Research guides

These guides answer questions that come up before a decision: whether a number can be trusted, how big a market is, and what the public data says when vendors and research firms disagree. Each one is built from primary sources, such as the Economic Census, County Business Patterns, BLS price data and company filings, and every figure links to the page it came from.

Checking sources and statistics

• Is Statista reliable? Thirteen public Statista figures traced back to their original sources, with what matched, what changed in scope or year, and what could not be traced.
• How to check a market research report before you pay for it One self-storage market figure from three report firms, traced against Census counts and REIT filings.
• Why market size reports disagree Eight research firms’ estimates for one market, restated to the same year and set against the Economic Census.
• How to verify citations in AI output The four ways citations go wrong in machine-written text, and a manual procedure that catches each one.
• How to check whether a paper is retracted Which Crossref field carries a retraction, the free lookups and the Retraction Watch CSV, and why AI research tools still cite retracted papers.
• Legal open-access full text for agents Getting the full text of a paywalled paper by DOI from Unpaywall, Europe PMC, CORE, OpenAlex and Crossref, with real requests and rate limits.

Statistics, collected and checked

• Consulting rates in 2026 Hourly, day and fractional-executive rates from federal contract price lists, court fee filings and consultant surveys.
• Small business valuation multiples by industry Closed-deal SDE and EBITDA multiples for eleven industries and five deal-size bands.
• Food insecurity statistics The final USDA figures, all 50 states, and the sources still measuring food insecurity after USDA ended its report.

Sizing a market

• How to calculate market size A complete worked example, US self-service laundromats, computed top-down from Census receipts and bottom-up from households, with TAM, SAM and SOM for a single store.
• Is a laundromat a good investment? Eleven common claims about laundromat returns, checked against 25 years of Census establishment counts and BLS price data.
• Self-storage feasibility study What a study costs and contains, and a demand check for Tucson from Census data and REIT 10-Ks.

Deals, accounts and trade

• Commercial due diligence for a small acquisition What CDD covers and costs, and a worked industry section for a $4M residential HVAC company.
• Account research from a 10-K Where the useful parts of a 10-K sit, with a brief and account plan for one mid-cap insurer.
• Tariff impact on medical equipment Which US tariffs apply to imported medical equipment, where imports come from, and what device makers report.

Comparing research tools

• What industry research subscriptions cost Published prices for IBISWorld, Statista, Mintel and others, and when a single report is enough.
• Migrating off the OpenAI deep research API What replaced OpenAI’s deep research models and what the alternatives cost.
• Perplexity deep research compared Research mode and the Sonar Deep Research API against Hyperresearch on price, time, citation checking and API access.
• Gemini Deep Research compared The Gemini app and the Gemini API agent against Hyperresearch, including where Gemini is the better pick.
• Out of deep research? How ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude meter deep research, when each allowance comes back, and when buying one report beats upgrading.
• Cost per verified citation A unit for comparing research APIs: the price of a delivered task divided by the citations the provider checked against their sources.
• Claude Code research harness Running deep research inside Claude Code with the open-source hyperresearch CLI.