Use the Google suite, deconstruct the market!
When I look at how people build products, I see two common paths. On the first, someone spends years in a field and works on all kinds of projects there. They keep running into its problems, and over time they learn to spot new ones. Their experience slowly turns into product ideas. On the second, someone starts with demand. They spot an opportunity first, and only then start building and spending time in that field. I'd call the second one the more opportunistic of the two.
Indie developers are the best example of the opportunity-driven mind I can think of. They move fast on short-lived openings, especially in the mobile app market. When iPhone cleaning videos go viral on TikTok, an iPhone cleaning app shows up right after. Builders who follow their experience and their own observations do the opposite. They skip the trends and keep building in the field they know. Think of an English teacher who opens a YouTube channel and keeps teaching English there for years.
I think both need market research, just at different moments. The opportunist starts with it: demand comes first, and the product follows. The experienced builder already has a hunch, and research is how they test it before putting time and money into it.
Either way, problems don't always look the same in the market, or in the customer's mind, as they do in the builder's head. What customers actually do matters more than anything, so watching how the market behaves can save you from bad decisions. Sometimes it changes a product decision or the way you talk about the product, and that shows up directly in how the product performs.
Problems don't always look the same in the customer's mind as they do in the builder's head.
For me, it comes down to this: I'd rather not guess. Before I build anything, I want to see what the market is already telling me. What do people search for, how often, and in which words? A lot of those answers are out there, and they're easier to find than you might think.
So how do I actually research a market? My flow is built on four Google products, and it doesn't stop at launch. Google Cloud Console ties everything together. Keyword Planner measures demand up front. Once the product is live, Search Console and Google Analytics 4 show me how people respond.
Before you can use any of Google's APIs, Google asks you to create a project in Google Cloud Console. A project isn't tied to one service: you can enable Google Ads, Search Console, Analytics and many others in the same one.
From the API Library, search for each service you need and enable it for your project. Everything below runs through an API you enable here.
Keyword Planner is the market research tool Google gives advertisers, and it's where I always start. Open a Google Ads account and you'll find it in the interface. Pick any country and language, and it shows you how often a keyword is searched, along with the keywords related to it. This is where the opportunist goes looking for demand, and where the experienced builder checks whether anyone is actually searching for the problem they want to solve.
You can also reach Keyword Planner through the Google Ads API. Once you have a developer token and the API is enabled in your Cloud project, you can send it any query you like and pull the same data as a CSV. One heads-up: to use the Google Ads API with Basic access, you'll need to apply for it, and Google reviews your application before approving it.
I think the API is worth the setup for another reason too. If your account has little or no ad spend, the web interface only shows you a range. For “iphone”, the screenshot above says 100K–1M. Through the API, the same query gave me an average of 368,000 monthly searches.
Keyword Planner isn't only for consumer products. B2B products have search volume on Google too, so whatever solution you're thinking about, I'd check Keyword Planner first.
What I like most is the source. This data comes straight from Google, from what people actually search for, and that makes it feel very reliable to me. On top of that, it's free. Reliable and free is a hard combination to beat.
Reliable and free is a hard combination to beat.
Compare that with the mobile app world. Before submitting an app to the stores, many developers use paid intelligence tools like AppTweak or Appfigures. These tools crawl the stores and give developers insights about the market. Somehow, I've never been able to fully trust them. So instead, especially for consumer products, I go straight to Keyword Planner and analyze the market there.
And here's the thing: research doesn't end when the product launches. It turns into a loop. Keyword Planner tells me what people are already searching for. Once I'm live, Search Console shows me what they actually find the product through, and Google Analytics shows me what they do once they arrive. Those signals go straight back into the next round: new searches to look up, new questions about the product, new decisions to make. The market tells me something, I build, people respond, and then the market tells me something again.
Now say you've built the product and launched a website to market it. Search Console shows you how the site appears in Google's organic results and lets you follow its organic performance in detail. With its API, you can dig into which queries bring people to your site and how each one performs, and optimize based on what you see. I find this part especially interesting, because the searches that actually bring people in don't always match the keywords you planned for.
Search Console stops at the click, and Google Analytics 4 picks up from there. With its API, you can look closely at how people use your site and build all kinds of reports on top of that. The most important part, I think, is defining your own events, the ones that capture how your users behave, and sending them to Google Analytics.
Put Google Cloud Console at the center, enable the Google Ads, Search Console and Analytics APIs in one project, and you have everything in one place.
To work this way, I create a folder and open Claude Code inside it. Once the APIs are connected, I can ask it to pull the data, explore the market, and save the results as I go — all from one terminal.
Here's what that looks like. I asked Claude Code for UK search volumes for “iphone” in English, then for the related keywords. It queried the Google Ads API, pulled about 1,010 related keywords, and saved them to a CSV so I could dig in. A few things jumped out right away: “iphone 17” gets 823,000 searches a month, more than twice plain “iphone”, and “iphone 18” already gets 201,000.