If you're the founder, owner, investor or marketing VP in a new storage market startup there's no longer any reason to work in the dark when working on your business plan, raising the next round of VC investment or simply testing out new product ideas.

The attractive thing about niche / small emerging technology segments within the storage market is they are too small for the big vendors to take notice. That's always been a great opportunity for new companies and small to medium sized established companies to develop groundbreaking products and customers in a profitable environment where the best technology attracts the most business.

The problem with emerging and disruptive technology markets is that reliable market data is not available. Most of the market research companies that cover the storage market don't cover new segments until they reach a critical mass of around $1 billion to $2 billion in size. If you wait that long before developing your own product and marketing plans, you will almost certainly lose the first mover advantages of establishing your products and standards as the "brand" associated with the new technology. But as our list of hundreds of dead storage companies show - rushing to market with a well funded startup can take you fast in the wrong direction if your marketing plans aren't sharpened by the type of reality that quick and dirty market research can provide.

The classic problem for new companies is that they use their first trade show and developed product to test market reactions. By then they've spent so much money on designing a product which has the wrong balance of features and price and they have invested so much on the event costs that much of their marketing budget is already blown. Nearly everyone in high tech companies is guilty of this. I did the same myself when I launched my own VC backed startups in the 1980s.

You don't have to make the same mistakes everyone else does. A low cost customized market research project can deliver answers to your hypothetical questions about users and markets (or routes to amrket) and save you 3 to 6 months of lost business development time. Or it can simply save your company.

• cheaper than a focus group:- a 2 day focus group project in California can typically set you back over $15,000

• fast reliable marketing data:- you supply the questions which we test on contextually targeted readers. Our readers are the same set of people who you hope will be interested in buying your product when it's advertised. The reaction you get from them via a commercial web publication has a value which cannot be replicated by any other market research method (including more expensive focus groups and telephone of direct mail based surveys - which include greater sampling biases).

• cheaper and faster than doing it yourself on the web:- even when you're using a targeted publication the participation rate you get for an online survey can be 20 to 50 times lower than you'd get for a banner ad. Doing all this yourself would mean buying advertising space, designing a research banner and designing the online survey. Our package includes all that and delivers a guaranteed number of results. All you need to do is give us the information we need in a few emails.
• protect your confidentiality:- running a public survey on the web yourself can alert your competitors and give them ideas. Our service can hide your identity behind the neutral brand of our publication. We design a neutral "thanks" publication style landing page at the end of the survey as part of the whole service.

• much cheaper than using a marketing agency:- a good technology savvy marketing agency we know charges over $2,000 per person day. You'll spend more money telling them your problem than it costs getting the answers researched and delivered.

• Based on the questions and what you say in the emails you send us after confirming your order we design a survey form using surveymonkey.com.

• We target readers by links, pop-ups and / or editorial on STORAGEsearch.com to elicit readers to take part in the survey. We choose targeting and visibility based on our 13 years experience as a publisher in this market. We target by the closest subjects related to your study - for example iSCSI, or military, or flash. We can also target by articles, news etc etc in exactly the same way as we do when we're running ads.

• We collect the agreed number of responses within the agreed period and give you access to the raw results on the web which you can analyse using the simple tools in surveymonkey or which cane be downloaded to your own spreadsheet.

• Trend data. We can supply relative trend data extracted from the last 3 months of our readership statistics to tell you if a related subject such as NAS (or any of 70 other storage subjects) has been growing or declining in relative popularity.

• precise answers to your own unique questions which eliminate fuzzy areas of doubt in BOGSAT (Bunch Of Guys Sitting And Talking) style of high-tech market research

• valuable market data from potential buyers and partners in your targete market

• marketing ammunition:- quote the results as arguments to help you get your next round of finance or to nail down uncertainties in product / marketing strategy

• save your company / improve the odds of getting things right:- answers may confirm your original gut feel ideas or trigger new ideas about the market and buyer model / perceptions

• entry level custom survey $500 - upto 6 questions, 10 filled in forms

• medium level custom survey $800 - upto 10 questions, 20 filled in forms

• geographic targeting to filter responses:- worldwide (typically includes 65% US) no extra cost, US only (discard Europe and Asia) 10% additional cost, Europe only 50% additional cost.

• quotable quote from the editor of STORAGEsearch.com - based on the results of your survey - which you can quote in internal confidential documents or use later in a press release or other marketing material - $300. This can be ordered later if needed.

• follow on survey - 10% discount for each follow on survey - even if it's completely different

How to order

• decide whether you want the basic package or need the optional extras

• email the publisher subject "STORAGEsearch Custom research" with your order or questions

• we'll answer your questions about the suitability of your research. If we know a standard report which already gives you the answers we'll tell you. If your target market doesn't overlap sufficiently with our readers we'll advise you. If your intended questions are not suitable (unrelated to storage products or technologies or likely to offend our readers or detract from our good reputation) - we'll tell you.

• we'll email or fax you a pro forma invoice which you can pay by credit card, check or wire transfer

• we'll work with you by email to refine the questions to get the best results

• when the questions are frozen we'll start the survey

• you can check progress online from the time the survey starts

• once the survey has started the questions can't be changed without invalidating later results. But if they have to be changed we'll charge an agreed modest reset fee to start over.