Executive Summary

Academic researchers and graduate students — about 8 million globally — regularly face intermittent, high‑stakes statistics and data‑analysis questions but lack reliable on‑demand help, which slows projects, increases the risk of flawed inference, and contributes to reproducibility problems. Friction appears at study design, interim analysis, peer review, and manuscript revision stages; using a $600 average customer value this pain maps to a $4.8B addressable market and real institutional time and reputational costs. A viable product is a paid on‑demand chat platform that combines LLM triage for instant first responses with escalation to vetted human statisticians for short paid sessions (pay‑per‑minute or micro‑subscription) plus code review and reproducible notebook deliverables. Operational targets might be <5 minute time‑to‑first‑answer, median expert session of 20–30 minutes, and a revenue model that supports expert pay, quality control, and a path to the $600 ACV. This market is attractive now because AI‑assisted diagnostics materially reduce time‑to‑first‑answer, acceptance of remote micro‑consulting is rising, and journals and funders are tightening reproducibility standards; those trends support a Market Score of 90/100 and Revenue Potential of 84/100. Lowered acquisition friction and the ability to automate triage also make a hybrid model more capital efficient than purely human marketplaces. To stand out you must enforce strict credentialing, deliver executable reproducible code and provenance with every consult, and offer quality guarantees or journal‑facing artifacts so the service feels like verifiable review rather than ad‑hoc advice. The honest challenges are scaling a supply of high‑quality experts, proving institutional ROI, and competing with free LLM tools and established consultancies; these are addressable but will require disciplined pricing, tight retention mechanics, and initial partnerships with departments or journals.

Market Opportunity

Academic researchers lack on-demand stats help — paid chat with experts targets a $4.8B = 8M academic researchers & graduate researchers x $600 ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 15% CAGR — EdTech and online skills marketplaces growing as research outputs and data reliance increase.

Key trends driving demand: AI-assisted diagnostics -- LLMs enable fast triage of statistical questions, reducing time-to-first-answer and enabling human experts to focus on high-value work.; Remote micro-consulting -- acceptance of short paid, remote sessions is rising, enabling pay-per-minute or micro-subscription models.; Reproducibility and data-science literacy -- increased scrutiny on research in journals fuels demand for rigorous statistical review and reproducible code.; Tool consolidation in research workflows -- researchers consolidate around R, Python, Jupyter and expect integrations, making productized workflows valuable..

Key competitors include Kolabtree, Upwork, Wyzant, MentorCruise, ChatGPT / Anthropic Claude.

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Academic researchers lack on-demand stats help — paid chat with experts

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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