Surfc — User research plan, Q2 2026

Owner: Deji Drafted: 2026-04-27 Window: 2026-05-01 → 2026-05-31 (~4 weeks) Status: Draft, ready to execute

1. What this research must answer

Four research questions, each tied to a downstream decision. If a method on the plan isn’t moving one of these forward, cut it.

#	Question	Decision it unlocks
1	What pain does Surfc address for the target user?	Whether to keep the current Syntopicon-cross-source-index thesis, narrow it, or pivot the value prop
2	Can the target user afford a subscription?	Pro tier price point and the Free → Pro conversion model
3	Where do target users gather?	Where to focus GTM — communities, content, partnerships
4	Is this a growing market?	Whether the segment is large/growing enough to keep investing

2. Target user — working hypothesis

Primary segment: lifelong learners / autodidacts — adults who read serious nonfiction (philosophy, history, science, theology, literary nonfiction) outside of formal study, annotate as they read, and want their reading to compound over time rather than evaporate.

This hypothesis must be falsifiable in the interviews. Adjacent segments worth listening for, in case one of them is actually the better wedge:

Academic readers (philosophy / humanities students and faculty)
Writers and creators who use reading as raw material
Religious / theological readers indexing across canons
PKM power users dissatisfied with text-only Obsidian / Roam workflows

Ancillary segments — pursue only if time permits:

Book club members (group-reading dynamics, social annotation use cases)
Researchers (independent / industry researchers managing literature beyond formal academia)
Speakers (keynote, conference, podcast — read-to-perform, need to retrieve quotes and ideas on demand)

These are lower confidence as primary wedges but worth keeping ears open for during interviews and lurking. If signal emerges naturally, follow it; don’t actively recruit for them in the first pass.

3. Constraints (these reshape everything)

Timeline: 2026-05-01 → 2026-05-31 = ~4 weeks (with the last weekend Apr 27–30 as optional pre-work)
Budget: £0 — friends-and-favours recruiting only
Pipeline reality: waitlist of ~1–50 is family/friends and inactive. Treat as not-usable. Effective starting point = 0 qualified participants.
Single researcher (Deji)

The honest implication: we run lean, and we instrument recruitment so it doubles as channel research for Q3. There’s no budget for paid recruiters or fancy analysis tools — every method below has to earn its keep.

4. Method mix mapped to questions

Method	Q1 Pain	Q2 Pricing	Q3 Channels	Q4 Market	Sample / format
Desk research & market sizing	—	partial	partial	primary	~2 days, no participants
Community / forum lurking + voice-of-customer capture	primary	—	primary	partial	8–12 communities, 30 min/day
Public recruitment survey (also a screener + channel map)	partial	partial	primary	—	Target 60–100 responses
1:1 user interviews	primary	partial	partial	—	6–8 × 45-min interviews
Van Westendorp PSM	—	primary	—	—	Embedded in survey + interview

The recruitment survey is the lever. Every channel you post it to teaches you whether qualified people congregate there, and it screens for interview candidates. Recruitment is channel research.

5. Week-by-week execution

The extra week (vs. an Apr 27 → May 22 plan) goes mostly into recruitment runway — the single highest risk. With more time you can lurk longer before posting, accept some channels converting slowly, and push the sample to 8–10 interviews / 100+ survey responses if recruitment goes well.

Week 1 — May 1 → May 10 (set up + start recruiting)

May 1 is a Friday, so the first three days are a soft opening for prep, then a full week of execution.

Days 1–3 (Fri–Sun, May 1–3) — set up:

Define the screener decision rule (see §8) — who’s a “yes” for an interview
Build the public survey in Tally or Google Forms (free)
Draft the interview discussion guide (§7)
List 8–12 candidate communities and capture each one’s posting rules (§6)
Block 4 calendar slots/week for interview availability
Kick off desk research for market sizing (§9)

Days 4–10 (Mon–Sun, May 4–10) — start recruiting:

Post the survey + a one-line value-prop teaser into 8–12 communities and your personal network. Use 2–3 framing variants so you can compare which resonates — that’s part of the Q3 answer.
Begin 30 min/day of forum/Discord lurking. Capture verbatim pain language in a “voice of customer” doc (one page per community, raw quotes only).
Milestone (end of week 1): 30+ survey responses, 2–3 interviews booked.

