🧠 How to use Perplexity to automate product market research
🧠 How to use Perplexity to automate product market research
Knowledge Series #43: Unlock your Perplexity superpowers. Market research, competitor analysis more.
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Hi product people 👋,
Perplexity is now officially1 growing at a faster rate than ChatGPT. This is hardly surprising given just how quickly ChatGPT cemented its place at the top of AI assistants but still, it’s an impressive feat nonetheless.
The rushed (and a little frantic) rollout of Google’s Search Overview is also a testament to the success of Perplexity given how much of a threat big tech clearly perceives it to be. It’s still early days, of course, and nobody is pretending that Google is about to be dethroned any time soon.
But there's a reason so many people are excited about Perplexity, and it's simply because it's an excellent product - and when you know how to use it effectively, it can feel like you have a few superpowers at your disposal.
In this Knowledge Series, you'll learn how to use Perplexity's core features to conduct product market research, as well as some practical examples of how you can use Perplexity's API to build your own autonomous AI workflows that will conduct useful market research on your behalf.
If you’ve ever wanted your own personalized, automated email that keeps you up to date with everything that’s going on in your product’s niche, this guide should help.
Coming up:
Understanding how Perplexity works: the core features that matter at work
How to use Perplexity to analyze new market trends and innovation
How to build your own dedicated assistant for automating competitor analysis using Perplexity’s API
Visualizing data with Knowledge Cards and data exports
Managing your research with collections and pages
Understanding how Perplexity works: the core features that matter at work
Perplexity is popular because it’s excellent at answering questions. Whereas traditional search involves wading through pages of blue links, Perplexity does the heavy lifting for you to scour the internet and provide you with the answer you need.
How it works
Unlike traditional search engines that rely on pre-indexed data, Perplexity performs real-time searches across the internet. This enables it to provide the latest information, including news updates and recent developments, which is particularly useful for tasks like conducting market research.
Perplexity’s tech stack includes real time web searches with advanced NLPs and LLMs to generate answers to questions. It doesn’t always give you the correct answer of course, and just like other LLM-powered products, Perplexity is prone to hallucinations at times, but since each answer is clearly referenced with sources it’s pretty easy to fact check each source as you use it.
Why it’s useful for product / tech teams to use at work
The core value proposition of Perplexity is its ability to conduct real time web searches and in a product context this can be super helpful.
Some of the most powerful Perplexity capabilities that we care about include:
Searching the web and getting summaries of information you need
Applying filters to only research only specific types of information e.g. academic publications or social sites like Reddit
Grouping results into collections to organize your research
Converting your data into visualizations
Using the Perplexity API for advanced automation workflows so that you don’t always need to rely on the web version of Perplexity
We’ll take a look at some of these features in greater depth as part of this Knowledge Series along with some real world examples.
But before we move onto the first task, it’s worth noting that Perplexity comes with 2 tiers: free and Pro. The free version of Perplexity is perfectly capable of doing everything you need it to do (aside from API access which does require paid tokens) but the Pro model of Perplexity gives you access to newer models and more customization settings.
If you’re interested in understanding the differences between the two, here’s a quick summary which outlines some of the core differences.
For this Knowledge Series, you can use the free version for all of the web tasks outlined. If you want to use the API, Pro users get $5 free a month or free users can buy credits priced at $0.01 per call too.
OK, so now that we know a little bit more about how it works, let’s take a look at some practical examples together.
Market sizing and scoping
Before launching a new product into a new market, product teams typically perform a series of market research activities. Perplexity helps you to get a snapshot of important data points in a single query and you can ask it to create a short “memo” of the areas you’re particularly interested in.
This is often a helpful starting point before then deciding which specific areas to drill down into in more detail.
For example, if we were planning to launch a new product which allowed pet owners to buy and manage pet insurance, we’d want to get a quick snapshot of the industry and market dynamics.
Here’s a prompt that would give us everything we need to get started: