Marketing Needs Study — Method

Why this study exists

No formal user-needs study had ever been done for Brasse-Bouillon. Before investing further in features and positioning, we run a proper marketing needs study to identify what intermediate homebrewers actually want, validate (or kill) our differentiating hypothesis, and ground product decisions in evidence rather than assumption.

Strategic frame (decided during the kickoff debrief)

• Primary target (beachhead): regular / intermediate homebrewers; international / English-speaking first, French also in scope.
• Product language: bilingual FR + EN (implies an i18n effort tracked as a separate epic).
• Positioning hypothesis:
  • Hook (hero): a community for cloning and sharing beer recipes.
  • Foundation (table-stakes): recipe organization + brew/fermentation tracking.
• Starting channels (2): r/Homebrewing (users) + Indie Hackers (founder build-in-public); LinkedIn kept in French for the founder's reconversion narrative.

Research design

Two phases, cheap-to-expensive:

1. Secondary research (desk research) — DONE. Mine what already exists publicly: competitor app reviews, Reddit, homebrewing forums. Cheap, fast, generates hypotheses.
2. Primary research — TODO. Talk to real brewers: a structured interview guide (via the customer-research skill) + 10-15 interviews to confirm or refute the desk findings.

The order matters: secondary first to build hypotheses, primary second to confirm with real people.

Secondary research execution

Six desk passes across source families:

• 01-desk-competitors.md — reviews of Brewfather, BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend, BrewBuddy, and adjacent apps.
• 02-desk-reddit.md — r/Homebrewing recurring questions and pains.
• 03-desk-forums.md — HomeBrewTalk (EN) + brassageamateur.com (FR).
• 03b-desk-french.md — dedicated French-language pass (FR blogs, tools, community channels).
• 03c-desk-market-data.md — quantitative layer (market size, downloads, recipe-DB sizes, uncovered competitors).
• 03d-desk-french-market.md — snowball pass on the French homebrewer population / market (fills the FR data gap).
• 04-synthesis.md — consolidated needs map + market context + one-sentence positioning statement.
• 05-interview-guide.md — bilingual primary-research instrument (JTBD interview guide).
• 06-report.md — final report (epic closure deliverable; written after primary research).

Method limitations (read before trusting the numbers)

• Reddit and HomeBrewTalk block automated fetching (HTTP 403). r/Homebrewing findings are inferred from adjacent forums and from the prevalence of clone-recipe compilations, not from direct thread reads or upvote counts. HomeBrewTalk findings rely on search-result snippets. brassageamateur.com was fetched directly.
• Frequency signals are qualitative (recurrence of distinct threads / reviews), not scraped counts. Treat rankings as directional.
• Forums over-represent people who are stuck — a strong hypothesis generator, not proof. This is exactly why primary research (interviews) follows.
• To harden: read a sample of r/Homebrewing threads via an authenticated/API path and tag posts by theme for true counts.

Status

• Secondary research: complete (captured in 01–03d, consolidated in 04).
• Primary research: not started.
• Final report: not started.