David Darmanin, Hotjar’s CEO (and my boss), launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

With Hotjar, they did things differently. Long story short, they conducted market research in the early stages to figure out what their consumers really wanted, and they made (and continue to make) constant improvements based on their research.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to conduct quick, effective market research without hiring an agency—something called lean market research. It’s easier than you might think, and it can be done at any stage in a product’s life-cycle.

To show you how it’s done in the real world, I’ve included a market research example from…