Research
An on-demand AI research analyst — DM a question, get an evidence-grounded briefing back. Customer pain mining on Reddit/HN/G2, competitor signals, pricing benchmarks, trend research, vendor evaluation. Reactive by default; opt in to scheduled tracking when you actually want it.
Sample briefing
"You asked: "What are Tock customers complaining about?" Researched: 47 r/SaaS + r/restaurateur threads (last 30 days), 12 G2 reviews (last 90 days), 6 Twitter threads from named users. Three themes: (1) rigid scheduling — 62% of complaints ("can't move a 2-top to a 4-top without re-entering"), (2) no waitlist — 24% ("we lost 8 covers Saturday because no waitlist"), (3) pricing opacity — 14% ("quoted us $899/mo, then it was $1,299 after demo"). Each theme links to 5+ verbatim quotes. Followups suggested: (a) check if SevenRooms covers the waitlist gap, (b) draft a positioning angle."
What Research does
- Customer pain mining — scrapes Reddit, HN, G2, Trustpilot, Twitter for unfiltered complaints about you, your category, or your competitors
- Competitor intelligence — pricing-page diffs, feature ships, positioning pivots, hiring signals, fundraise news (the original Competitor Intelligence scope)
- Pricing benchmarks — what comparable products charge, what the price floor and ceiling look like in your category, willingness-to-pay signals
- Trend research — adjacent industry shifts, technology adoption curves, what your buyers are reading and asking about
- Vendor evaluation — when you're considering a tool/service, the role researches the alternatives + reads the reviews + surfaces the trade-offs
- Hand-offs to other roles — when research surfaces a positioning gap or content opportunity, fires a memo to SEO Content / GEO Strategist / Twitter Growth
- Opt-in scheduled tracking — DM "watch Tock weekly" and the role adds a recurring brief; reactive-only by default
How it works
Indie founders need research more than they need a daily competitor cron. The original Competitor Intelligence role pre-scheduled briefings on a fixed competitor list — useful for some teams, overkill for most. The Research role inverts the default: DM a question, get a briefing back; if you want recurring tracking you opt in explicitly. The result is a role that fits the messy reality of early-stage marketing, not a fixed cron schedule.
Reactive by default. You DM a research question to Ceres in your IM — "what are people on r/SaaS saying about pricing in our category", "has SevenRooms shipped any new features since their February launch", "benchmark pricing for Bluetooth-mesh smart-light startups". The role plans the research (which sources to check, what depth, what time window), executes, and ships back an evidence-grounded briefing. Most questions resolve in 5–20 minutes; deep dives take longer and the role DMs progress updates.
Evidence chain on every claim. The role doesn't just summarize — it cites. Every theme in a customer-pain briefing links to verbatim quotes with their source URLs. Every pricing benchmark says "Tock pricing was $899/mo on 2026-02-14 (Wayback Machine snapshot), now $699/mo (live page snapshot 2026-04-30)". If the role infers something it can't source directly, it labels the inference and explains why. You can verify any claim in 30 seconds.
Opt-in scheduled tracking is real, just not the default. If you want Mon-morning competitor briefings on a fixed list, DM "watch SevenRooms + Tock + Resy every Monday" and the role sets up the cron. If you want a daily Reddit-pulse on your category, DM "daily r/restaurateur scan, ping me on anything that mentions Tock or SevenRooms". Tracking adapts to what you actually need rather than forcing every customer onto the same schedule.
Cross-role hand-offs. When the role surfaces a meaningful signal — competitor pivots positioning, customer pain matches your differentiator — it doesn't stop at the briefing. It drafts a memo for SEO Content ("customers describe the pain as 'rigid scheduling' — content opportunity at this exact phrase"), or for GEO Strategist ("our core value-prop matches a query AI engines aren't citing us for"), or for Twitter Growth ("real customer quote you could open a thread with"). You see the memos in the briefing and can accept or reject the proposed follow-up work.
What Research does not do
- Auto-respond on your behalf — every output is a briefing, not an action
- Track competitor app stores or in-app feature usage (we only see public surfaces)
- Predict competitor's next move (it reports on observed signals; the inference is yours)
- Monitor private Slack communities or paywalled industry newsletters (legal + scope reasons)
- Replace your own product instinct — Research surfaces signals; you decide what to do
- Buy data from sketchy data brokers — research is from public sources only (you can see exactly which)
FAQ
- Can Ceres automate competitor and customer research for a SaaS startup?
- Yes. Ceres's Research agent runs customer pain mining (Reddit, Hacker News, G2, Trustpilot), competitor intelligence (pricing-page diffs, feature ships, positioning pivots), pricing benchmarks, trend research, and vendor evaluations. It is reactive by default — DM a question and get an evidence-grounded briefing back, usually in 5–20 minutes — and you can opt into scheduled tracking when you want it. Every claim links to a verbatim public source you can check in 30 seconds.
- How is this different from just asking ChatGPT or Claude directly?
- Frontier-model chatbots are great for one-off research questions, but they don't have access to live data on your specific competitors / your customers / your tenant memory. The Research role adds three things on top of the underlying LLM: (1) live data via connectors (Reddit, HN, Twitter, G2, Trustpilot, GSC), (2) per-tenant memory (it remembers your previous research, your competitor list, your ICP definition), and (3) hand-offs to other Ceres roles (a content opportunity becomes a SEO Content brief, not just a sentence in a chat). For one-off curiosity questions, ChatGPT works. For ongoing research that compounds, the Research role works.
- Do I have to set up scheduled briefings to get value?
- No. Reactive use (DM a question, get a briefing back) is the default mode and what most customers use 80% of the time. Scheduled tracking is opt-in for the cases where it actually makes sense — competitor positioning watch, daily category pulse, weekly customer-pain digest. Many customers never set up a single scheduled briefing and still get heavy value from the reactive flow.
- Where does the research data come from?
- Public sources only — Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter/X, G2, Trustpilot, ProductHunt, your competitors' public pages (homepage, pricing, changelog, blog, careers), public press feeds, and Wayback Machine for historical snapshots. We do not scrape private communities, paywalled newsletters, or anywhere the source's TOS prohibits automated access. The role tells you exactly where each claim came from.
- What's the relationship between Research and the old Competitor Intelligence role?
- Research is the broader successor — it includes everything the original Competitor Intelligence role did (pricing diffs, feature ships, positioning pivots, hiring signals, fundraise news on a fixed competitor list) and adds customer pain mining, pricing benchmarks across a category, trend research, and vendor evaluation. The narrow competitor-only flow is now an opt-in scheduled mode within the broader role.
- How is this different from Visualping, Distill.io, or other monitoring tools?
- Pixel-diff alerters tell you 'something changed' on a URL without context, classification, or follow-up. The Research role parses the change, classifies importance, traces it to evidence, fits it into your tenant's memory of past research, and hands the relevant follow-on work to other roles. The pixel-diff is the input — useful — but the briefing is the output that actually shifts your week.
- Can it research my own customers (interviews, support tickets, etc.)?
- Yes — if you upload them to your knowledge base. The role can read uploaded customer-interview transcripts, support-ticket exports, churn-survey responses, NPS verbatims, and synthesize them with public-source research for a complete customer-pain picture. We do NOT auto-ingest from your CRM/helpdesk in Phase 1; that flows through KB upload until the connector ships.
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