Your customers are already telling you what they want (you're just not listening)

The idea is simple: your customers are already discussing their problems in public. You just need to know where and how to listen.

What's a Community Insight test?

It's not surveys. It's not focus groups. It's systematic analysis of where your customers naturally gather online to discuss their problems, frustrations, and workarounds.

No recruitment. No scheduling. Just mining the goldmine of authentic conversations that are already happening.

Most teams spend thousands on formal research while ignoring the free, unfiltered feedback that's already out there.

How a healthcare giant identified a £25M new venture opportunity

A global healthcare corporation we work with was looking to expand beyond their traditional medical device business into digital health services. Their initial market research and customer interviews had led them toward developing a chronic disease management platform. A crowded space with established competitors.

Before committing to this direction, we suggested running a Community Insight test to explore unmet needs in adjacent spaces. The team:

• Systematically analysed patient and caregiver communities across Reddit, Facebook groups, specialised health forums, and Discord servers

• Mapped patterns of discussion in condition-specific communities

• Analysed language, emotion, and interaction patterns in over 15,000 posts

• Looked specifically for problems people were solving themselves

What they discovered revealed an entirely different opportunity. While chronic disease management platforms were frequently mentioned, there was minimal emotional engagement in these discussions. But they uncovered an intense, unmet need in an adjacent space:

Across multiple condition-specific communities, family caregivers were creating elaborate systems to coordinate care among extended family members. They were using combinations of WhatsApp, Google Docs, and paper calendars to manage complex medication schedules, appointments, and daily care tasks. The emotional language around this coordination challenge was intense, with many describing it as more stressful than the medical aspects of caregiving.

Based on this insight, our client pivoted completely. Instead of entering the chronic disease management space, they developed a dedicated caregiver coordination platform that:

• Facilitated task sharing among family members

• Provided medication and appointment scheduling

• Enabled simple communication among care circles

• Integrated with provider systems where possible

Within 18 months of launch, this new venture:

• Attracted over 380,000 active caregiver circles

• Generated £25M in annual revenue

• Created partnership opportunities with insurance providers

• Established a powerful channel for their core medical device business

Without the Community Insight test, they'd have missed this enormous opportunity and launched yet another disease management platform in an already saturated market.

How to run a Community Insight Test

To run this test effectively, you'll need:

• Access to online communities where your customers gather

• Search tools to find relevant discussions

• A framework for analysing comments systematically

1. Find where the conversations are happening

The key is identifying where your specific customers talk openly:

• Industry forums and community boards

• Reddit, Discord, or Slack communities

• Technical forums like Stack Overflow

• Social media groups

• Product review sites

• App store reviews

• Your own support tickets and community forums

2. Look for specific signals

Don't just skim for general sentiment. Look for:

• Workarounds and "hacks" customers have created

• Consistent pain points mentioned across platforms

• Feature requests with strong emotional language

• Comparisons to competitor products

• Questions that get high engagement

3. Pay attention to language and emotion

How people talk about problems reveals their importance:

• Urgency: "I desperately need..."

• Frustration: "Why is it so difficult to..."

• Resignation: "I guess I'll just have to..."

• Pride: "I figured out a way to..."

4. Quantify what you find

Turn qualitative insights into actionable data:

• Frequency of mention across platforms

• Intensity of language used

• Number of people engaging with the topic

• Complexity of workarounds developed

Common mistakes to avoid:

• Only monitoring your own branded channels

• Focusing on the loudest complaints rather than patterns

• Dismissing technical discussions as "power users only"

• Failing to distinguish between surface problems and root causes

Try this next week

Identify 3-5 online communities where your customers gather. Look for discussions about your product or service category. Look specifically for workarounds people have created. Map these against your current roadmap priorities.

You'll likely find that what customers say in public forums is quite different from what they tell you in formal research.