Research the market (what you didn't tell me)

The brief is what you know. A plan built only from the brief can only rearrange your own answers back to you. This is the step where the agent goes out and finds what you don't know yet: where your users actually are, how products like yours got their first users, and the openings you haven't seen.

Use this when: you've just written the brief and want a plan grounded in the real market, not just your own read. Or you're about to pick channels or plan a launch and "post on Reddit and HN" is the best idea on the table. Or the roadmap you got back felt like a tidy summary of what you said.

The core idea

The interview pulls out what's in your head. Research brings in what isn't: the specific subreddit where your ICP complained about this exact problem last week, the newsletter they all read, the three products in your space that launched in the last two years and what actually brought their first users, the competitor you didn't name.

Research is planning-grade evidence, not proof. Public evidence that 40 people asked for this in a GitHub issue is strong enough to plan a channel around. It is not strong enough to call the pain validated or to set a price. So it gets its own tag, [researched], between [assumption] and [validated]. Only a real conversation with a real user who is not a friend earns [validated].

Before you start: can your agent see the web?

• If your agent can browse or search the web, it runs the research for real, and every finding carries a link.
• If it can't, it says so up front and hands you a short list of exact searches to run (8 to 12, each a copy-paste query with what to look for). You paste back what you find, and it does the analysis. Same output, you're the browser.

Never fake it. An agent without web access that writes up "communities" from memory is guessing, and invented member counts and dead links destroy trust fast.