Desk research

The hard part of desk research is knowing how much to trust a number. This skill plans the search, goes to the sources closest to the data, grades each one, and shows the founder what is solid and what is still a guess.

When to use

• Before interviews, to understand a market and its vocabulary.
• To fill a business plan, a grant application or a pitch deck with sourced figures.
• To check a figure someone quoted.
• Not to estimate a market size from scratch: use market-sizing from boardroom if it is installed, with the figures found here.

Inputs

1. The questions to answer, and the decision behind them.
2. Geography, period and segment.
3. Sources the founder already has.

Method

1. Turn the topic into precise questions, each with its unit, geography and year: "number of independent bakeries in France in 2024", not "the bakery market".
2. Search in this order, closest to the data first:
   • Official statistics: national institutes (INSEE in France, INE in Spain, their equivalents elsewhere), Eurostat, OECD, World Bank, central banks.
   • Filings and registries: annual reports, company accounts (in France, for example, Infogreffe or Pappers), stock market filings.
   • Trade associations, regulators and public agencies.
   • Academic research (for example Google Scholar) for behaviors and definitions.
   • Market research firms and the press: useful, but check how the figure was produced, and whether the article only repeats the summary of a paid report.
   • Signals: search trends, app store rankings, job postings, customer reviews, forums.
3. Grade every source: who produced it, with which method and sample, when, and whether the method is public. Give a confidence level: high (official or audited), medium (reputable, method partly public), low (unknown method, marketing material, unsourced summary, including summaries written by AI).
4. Cross-check: for each key figure, find a second independent source or a bottom-up sanity check. Explain the gaps between sources (different definitions, years or scopes).
5. Cite precisely: title, publisher, publication date, link and date accessed. Without web access, say which figures must be checked and where, instead of quoting from memory.
6. Write the brief: answers first, then the evidence, then what is still unknown and how to find it (often with customer-interviews or survey-design).

Output

### Research brief: <topic> (<geography>, <period>)
| Question | Answer | Source (publisher, date, link) | Accessed | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|

### Cross-checks and gaps
…

### Still unknown, and how to find out
…

Quality bar

• Every number has a source, a date and a confidence level; nothing is quoted from memory.
• Primary and official sources come first; a press article that quotes a study is traced back to the study.
• Definitions and years match when figures are compared.
• Unknowns are listed, not filled with guesses.
• Written in the user's language, with the terms below.

Terminology

Sources

• Saunders, M., Lewis, P., & Thornhill, A. (2019). Research Methods for Business Students (8th ed.). Pearson.
• INSEE (https://www.insee.fr), INE (https://www.ine.es) and Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat): official statistics portals.