Making $15,000 Monthly Doing Deep Research
How this founder of a boutique market research agency scaled his business to $15,000 MRR.
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hello, my name is Abhishek Kumar, and I am the founder of Deep Research.
We are a boutique market research agency that helps companies gather customer insights and use them to guide their product and growth strategy.
Our clients are early-stage startups in the idea validation phase or businesses that have paying customers and are looking for their next growth opportunities.
Depending on the needs of our clients, we spend 4-8 weeks speaking to their customers and helping them figure out their ideal buyer personas, the messaging that resonates with their buyer personas that can be used end to end from their website to their email marketing campaigns, how to position themselves in the market against competitors, feature recommendations based on the most lucrative problems, and marketing recommendations that their buyers would respond to.
I'm originally from India but spend most of the year in the UK.
How was the business started?
I've always had side gigs.
I’ve dropshipped t-shirts from China to the USA, built and sold a few pages on Instagram, helped businesses repurpose content, helped an entrepreneur write an ebook (which never came out), written code, and ran customer research. I also wrote a newsletter and a podcast for over a year when I had a full-time job.
Over time, I realized that I enjoyed research more than anything. It was also the best part about podcasting. I loved creating a hit list of dream guests, stalking them on social media for weeks, and then dropping them emails to invite them to the podcast.
I also loved reading about their background and asking questions they'd not been asked before. Felt like a win. What I hated was all the post-interview stuff - editing and posting.
So last year I started to clean my plate and kill side projects that I no longer enjoyed or were making little to no money. I could come back to them later but now I needed something full-time that would help me quit my day job.
So I’m removing tasks off my plate, increasingly thinking of research, and one fine night I see a post for a customer interview gig. One thing led to another and I started working with Sophia at Ignore No More agency. They’re still a client.
Working with her, I realized there’s a huge market for research for startups - not a billion-dollar market - but enough for me to start an agency of my own. It still took a full year for me to quit my job, but I eventually did it.
At the time I had 0 clients outside of Ignore No More, but they were a constant source of revenue. I spent about $400 creating the first version of the product - which was a landing page and an example report I would deliver to my potential clients. I started with the website.
A friend suggested the Umso website builder. They had a good agency template. Spent a week playing with it and created a basic website. The example report was made on Notion.
How did you get your first initial customers?
For sales, we went all in on communities.
Previously I had worked with a creator on creator-led businesses and had seen the power of well-curated paid communities. Back in 2020, I had joined On Deck’s Podcasting Fellowship. A lot of fellow members were business owners getting into podcasting.
When I shared my story of building the TikTok page, I got 2 clients the same week.
I wasn't even selling a service. They reached out to me and convinced me to work for them. Both were short-term gigs but paid for my fellowship. In good communities, you’ll make money even without selling.
Our first customer outside of Sophia came from the Trends community by Dru Riley. Since then we’ve had customers from MicroConf, Indie Worldwide, Ramen Club, and Lenny’s Newsletter.
We continue to invest a lot of time in these communities and they have been our biggest sales channels. There was never a big launch. I just started spending a lot of time in communities:
Answering questions on user research and connecting with other founders. Some communities have daily standups and weekly masterminds. I’d join all calls, letting people know what I do.
After about a month of doing that, we started to see inbound interest. I like to say that Deep Research gets all of its clients through content. It’s just that we create that content for one person or a very small group - at a time.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
We still get almost all of our customers from communities. Some through cold pitches to founders we've known for a while and see an opportunity to work together.
I hop on 4-5 founder coffee chats every single week. I’m constantly watching founders working on interesting ideas and firing off lots of cold emails.
Here are all the flows through which I’ve networked with people:
Read interesting intros in communities and DM/Email founders -
Read a Twitter thread and DM the writer -
Read articles on Business Insider, Inc. and and email founders -
Read about small businesses through newsletters and email their founders
In total, I wrote an email or sent a DM to 400+ founders this year alone, hopped on 50+ calls, and have made many friends.
I’m horrible at following up, which I’m working on but it’s not something I’m proud of now.
But in short, that’s how I get clients. I’m always skeptical that this strategy will fall on its face someday but it has worked till now.
In the past months, we've had calls with prospects that have come to us through content (interviews in online publications). But it's still too early to put a number to them.
How does the business make money?
We charge our clients on a per-project basis - $4000-$10,000 depending on the client's needs:
I spend about 40 hours per week on the business. Most of it is networking with founders and day-to-day client work.
If I had to break it down, it would be something like:
2 hours per day in communities and reading relevant news pieces -
3 hours a day in research
2 hours per day on networking calls
1 hour per day on Business-related tasks - delegation, invoicing, paperwork
The business is currently making around $15,000 MRR, and the cost of running it is around $8,000 per month.
Where can we go to learn more?
You can find me at the following links:
Founder Coffee Chat - this is the best way to connect.
I keep it casual and love learning from other businesses.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out!