Releven Manifesto

We are on a mission to democratize professional market research services for IT companies of all sizes

So you have an MVP that is ready to shake up the market. You are zeroing in on your product-market fit and entering multiple local markets. Based on our experience, most startups tend to omit the research phase or rely on its own team, which does not always have sufficient expertise. However, a lack of thorough research may lead to second-guessing when attempting to enter a market.

Market research is a lengthy, complex, but essential step in a successful business development effort. If skipped, an entrepreneur can easily miss their mark. With this in mind, there are a few reasons why IT companies tend to neglect market research:

• unaware of the importance of the early-stage research;
• a lack of expertise, resources, and tools for thorough research within a team;
• lengthy searches of external resources for research needs.

We believe that research plays an important role in the rapidly developing markets of emerging IT industries where everything can be changed in a matter of weeks. To confirm our hypothesis, we have interviewed representatives from such IT segments as blockchain, FinTech, EdTech, AI/ML, VR/AR, and IoT/5G.

Why is research essential?

Research is an important but often underestimated process that allows companies to move in the right direction faster while still recognizing what the user needs most.

Research pursues three objectives:

1. Identifying opportunities for growth.
2. Assessing competition.
3. Pinpointing problems and stagnation causes.

What problems can we solve?

Based on the interviews we have conducted with IT companies’ representatives, the core problems they face when doing research are:

1. Lack of qualified specialists within the team (42%).
2. The process is too long and expensive (19%).
3. Assumption that research is not important (14%).
4. Previous negative experience with contractors (11%).

Only 14% successfully do research within the team.

Most growing companies do not pay due attention to research, they often neglect it or do it poorly, which leads to pouring time and money into developing unprofitable projects.

Releven can help businesses answer these need-based questions:

• What product-market fit do you need? How to apply geomarketing?
• What do you need to improve to become Number One in the industry?
• What do your users need? What features do you need to implement?
• What can you do to increase the company’s revenue shortly?

Releven is changing the research market for good

We believe that IT businesses of all sizes should have access to high-quality and affordable market analyses. By lowering the entry thresholds, we are building a product-centered platform where simple requests from companies can be standardized, all without compromising the quality of the research that is conducted.

At the moment, we are ready to offer the following services:

• Customer Development. We help you obtain user insights to create, test, and optimize your product ideas through interviews and structured experiments.
• Competitor Research. We research your competitors, compare your products with theirs, and provide you with information on their business processes, UX, traffic channels, client analytics, and more.
• Market Research. Before building a sustainable long-term marketing strategy for your product or service, we study the markets you are striving to enter, its trends, target audience, growth potential, and the main demands and risks.

What makes Releven different from most traditional agencies?

It’s simple: we focus on the conventional approach and its most problematic areas:

• We work with large data sets collected automatically and manually for each project. We do not use prepared stacks from a decade ago.
• When analyzing data, we draw conclusions on specific metrics that are explicitly tailored to your product. We do not work with generic metrics.
• When analyzing competitors, not only do we look at public data but we also scan for traffic sources, functions, pricing policies, workflows, and presence on social media to figure out all the vital points and provide valuable insights.
• We structure and present data so that actionable insights flow directly from it. We do not collect information and numbers for the sake of elaborate charts and graphs.
• We create focus groups based on the portrait of your target audience to run structured, multi-level interviews. We do not reuse groups that were created for other clients.

Releven’s approach is based on the belief that the client should benefit most from our cooperation, even at the earliest stages.

What is in it for you?

We will assist you with redefining your business needs through high-quality, business-specific research and analytics and automating your routine processes to optimize costs and reduce time spent for completing tasks.

Releven’s promise is to give evidence-based answers and key business insights to ensure growth and increase revenue.

1. To satisfy every deliverable, we start by gathering and ordering all the typical client requests in a standardized form.
2. We create a set of specific workflows that can automate those requests in order to reduce any unnecessary back-and-forth to a minimum.
3. Presented in the form of a digital portal (soon), the Releven platform allows clients to request and track the progress of key research metrics as well as handle billing and communication.
4. You can expect a consistent presentation of data, insight highlights, billing summary, and progress on your deliverables.
5. We are performance-focused, and our key goal is to guide IT companies to tangible results sooner and more efficiently.

Releven’s step-by-step workflow

We are all for transparency and efficiency, that is why our workflow is simple, structured, and easy to understand.

Step 1. We analyze your product and help formulate your research request.

Step 2. We develop a research plan and align it with your needs.

Step 3. We collect and analyze data using the required set of tools and sources.

Step 4. We confirm or refute the hypothesis that we have put forward.

Step 5. We provide you with a report that illustrates the structural and consistent basis of the research results.

Step 6. We help your team proceed with the received data and answer
other pressing questions you might have.

Getting it right from the beginning

Releven is not just a set of services, our goal is to create a fully automated platform to offer high-quality research on a tight deadline.

While launching the Releven platform, we focus on creativity, optimization, and ongoing practice with our target companies. The process is divided into three key steps:

Hypothesis Validation. It includes researching the market, conducting interviews, and implementing pilot projects. We strive to better understand:

• the research needs of IT companies;
• how research can help IT companies and their products;
• how Releven can solve their key problems.

Agency Launch. For now, the Releven agency offers research services for product IT companies. This stage entails:

• running research projects for promising and innovative IT products;
• identifying the most popular, urgent, and important issues product IT companies face;
• optimizing the research process and increasing our efficiency by reducing project timeframes.

Platform Launch. At this stage, we plan to focus on:

• automating processes of research and data management;
• building a platform that fully satisfies the needs and requirements of our target companies;
• gradually adding functionality to the platform.

With well-thought decisions, more passionate entrepreneurs can enter markets and minimize the risk of failure while benefiting their teams and communities.

Our goal is to transform how organizations handle MVP go-to-market strategies. With all the tools Releven has at its disposal, IT companies can be sure they are making decisions backed by real-life data to preserve their budgets and avoid uninformed judgments or wishful thinking.

Thanks for reading our manifesto to the end!

Now you understand how Releven is changing the role research plays in the IT industry and democratizing professional market research services. We know how to change the research market for good and we have already started to.

Releven is looking for business analysts and representatives of product/service IT companies, and we want to be your guide to growth through professional research.

To discuss your research issues, contact us on releven.io.

Releven – with you 24/7.