Company Research
Explain what the company sells, how it earns money, and what supports its continued operation. Organize research around the user's decision rather than a collection of facts.
Scope and depth
- Resolve the company, website, jurisdiction and legal entity. Separate brands, products, subsidiaries, parent companies and listed entities. Clarify ambiguous names when they materially affect the result.
- Read supplied materials and identify the purpose: overview, partnership, job research, competition or public-source due diligence. If unspecified, state an overview assumption and use
depth: quick. - Set the research cutoff, geographic/business scope, currency and reporting periods. Ask only questions that change the result; state reasonable assumptions for the rest.
- Quick: identity, products/customers, business model, competitive position, material risks and gaps.
- Deep: investigate the relevant dimensions below, including conflicting evidence. Do not promise depth through fixed hours, page counts or search quotas.
- Use public or authorized materials. Disclose inaccessible paywalled, login-only or internal records and continue achievable work. Research does not authorize contacting a company, buying data or publishing findings.
Research dimensions
Allocate attention according to the user's decision; explain inapplicable dimensions rather than filling them mechanically.
| Dimension | Questions |
|---|---|
| Identity and history | Legal name, incorporation, jurisdiction, control, related entities and turning points. Separate brand history from legal incorporation. |
| Products and customers | Problem solved, target customer, price, purchase path and verifiable customer examples. Separate users, paying customers, distributors and partners. |
| Business model | Who pays, why, how charging works, delivery, revenue mix, costs and collection cycle. |
| Operations and financials | Revenue, profits, cash flow, debt, growth, customer concentration and relevant industry measures, with entity, period, definition and currency. |
| Market and competition | Direct rivals, substitutes, segment, differentiation, switching costs and channel/technology advantages; test alleged moats with evidence. |
| Acquisition and brand | Sales, marketing, distribution, partners, acquisition efficiency and retention. Exposure is not revenue or demonstrated demand. |
| Delivery and execution | In-house work, outsourcing, supply chain, capacity, dependencies and expansion bottlenecks. |
| Team and governance | Management, organization size, governance and key-person dependence. Hiring and reviews are biased signals; investigate pay and culture when relevant to job research. |
| Capital and strategy | Funding, acquisitions, investors, use of funds and direction; distinguish cumulative funding, a round, valuation and cash received. |
| Risks and gaps | Operating, financial, regulatory, litigation, data and reputation risks; evidence, mechanism, counterevidence and verification paths. |
Read references/research-guide.md to select sources and metrics for the target. Use references/report-template.md when a full report is needed.
Evidence and reasoning
- Establish entity and product relationships, then investigate the decision-critical questions. Open original documents; search snippets, AI summaries and reposts are leads, not final evidence.
- Match sources to facts: registries for identity; regulatory filings and audited accounts for finances; product documents for capabilities/prices; customer materials and independent coverage for adoption/effects. Company statements alone cannot establish market leadership.
- Corroborate important numbers and high-impact conclusions where possible. Syndicated copies are one source. Attribute single-source statements rather than describing them broadly as verified.
- Attach source links, publication/update dates, data periods and access dates when necessary. Separate facts, company claims, third-party estimates, analytical inferences, undisclosed data and unverified statements. Explain inference inputs and counterexamples.
- Preserve conflicting dates and definitions. Prefer direct, current, applicable evidence; explain unresolved conflicts and their effect on the conclusion.
- No funding record does not prove no funding; no litigation found does not prove no litigation; undisclosed revenue is not zero. Use verifiable operating signals for private companies instead of inventing financial statements.
- Registered capital is not revenue, cash or operating scale. Profile counts, vacancies, downloads and traffic are biased proxies, not precise employees, customers or revenue.
- Distinguish market capitalization, valuation, funding, revenue and profits. GMV is not revenue, ARR is not recognized revenue, and orders are not deliveries. Compare consistent entities, periods, currencies and definitions.
- Stop when key questions have traceable answers and more searching is unlikely to change the judgment. Retain unresolved gaps instead of padding the report.
Deliver and verify
- Default to Markdown in the user's language. Lead with conclusions, then company profile, evidence, risks, gaps and purpose-specific next steps. Answer inline for a brief; save and read back files when requested.
- Put citations beside claims and make table values traceable. Explain confidence and its basis; avoid unsupported numerical scores.
- Produce PDF, DOCX or slides only when requested with available tools; require no personal paths or unavailable skills. Keep exports consistent with Markdown.
- Before completion check entity resolution, dates, units, sources actually read, fact/inference separation, conflicts and whether conclusions exceed evidence. Verify saved files exist and read back. For exports verify opening, readable text/tables and working key citations; link counts alone are not quality checks.
- State unverified portions. Public-source research is not an audit, legal opinion or completed comprehensive due diligence.
Example
Use company-research to investigate [company or website].
Purpose: [overview / partnership / job research / competition / public-source due diligence]
Depth: [quick / deep]
Focus: [one to three questions]
Scope: [region, business line and period, optional]
Output: [chat brief / Markdown file / Markdown and PDF]
Conceptually based on social-org-research, generalized to commercial companies. This separately authored English edition is released by 0xcjl under MIT-0; see LICENSE.