Hello there, Walt here!

I spent the past week diving deep into market research, and I want to share the exact process I use. This method helps me reverse-engineer how marketers sell into any new industry. I think you'll find it invaluable for your own projects, so enjoy!

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In every market, marketers have an established way they sell. If you know that sales blueprint, you can use it to consistently generate leads and turn those leads into customers.

For instance:

• Freelance/Consulting: People provide example work (portfolios and references). The closer that proof is to what the client wants, the better.
• EdTech (Education Technology): Sales often happen through professional channels like conferences and webinars.
• Language Learning: Marketers sell via value-driven social media content (mini-lessons) and, universally, through podcasts.

When I kick off a new business project, the first thing I do is try to reverse-engineer how the players already in that market sell. Do they lean on social media, webinars, or email? What are their core talking points? What are they promoting? What are the exact email sequences they’re sending out?

This research is invaluable because it solves the most daunting and scary part of a new venture: getting distribution.

If I know how to reach customers and what messages resonate with them, I can confidently work my way into that market. If I don't know how to reach customers, that fear always hangs over me: Am I building the wrong thing? Am I wasting time? That's why this reverse-engineering process is one of the most valuable things I do.

I've been doing this research over the past week, so I want to share the actual steps I’ve been taking. I hope this process gives you some concrete ideas about how you can get a foothold in the market for your own projects.

🎯 The Project: Cracking EdTech

A friend is trying to enter the EdTech industry, targeting institutions like universities and community colleges.

I'm a little familiar with this world (I spent some time working for an online school), but not an expert. My initial, gut-check feeling was, "How will we ever reach decision-makers at universities?" Scary! Honestly, that's a pretty common feeling for me, but I've learned that before writing off a market, it pays to do the research. Sometimes markets are much easier to get into than I first thought.

🔍 My Research Goals

When I dive into this kind of research, I have a couple of concrete goals:

• Goal #1: Find Executable Strategies. I want concrete actions I can use to enter the market. Should I start posting content? Running webinars? Buying ads?
• Goal #2: Experience the Sales Funnel. I want to sign up for a webinar, buy a product, or do something that lets me experience what it’s like to be a customer.

The rough process is:

1. Find about 100 people and organizations already selling into the target market.
2. Opt-in to their marketing (subscribe to emails, attend webinars, etc.). This gives me a gallery of effective marketing examples to draw on, and a way to keep tabs on what competitors are promoting.

🛠️ The Process in Action: EdTech Funnels

When we started, my first question was, "How do people actually market in the EdTech industry?" My goal was to analyze funnels, get on mailing lists, and find free events or webinars to attend.

Step 1: Find the Industry "Parties"

The first thing I looked for were the industry's big conferences. Every industry has them, and the best marketers will be attending. Conferences often list attendees, speakers, and topics, making them a great way to quickly figure out what the industry is focused on.

How did I find them? Google and AI.

I quickly found Educause and P3Edu. P3Edu was amazing because it had a speakers and attendees list, which is gold.

Now the people on this page fall into a few categories (I've highlighted some relevant ones).

1. Journalists (Scott Carlson)—They write about industry trends. Useful for understanding customer topics (and later for ads or guest posts), but less useful for understanding the sales process.
2. University Employees / Staff—These are the decision-makers that marketers are trying to reach. They tend to consume content, not produce it. Better to focus on the vendors.
3. Marketers (Andrew Magliozzi)—These people have something to sell. They may be CEOs, presidents, or startup founders. They are actively looking to reach the market, and that's where the learning is.

Step 2: Digging Into the Marketers

The marketers are the ones I want to dig into.

I took one, Andrew Magliozzi, and pulled up his LinkedIn profile. The first thing I scrolled to was his Posts section.

I'm looking for two things: frequent marketing activity and high engagement. This guy is attending relevant events (which I should note) and posting topical articles. He has good engagement, too. He immediately goes onto my list.

Just casually browsing his posts, I saw him advertising webinars his company is hosting and panels where he mentioned other influencers (these also go on my list). My sense is he knows how to market to this target audience, so let's dig deeper.

Step 3: Analyzing the Funnel

The next thing I did was check his company's LinkedIn page.

I reviewed the posts. The most recent one was posted 19 hours ago—this company is super active on LinkedIn. They also host lots of events.

Crucially, LinkedIn (like Facebook) has an Ad Library at https://www.linkedin.com/ad-library/search?companyIds=9288295.

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Here, you can see the exact ads his company, Mainstay, has been running. These ads are linking to webinars they are promoting.

So, we're starting to get a clear picture of their funnel: Ads lead to webinars and articles.

I then checked their website. It's very well-executed, and they're doing many smart things: they have an ebook, case studies, webinars, and an email list.

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The email list and webinars are the most valuable for our purposes. Companies do their core selling through their email lists, which is where we’ll see their specific offers. The webinars are a quick way to experience their sales pitch. I signed up for both.

Pro-Tip: I sign up for email lists using a labeled email address, like me+label@mydomain.com. That way, I can automatically filter all the marketing emails into a segmented folder, making it easy to review their tactics from time to time.

🚀 Conclusion

That's the process in action. It’s the first step in solving the distribution problem, which turns a vague business idea into something that feels truly do-able.

I hope this breakdown has been useful for you.

Let me know if you have any questions,

-Walt