I’m Building a Canvas-Style Market Research Workspace — Does This Direction Make Sense?

Pallaxa Holzapfel — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:26:42 +0000

I’ve been working on a product called MarketGeist, and I’m at that dangerous stage where an idea can still be either genuinely useful or just very well-designed nonsense.

The problem I’m trying to solve is this:

A lot of market research work still feels fragmented.

You open competitor websites in one tab, check social platforms in another, skim recent news, maybe look at SEO signals, maybe financial or stock-related indicators, dump thoughts into docs, collect screenshots, and somehow try to turn all of that into a usable strategic view.

The research itself may be good, but the workflow often feels scattered.

So I started exploring a different UI approach: a canvas-style workspace where the company or topic sits in the middle, and different research lenses are connected around it.

For example:

competitor analysis
recent news and mentions
stock / financial signals
social media presence
online presence / SEO

The goal is not to replace research with AI-generated fluff.

The goal is to make it easier to:

organize different research angles in one place
preserve context across the analysis
connect findings instead of burying them in separate tools
move from raw signal collection to an actual strategic view

Here’s the kind of question I’m wrestling with now:

Is a visual workspace like this actually useful for researchers, strategists, marketers, and founders — or is it just adding UI complexity to a process that should remain document-first?

That’s the tension.

On one hand, a connected visual workspace can make relationships between signals easier to grasp.
On the other hand, too much interface can become decoration instead of leverage.

I’ve attached a screenshot of the current direction because I’d love honest feedback from people who build products, work with data, or do research-heavy work.

A few things I’m especially curious about:

Does this workflow feel genuinely useful, or too “dashboardy”?
Which modules would actually matter to you in practice?
What would make a tool like this trustworthy enough for real work?
Would you prefer this kind of canvas, or a more classic report/document interface?

I’m very open to blunt feedback.

Better to hear “this is overbuilt founder nonsense” now than after polishing it for three more months.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to tear it apart constructively.

DEV Community: Pallaxa Holzapfel

I’m Building a Canvas-Style Market Research Workspace — Does This Direction Make Sense?