Week 2 — May 11 → May 17 (recruit + interview round 1)

Run 3–4 interviews. Update the discussion guide between sessions if probes are dead-ends.
Continue recruiting in parallel; aim for 60+ survey responses cumulative.
Continue desk research; draft v0 of the market-sizing memo.
Milestone (end of week 2): 60+ survey responses, 3–4 interviews completed, market-sizing memo v0.

Week 3 — May 18 → May 24 (interview round 2)

Run remaining 4–5 interviews. By end of week, target 7–9 total.
Reach 100+ survey responses if channels are converting; if not, reallocate that effort to deeper interviews.
Begin transcription and rough affinity-mapping in parallel — don’t leave it all to week 4.
Refine market-sizing memo to v0.5 (numbers + ranges + sources).

Week 4 — May 25 → May 31 (synthesis + write-up)

Finish affinity-mapping across all 7–9 transcripts.
Synthesise PSM data → recommended price point with a confidence band.
Write the synthesis report — one doc, four sections matching the four questions, plus appendices.
Pull the highlight reel (5–10 quotes) for landing page / future investor use.
Final deliverable due 2026-05-31.

6. Recruitment + lurking targets

This list also seeds the answer to Q3 — communities that convert at all become channel hypotheses.

High-priority (likely autodidact-dense)

r/books, r/literature, r/Commonplace_Book, r/Marginalia, r/notebooks
r/PKMS, r/ObsidianMD, r/RoamResearch, r/Zettelkasten — adjacent; may be too tool-loyal but worth one post each
r/philosophy, r/AskPhilosophy, r/AskHistorians — read community rules carefully; many forbid product/research recruitment posts
Hacker News “Show HN” — only once you have a usable demo
Goodreads “Always Reading” / classics groups
Readwise community, Matter community
Substack note discussions on commonplace-book and reading-system writers (Anne-Laure Le Cunff, David Perell, Tiago Forte’s audience, etc.)
Discord: Obsidian, Anti-Library, Foundations of Western Thought-style philosophy servers
Local: book clubs in your network, university philosophy alumni groups

Social-first (BookTok / Bookstagram) — secondary tier

TikTok’s #BookTok and Instagram’s #Bookstagram are the largest reader communities online — but they skew heavily fiction (romantasy, thrillers, YA) rather than annotated-nonfiction. Worth probing rather than ignoring:

Search and lurk #nonfictionbooktok, #philosophytok, #commonplacebook, #annotatedbook, #studytok, #booksofnonfiction tags before posting anything
Look for accounts with annotation-heavy content (highlighter shots, marginalia, study-with-me posts) — DM 5–10 of them with the screener question, treat as warm leads rather than mass posting
Don’t burn time creating original content for these platforms during the research window — the goal is recruitment and signal, not audience-building
If the conversion rate is decent, flag it for the GTM plan; if not, downgrade and move on

Posting rule: lurk 2–3 days before posting in any new community. Lead with the question, not the product: “I’m researching how serious nonfiction readers keep track of what they read across books. Looking for 30 minutes with anyone who annotates as they go.” This survives self-promo filters and pre-qualifies the people who reply.

7. Interview discussion guide (45 min)

Warm-up (5 min)

Tell me a bit about your reading life right now. What are you in the middle of?
How long has reading been a serious part of how you spend time?

Context — current behaviour (10 min)

Walk me through what happens when you read something that lands. What do you do with it in the moment? After?
Show me — can you pull up the last book you really engaged with? Where did your notes/highlights end up?
When was the last time you went back to something you read and wanted to find a specific idea? What did you do?

Probe for breakdowns: “shelves of annotated books I’ll never re-open,” “Readwise highlights pile up and I never look at them,” “I take photos but never tag them.”

Pain — Q1 deep dive (15 min)

What about your current system frustrates you most?
If you could wave a wand and change one thing about how your reading compounds over time, what would it be?
Tell me about a time you knew you’d read something relevant to a problem and couldn’t find it.
Have you ever paid for or tried a tool to fix this? What happened?

The diagnostic question (Sean Ellis PMF probe): “If a tool that fixed [the pain they named] disappeared tomorrow, how disappointed would you be — very, somewhat, or not really?”

Concept reaction + pricing — Q2 (10 min)

Show a 60-second concept (one paragraph + a screenshot of the index view): “Photograph annotations from any book or notebook → tagged to ideas → cross-source index of your reading.”

What do you understand it to be?
What’s missing or confusing?

Van Westendorp PSM — ask all four:

At what monthly price would this be so expensive you wouldn’t consider it?
At what price would it be expensive but you’d still consider it?
At what price would it be a bargain — great value?
At what price would it be so cheap you’d question its quality?

