What Is A Research Gap: Types, Examples & How to Identify

A research gap occurs when there’s missing, insufficient, or outdated data, or when there is simply not enough data. For SaaS founders, leadership teams, and managers, research gaps can be dangerous. Instead of relying on data ⏤ whether quantitative or qualitative ⏤ assumptions are often used to fill the research gap. Assumptions can be wrong. 

If decisions involve how funds are used, such as for marketing or sales campaigns, or what to prioritize in the product roadmap, then data is essential, and that’s why filling a research gap is so important. In this article, we explore the importance of solving research gaps, identify the five most common gaps SaaS teams face, and discuss five tools for identifying and addressing these gaps. 

What Is A Research Gap? 

The term “research gap” is more commonly thought about in the academic and research sectors. Hence, articles on this topic often focus on “fields of study” rather than problems with business implications and their solutions. 

However, for SaaS teams, a research gap is a series of questions that need answering. The gap is missing knowledge. For instance, you may need to identify which new feature your customers value most. Do you assume? Or do you research to determine the most effective use of a product manager's and a developer's time and resources?

That’s where and how a research gap plays a role in SaaS team decision-making. 

Why Solving Research Gaps Matters to SaaS Founders? 

Let’s answer that question with an even more crucial question: Why do SaaS businesses and startups fail?

According to Acquire, a company that specializes in helping SaaS founders sell to new owners, the top reasons are: “Bad product-market fit, ineffective marketing strategies, co-founder conflict or team problems, lack of research, and cash flow shortage.”

Running a SaaS is competitive across every niche and sector. The overall SaaS market is vast and mature, as it’s expected to hit $716 billion by 2028. And yet, running out of money kills most businesses. When your cash flow doesn't equal or exceed the money flowing out, it’s always fatal. Out of the top 12 reasons for SaaS failure, “poor cash flow management kills businesses” more than anything else, according to CB Insights, Sequoia Capital, and Onfolio. 

Again, we have to ask why this is, and there can only be a few core reasons (apart from team/co-founder conflict, which we can’t research our way out of):

• Bad product-market fit: In other words, more research was needed before developing new features.
• Ineffective marketing strategies: Further research would help address the issues in this area. This can also help retention marketing efforts, which have the best ROI long term.
• Lack of research: Need we say more? 

This is why identifying and solving research gaps is so important to SaaS founders, managers, and teams. Now, let’s dive into the 5 more common types of research gaps that SaaS teams encounter, and 5 types of tools that will help solve them. 

5 Types & Examples of Research Gaps 

1 Product-Market Fit (PMF) Misalignment

Because bad product-market fit (PMF) is one of the main reasons a SaaS fails, this is a research gap that’s mission-critical to solve. Having a misaligned PMF could mean:

• You’ve developed a solution for a problem that not enough people know/care about;
• The size of the market is much smaller than you assume.
• The market is too mature, and you aren’t offering a differentiator/unique selling point (USP) that’s more tempting than established competitors.
• You aren’t getting any traction, even at the beta stage, because you’ve not tested and validated your assumptions sufficiently.
• You are struggling to cross the “Valley of Death” because of any or all of the problems listed above.

A bad PMF can kill a startup or SaaS before it starts, or worse, can kill your company slowly a few years down the road. Spending time in the early days ensuring you’ve got a valid, data-backed PMF can save you so much trouble, stress, and headaches later on. 

2 Go-to-Market (GTM) Knowledge Gaps

The same applies when it comes to developing and implementing go-to-market strategies (GTM). How you launch and generate traction depends on several factors, such as whether you’re B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), and whether you are bootstrapped or funded in some way. 

Resources you’ve got for marketing (money and people), and sales efforts, impact how you market your SaaS. However, before you start any marketing or sales activities, you need to understand the basics (this list isn’t exhaustive):

• Who are your potential customers?
• Where are they?
• How do we reach them?
• How can we help them find us?
• What’s our total addressable market (TAM) and realistically, our serviceable obtainable market (SOM)?

Any GTM knowledge gaps can lead to assumptions that blind you. Or deafen you to the truth. 

Aim to fill those knowledge gaps sufficiently so that when you launch a marketing or sales campaign, you’re investing time and resources the right way. Let us use law firm marketing as an example.  

This is another crucial reason why knowing where your potential clients are is essential.

3 Incorrect Customer Experience (CX) Assumptions

Once you’ve achieved PMF and have a successful GTM strategy, you’ll start winning customers. That’s where new problems can emerge if you have unfulfilled research gaps. 

Making customer experience (CX) assumptions could quickly cause you to lose customers. Examples of this could include:

• Assuming customers need more or less help than they actually do for onboarding.
• Contacting them too much or not enough during the sign-up and onboarding process.
• Not providing enough self-serve resources to make your product “sticky” enough.
• Failing to understand what integrations customers need the most.
• Developing features that most customers don’t care about because a minority of your customers shouted loudest about wanting other features. 

How customers use and interact with your product and customer success team impacts whether or not they stay. Churn is expensive for SaaS businesses. It’s well known that it costs less to keep current customers happy than to win new ones. 

If you’ve got a churn rate above the SaaS industry average of 5-10% annually, then it could indicate several problems that research and data should solve: “suboptimal product features, poor customer experiences, or misaligned expectations during onboarding.” 

