Vertical SaaS serves a specific industry — its particular workflows, jargon, and constraints — and its whole advantage over horizontal tools is fitting that niche precisely. That advantage only exists if you genuinely understand the domain, which you usually do not by default. User research is how you learn a specialised workflow you do not live in yourself, so you build for how the job is actually done rather than how you imagine it.
Get inside the workflow
Surface-level research produces surface-level products. To build vertical software that fits, you need to understand the customer's workflow in depth — the steps, the exceptions, the tools they use alongside yours, the constraints their industry imposes. This means talking to practitioners at length and, where you can, watching them work, because the real workflow is full of detail and workarounds that no feature-request list captures. The depth of your domain understanding is the depth of your product's fit.
Separate what they say from what they do
The central discipline of user research: people are poor reporters of their own behaviour. They will tell you they want a feature and never use it, or describe an idealised process quite different from what they actually do under pressure. Weight observation over stated preference — watch what they do, notice where they struggle and improvise, and treat feature requests as clues to an underlying problem rather than instructions. The gap between what users say and what they do is where the real insight lives.
Feed insight into the roadmap
- Interview practitioners in depth — open questions about how they actually work, not whether they like your idea.
- Observe real usage — watch the workflow in context to find the friction people do not articulate.
- Look past requests to the problem — 'I want X' usually means 'I have problem Y'; solve Y.
- Synthesise into decisions — research that does not change what you build was theatre.
A horizontal competitor can copy your features but not your understanding of the industry. Deep, ongoing user research is what keeps a vertical product fitting the workflow better than any general-purpose tool — and that fit, not any single feature, is the durable advantage. Treat research as a continuous investment in the moat, not a one-off before launch.
User research for vertical SaaS is getting deep inside a specialised workflow through interviews and observation, weighting what users do over what they say, and synthesising the insight into real roadmap decisions. It is how you earn the domain understanding that is the entire point of building vertical — a product that fits the industry's real work so well that general-purpose tools cannot compete.
Independent software engineer in Nairobi specialising in Acumatica customisations, Laravel backends, and tax fiscalisation integrations across East and Southern Africa.