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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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How I Research Any Market in 30 Minutes Using Free APIs

#startup #webdev #productivity #tutorial

You just had a startup idea. Before writing a single line of code, you need to know: Is there a market? Who are the competitors? What do customers want?

Here's my exact workflow for researching any market in 30 minutes using free tools.

Step 1: Market Overview (5 min)

Google News RSS — get the latest 10 articles about your market:

https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=your+industry&hl=en
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This tells you: Is the market growing? Any recent funding? Regulatory changes?

Tool: Google News Scraper

Step 2: Competitor Landscape (10 min)

GitHub — search for open-source alternatives. The number of stars tells you developer interest:

https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=your+industry&sort=stars
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Hacker News — search Algolia API for community discussions:

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=your+industry
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This tells you: Who's building in this space? What technology matters?

Tools: HN Scraper, GitHub Trending

Step 3: Customer Voice (10 min)

Reddit — search for discussions about your problem space:

https://reddit.com/search.json?q=your+problem&sort=relevance
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Trustpilot — check competitor review scores and common complaints.

This tells you: What do customers love? What do they hate? What's missing?

Tools: Reddit Scraper, Trustpilot Scraper

Step 4: Technology Trends (5 min)

Stack Overflow — how many questions exist about this technology?
npm/PyPI — how large is the package ecosystem?
arXiv — any academic research?

This tells you: Is the technology mature? Growing? Dying?

Tool: MCP Market Research Server (queries all 9 sources at once)

The Result

In 30 minutes, you have:

  • Market news and growth signals
  • 10+ competitors mapped with their tech stacks
  • Customer pain points from real reviews and discussions
  • Technology maturity signals from developer communities

Not a $15,000 consulting report — but enough to make a go/no-go decision.

Want Me to Do It for You?

I'll generate a complete market research report for your industry — data from all 9 sources, structured and formatted. $20 for 2 reports.

Order via Payoneer | 500+ sample reports | All 77 tools

What market would you research? Drop a comment and I might generate a sample report for you.

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