Product strategy, market research and customer intelligence
Vetted by ToptalTop 3% talent networkBetter decisions start with understanding the market.
I work with companies trying to figure out what to build, who to build it for, how to position it, and how to get it into the market.
My work runs across market research, customer intelligence, product strategy, positioning and growth — with particular attention to businesses being reshaped by AI, where discovery and decision-making are both changing at once.
The job
You might be here because…
Most of the work starts as one of these sentences, usually said with some frustration. Pick the one that sounds like your week.
Start with the job, not the roadmap.
What I do
From market uncertainty to better decisions.
These are not eight unrelated services. They are one commercial problem, taken in order. Market understanding informs product decisions; product understanding informs positioning; positioning determines how demand can be built. Search — including AI search — sits in the distribution layer. It is part of the work, not the identity of it.
01 — Understand
Understand the market
Who the buyers are, what they are trying to get done, who else is competing for that job, and where demand actually exists rather than where it is assumed to exist.
- Markets
- Customers
- Jobs
- Competition
- Demand
- Category
02 — Decide
Make better product and positioning decisions
Market understanding is only useful if it changes a decision. What to build, what to stop building, what to claim, and which words are worth defending.
- Product strategy
- Prioritisation
- Value proposition
- Positioning
- Messaging
03 — Grow
Build the path to demand
Distribution is part of product strategy, not a department downstream of it. Search — including AI-mediated search — is one route to demand, not the identity of the work.
- Distribution
- SEO
- AI search
- Content
- Acquisition
The through-line: what is happening in this market → what are customers actually trying to accomplish → what should we build or change → how should we position it → how does it get discovered.
How I think
Good strategy starts with better questions.
The methods matter less than the order of the questions. These are the working beliefs behind everything on this site.
Start with the customer, not the feature
Features are answers. The useful question is what someone was trying to accomplish when they went looking for one.
Understand the job before designing the solution
Jobs To Be Done is a lens I use constantly, but it is a tool in the kit — not the whole practice, and not a religion.
Understand the market before declaring the opportunity
Opportunity is a claim about demand, competition and timing. It should be argued with evidence, not enthusiasm.
Separate symptoms from underlying problems
Most 'we need more traffic' briefs are positioning problems. Most churn problems are hiring-the-wrong-tool problems.
Treat positioning as truth, not cleverness
Positioning that outruns the product creates expensive disappointment. The words should be the shortest accurate description of real value.
Combine qualitative insight with quantitative signal
Interviews tell you why. Search demand, usage and competitive data tell you how much and how often. Neither is sufficient alone.
Distribution is part of product strategy
How a product gets discovered shapes what the product should be. Deciding that later is deciding it badly.
AI changed discovery, not just marketing
When an assistant answers instead of a results page, being the best answer matters more than ranking. That is a product and positioning problem before it is a channel problem.
Selected work
Some of the problems I've spent time trying to solve.
Independent build, applied at NO BS Marketplace · 2025
AuthorityOS
100+Clusters mapped per audit
60–90sAudit time, from 4–8 hours
Working out whether AI assistants would ever recommend a brand — before spending a quarter on content
Most AI visibility audits stop at rankings or surface-level brand mentions.
A competitive AI-visibility system that maps what a brand is actually associated with, what its competitors own, and where the gaps are worth attacking.
SEO / AI SearchMarket ResearchAI ProductsPositioningIndependent build · 2025
JTBD Software Advisor
95%+Reduction in time to produce a buying brief
6 monthsForecast horizon for projected outcomes
Helping buyers work out what they were actually hiring software to do, before comparing features
Feature comparison optimises for the wrong variable.
A Jobs To Be Done advisor that uncovers the outcome a business is hiring software to achieve, then produces a consultant-style buying brief and a six-month projection.
JTBDProduct StrategyCustomer IntelligenceAI ProductsIndependent build · 2025
Topic Intelligence Map
90%+Faster planning
7Research areas per brief
Turning a one-line content idea into a research brief that knows who it is for and what they object to
Reader intent, stakeholder needs, objections and coverage gaps were being reassembled by hand for every brief.
A content intelligence tool that maps reader intent, stakeholders, objections, entities and gaps before anything is written.
Customer IntelligenceMarket ResearchSEO / AI SearchAI ProductsNO BS Marketplace (USA) · 2023 — present
Newsletter and product innovation at NO BS Marketplace
15,000+Newsletter subscribers
~25%Sustained open rate
Building an audience asset and an internal R&D habit inside an SEO marketplace
Industry change was arriving faster than opinion could be formed about it.
Writing and productising a weekly SEO and marketing newsletter, and leading research into AI-driven solutions for internal bottlenecks and client delivery.
GrowthSEO / AI SearchProduct StrategyMarket Research
Evidence
What there is to go on.
7 years
Working across marketing, SEO, research and product strategy
3
AI research and decision tools designed and built end to end
15,000+
Subscribers to a weekly SEO and marketing newsletter I write and productised
100+
Entity and content clusters mapped in a single AuthorityOS audit
60–90 sec
Competitive AI visibility audits, down from 4–8 hours
6
Literary and editorial outlets that have published my writing
Only figures I can substantiate are listed. Where client results are unpublished, the case studies say so rather than estimating.
Thinking
Some things I've been thinking about.
Search · 18 June 2026 · 7 min
Search is becoming an answer, and that is a product problem
When an assistant answers instead of listing results, the question stops being 'how do we rank' and becomes 'what are we reliably known for'. That is decided upstream of marketing.
Growth · 2 May 2026 · 6 min
Most growth problems are positioning problems wearing a costume
Traffic briefs, conversion briefs and churn briefs often describe the same underlying failure: the company has not established what it is for, and for whom.
JTBD · 11 March 2026 · 6 min
Personas describe people. Jobs explain decisions.
JTBD is a lens, not an identity. Used well it explains why someone switched; used badly it becomes another artefact nobody opens.
Positioning · 27 January 2026 · 5 min
Positioning is not copywriting
If the words outrun the product, you have bought yourself an expensive disappointment. Positioning should be the shortest accurate description of real value.
Book
[BOOK COVER IMAGE]
A Song For The Corpse
A published book, and the clearest evidence of a habit that underwrites the strategy work: thinking that has to hold together at length, in public, without a client brief.
[BOOK DESCRIPTION — to be supplied]
Writing
Published work.
Alongside the essays here, my literary writing has appeared in journals and anthologies. It is not adjacent to the strategy work — it is the same instinct for language and attention, applied elsewhere.
About
I'm Johnpaul. I've spent most of my career trying to understand why people buy.
Why products win, why markets move, and why some companies seem to make better decisions than everyone else. The path ran through journalism and marketing, then SEO and demand research, then customer intelligence and product strategy, and now AI-era work where discovery itself is being rebuilt.
What connects them is not a job title. It is a preference for the part of the problem nobody has defined yet.
Start here
Have a problem worth thinking through?
If you're trying to understand a market, make sense of customer behaviour, decide what to build, sharpen your positioning, or work out where growth is actually coming from — let's talk.