4 Traffic-generating SEO Keyword Gaps

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the main ways potential customers find SaaS businesses. SEO becomes even more crucial when considering how AI is transforming search engines and the way people discover what they’re looking for (e.g., AI Overviews and AI Mode). 

It should be a crucial part of your GTM strategy that you are using traffic-generating keywords on your website, on core landing pages, and across your SEO content marketing strategy. Research is crucial in this area before investing money in marketing campaigns. 

5 Conversion-focused Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU) Gaps

Alongside this, you need to be using Conversion-focused Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BOFU) keywords to drive those crucial revenue-generating conversions. Without investing money in research and a data-backed SEO strategy, you could be writing (or have an agency or freelancer do this work) articles that aren’t going to bring in and convert web visitors to customers. 

Now, let’s look at five types of tools for identifying and solving research gaps.

5 Types of Tools to Identify & Resolve Research Gaps 

1 User Analytics Software 

Research for SaaS teams typically involves a combination of quantitative (data and analytics) and qualitative (surveys, user interviews) methods. You could use analytics software, like HotJar or LiveSession, to validate assumptions about how people use your product. 

User analytics can be invaluable at the minimum viable product (MVP) and beta stages, and then ongoing, as your product and customer base evolve and grow. Making use of these types of SaaS tools to solve SaaS research gaps is one part of the equation. 

2 Market Research Tools 

The other part of the equation is understanding your market. This comes in many forms. For example, for cash flow forecasting and sales projection purposes, it’s helpful to know the total addressable market (TAM) and serviceable obtainable market (SOM).

In other words: How big is the market, and what percentage of that market can we realistically reach, and in what timescale? Narrowing it down, the real question you need to answer is, how many customers do we need to generate a profit? 

Alongside publicly available data, market research software can help you gain a better understanding of your market. You can then use that information to narrow it down further, from TAMs and SOMs to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This is where having a precise product-market fit (PMF) is so important. 

If you don’t have PMF alignment, then no amount of marketing is going to make your ideal customers want your product. For the simple reason that they don’t need it, they don’t understand why they’d pay for something they don’t need. This is why filling research gaps with verifiable data and feedback is absolutely crucial when building a SaaS. 

3 Customer Surveys

Another way to better understand your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is through the strategic use of customer and user surveys. This is the qualitative route to solving research gaps (surveys, talking to users). In many ways, it's more important than user analytics data, especially in the early stages of growth. 

Surveys are crucial because the more you find out about what customers want, the more people will use your product, and the more data you can analyze. Using an email marketing platform to send out surveys and collect existing user data is a gold mine your company is already sitting on.

There are hundreds of different survey tools around. One of the most well-known is SurveyMonkey, and there are numerous others like SmartSurvey and Qualaroo. 

4 Doing a Competitor Analysis

Understanding your competitors is also essential. In some sectors, such as eCommerce and retail, software is available to help you track market and competitor activity in near real-time. 

However, in some sectors, like selling B2B software, this involves time-consuming but necessary manual work. 

GTM teams and leaders need to understand the following as a minimum:

• Who are your competitors?
• Who are the market leaders and more agile upstarts?
• What are competitors' core and sub-markets?
• What features do they have?
• What features do customers love, and how can we differentiate ourselves?
• What are competitors' (big and small) USPs?
• Who are competitor ICPs (e.g., are they enterprise, or small and mid-market)?

Ultimately, the most critical question to answer is: How can we differentiate ourselves?

SaaS has become increasingly commoditized, making it harder to differentiate from one provider to another. This has become even more challenging with the rise of AI and the integration of these tools in so many software products and platforms. 

A competitor analysis should help you uncover new angles and approaches that support your marketing and sales campaigns. It’s even more powerful if you connect that research to customer surveys and user analytics data. 

5 SEO Research & Keyword Ideation Software

SEO research is an essential part of any marketing campaign. Whether you do this in-house or outsource, we always recommend starting with actionable SEO research and keyword ideation. 

You need to know what keywords to rank for, both at the top (TOFU) and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). SEO research is even more complex thanks to Google AI Overviews (AIOs) and people using AI tools to ask questions they’d have previously asked in search engines. 

SEO software, such as Moz, Semrush, MarketMuse, and numerous others, is necessary for analyzing keyword, AI, and traffic data to identify keywords that will significantly impact your traffic and, ultimately, revenue. 

Here is the recipe for a strong go-to-market strategy:

• TOFU & BOFU SEO research
• Connect that into market and competitor research
• Know how to differentiate your company from competitors clearly
• Be clear about who your customers are (ICPs)
• Feedback and responses from customer surveys
• Social media research is also valuable: Knowing where and how to reach your target customers. 

Key Takeaways: Filling Research Gaps for SaaS Teams

For SaaS teams, research gaps can be fatal. It’s not a problem if you’re 100% confident in everything you know about how to build, grow, and run your SaaS. However, few of us know everything we need to know, especially as entrepreneurs. We may not even know what we don’t know. 

Research is a crucial part of understanding your market, competitors, and developing your product and marketing campaigns. This article highlighted several key research gaps that typically require attention and introduced the necessary tools to address them. 

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