🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

This week: smarter market research for small teams (without the agency-sized budget).

Not long ago, market research meant expensive reports, slow surveys, or a spreadsheet swamp. Now small teams can spot rising search trends, organize messy customer feedback, and watch how real visitors use their site without blowing their budget.

Today, I’m sharing three tools that tackle those jobs from different angles

Plus: an interactive video form tool that makes forms more human, a cheap DIY setup for trend and SEO research, and a Meta AI fail.

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Glimpse

Trend Research

Glimpse makes trend research feel surprisingly painless. It is built to help you spot topics before they peak, and the big win here is the presentation: the charts, growth lines, and results are genuinely easy to read.

You can explore search volume, growth over time, related searches, and channel breakdowns without wrestling with raw data. I also like that there is a free way to try it. The catch is the price once you upgrade: $71/month is a lot. And even with the extra layers, the tool still relies on Google Trends, so I would not rely on it alone for other channels like social media-first research.

Still, I can see the appeal. If you want to compare ideas quickly, this feels much more polished than digging through Google Trends (and similar platforms) by hand.

Best for SEO, content teams, ecommerce research, and small businesses that want early signals without messy spreadsheets. Less ideal if you need a full social listening tool.

🛠️ Alternative to: Google Trends, Exploding Topics
👉 Visit: meetglimpse.com
💰 From $71/month | Free plan available

Dovetail

Customer Feedback

Customer feedback gets ugly the moment it starts spreading across ten different channels and platforms. Support tickets, app reviews, Slack threads, interview notes, sales calls, survey replies... useful on their own, but a mess together. Dovetail is built to pull that mess into one place so you can stop guessing and start spotting patterns.

What makes it interesting is how many sources it can connect, including Intercom, HubSpot, Zendesk, Apple App Store, Google Play, Slack, Notion, Figma, and Salesforce. From there, it turns scattered comments into searchable insights, summaries, dashboards, and reports. The less fun part: it does not look like a light setup, and paid pricing is not even publicly disclosed.

I’m not going to pretend we use Dovetail at Tooltester. But if your team collects feedback in many places, I can see why this tool exists – and the free plan is generous.

🛠️ Alternative to: Canny.io, Productboard
👉 Visit: dovetail.com
💰 Paid plan not disclosed | Free plan available

Microsoft Clarity

UX Analytics

Want to know why a page is failing without playing detective in Google Analytics? Microsoft Clarity is built exactly for that. While GA4 excels at the numbers (traffic, conversions, funnels), it offers very little in terms of visual Behavior & UX analysis. Clarity fills that gap with session recordings, heatmaps, and frustration signals, so you can actually see how people use (or don’t use) your page.

You get heatmaps, session recordings, scroll depth, rage clicks, and AI summaries, so it is easy to spot where people click, where they get stuck, and what they completely ignore – that last part is genuinely useful. The weaker part: the interface feels a bit old, and I do not find it especially intuitive. Clarity will not fully replace GA, but it is a great (and free) option for behavioral research.

🛠️ Alternative to: Hotjar, FullStory
👉 Visit: clarity.microsoft.com
💰 From $0/month

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

VideoAsk

Most forms still feel like admin paperwork. VideoAsk, from Typeform, makes them feel more like a short conversation by putting video first and letting people interact with the video. I thought it was a genius idea.

I haven’t used it in our projects yet, but I can see why it could work well. If the person asking the questions is the founder, creator, or even your favorite coffee roaster, the whole interaction feels more personal straight away. The catch is that pricing is tied to processed minutes, so costs can creep up, and the analytics and editing side seem less deep than specialist tools.

🛠️ Alternative to: Typeform, Loom
👉 Visit: videoask.com
💰 From $24/month | Free plan available

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

You do not need a giant SEO suite just to find the search volume for a certain keyword, or whether a topic is heating up. For quick market research, I like this cheap DIY setup: Keywords Everywhere for the data, and a local AI coding app for the repetitive work.

Here is my process:

Open a Keywords Everywhere account. It is cheap to start, less than $90 a year.
Get your API key.
Add it to Codex, Claude Code, or another local AI coding app.
Ask the AI to read the Keywords Everywhere API docs and set up a system to interact with it.

Then give it real jobs: compare two keywords, pull search volume and CPC data, or find rising topics in your niche, and the AI will perform the keyword research while you do something else. You can even ask it to create PDF or spreadsheet reports if you need to share the data.

This is not magic, and it will not replace judgment. But it is a very quick way to skip tab chaos, copy-paste work, and messy spreadsheets.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

This is the kind of AI story that sounds small until you imagine it happening in your own company. According to TechCrunch, Meta reportedly had a high-severity incident after an AI agent exposed sensitive company and user data to employees who were not supposed to see it, and the window stayed open for about two hours.

The twist is that this was not a classic outside attack. The problem seems to have come from inside the workflow: an agent with too much access and too few guardrails = an AI agent with a loud mouth.

If even gigantic tech companies like Meta struggle with AI‑driven data leaks, the rest of us need to brace ourselves and use these tools more responsibly.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. Next time: a compact, practical stack for running a tiny freelance agency without drowning in admin.

Cheers,

Josep

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