job posts, and their pricing page. The gold is in w... Beginner 2 resources → What if my customers say they have no competitors, is that good or bad? Almost always bad, because it usually means the job isn't painful enough to spend money or effort on. If nobody's built anything, ask what people c... Beginner 2 resources → What tools should I use to track competitors and market landscape? Start free and manual before you pay for anything: Google Alerts and their newsletter for moves, G2/Capterra reviews for weaknesses, Crunchbase for... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I position against a bigger, better-funded competitor? Don't fight them on their strengths, reframe the category so your strengths matter most. Anchor on the competitive alternatives your best customers... Advanced 2 resources → How do I size the market and figure out if it's big enough? Build it bottom-up, not from a scary McKinsey top-down number: who exactly is the customer, how many are there, what will they pay, and how will yo... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I understand the competitive landscape for an Indian market specifically? Don't assume the US playbook maps onto India, pricing power, distribution, and willingness-to-pay are wildly different. Study who Indian customers ... Intermediate 2 resources →