Follow-up anchor: “What other tools do you currently pay for in this space?” (Readwise, Notion, Matter, Obsidian Sync, Kindle Unlimited, audiobook subs, etc.)

Channels — Q3 (5 min)

Where do you find new books or reading tools? Newsletters, podcasts, communities, friends?
Whose recommendations do you actually act on?
If a friend told you about a tool like this, what would make you try it vs. ignore it?

Wrap-up

Anything I didn’t ask that I should have?
Is there one person in your life I should also talk to? (referrals are how you escape the friends-and-family pool)

8. Survey (public + waitlist)

Keep it under 4 minutes. Goal: screening for interviews, Q3 channel mapping, Q2 PSM at scale.

How many books do you read per year? (0–5 / 6–15 / 16–30 / 30+)
When you read nonfiction, do you annotate / highlight / take notes? (Always / Often / Sometimes / Rarely)
Where do your reading notes currently live? (multi-select: in the book, Kindle, Readwise, Obsidian/Roam, Notion, paper notebook, nowhere, other)
How often do you go back to your old notes/highlights? (Weekly / Monthly / Rarely / Never)
What’s the most frustrating thing about how you currently keep track of what you read? (open text — this powers the voice-of-customer doc)
Where do you discover new books and reading tools? (multi-select with “other”)
Van Westendorp — the four questions
Would you be open to a 30-minute conversation? Email + first name.

Screener decision rule for interviews: invite anyone who answers Q1 ≥ 6 books/year, Q2 = Always or Often, and gives a non-trivial answer to Q5. Everyone else gets the survey-only thank-you.

9. Desk research — Q4 market sizing

Triangulate from three angles. Validate every number with a current source in week 1 — don’t trust stale figures.

Reading base rate: Pew “How Americans Read”, NEA reading data, UK Reading Agency
Annotation / notes-app adoption (proxies for the digital-PKM segment): Readwise reported user numbers, Matter / Reader, Obsidian self-reported MAU, Notion, Roam
PKM growth signal: Google Trends for “second brain”, “zettelkasten”, “commonplace book”; free-tier keyword data (Google Keyword Planner)
Adjacent paid analogs: Readwise (~$8/mo, public revenue commentary), Recall, Heptabase — what % of nonfiction readers convert to paid?
Indie SaaS benchmarks: ARR per user, conversion rates (Indie Hackers, MicroConf data)
Cultural signal: Substack writers on commonplace books, sales of Building a Second Brain and similar trade titles

Output: a 1-page memo with TAM (English-speaking serious nonfiction readers) → SAM (those already paying for digital reading/notes tools) → SOM (a realistic 3-year capture). Fermi-estimate, label every assumption, give every number a range. v0.5 quality is fine — flag what you’d refine in Q3 with more time.

10. Synthesis & deliverables (week 3)

Affinity-map all qualitative data. Produce one synthesis doc structured as the four questions, plus appendices. For each question:

Headline finding (one sentence)
Evidence (3–5 quotes + counts)
Confidence (high / medium / low + why)
Implication for product / pricing / GTM
Open questions to follow up

Plus a 5–10 quote highlight reel for personal reference and future landing-page / investor use.

11. Risks & mitigations

Risk	Mitigation
Can’t recruit 6–8 interviews in 3.5 weeks with no budget	Cast wide via 8–12 communities; offer a non-cash incentive — early access + 1 free year of Pro for participants
Friends-network signal contaminates results	Tag every participant by source; analyse cold-recruited subset separately for Q1 and Q2
Van Westendorp on a not-yet-built product is fluffy	Treat the PSM curve as directional only; cross-check against what they currently pay for adjacent tools
4 weeks is still tight for solid market sizing	Output a “v0.5” memo with explicit ranges and assumptions; flag what to refine post-launch
Lurking surfaces tool-builders, not real readers	Filter heavily in the screener; over-index on Goodreads / philosophy / commonplace-book communities, under-index on r/PKMS
Concept screenshots aren’t ready by interview day	Fall back to a 1-paragraph written description + a paper sketch — concept reaction is about understanding, not visual polish

12. What to do first thing tomorrow

Draft the survey in Tally — 1 hr
List the 12 communities with their posting rules — 1 hr
Draft three versions of the recruitment post for A/B — 1 hr
Pre-write the screener decision rule (see §8) — 30 min
Block 4 calendar slots/week for interview availability — 10 min

That’s ~3.5 hours of setup. Everything else flows from those five artifacts.