[nostrademons]

The difference is that if you do all the research yourself, nobody else on earth knows it, and hence nobody is going to sell it to the highest bidder. If you've discovered a huge untapped market that can be served in a scalable way, you're certainly not going to sell that information; you capitalize on it yourself.

A popup restaurant is not a startup in the sense that is normally discussed on this site - namely a scalable business that focuses on owning an asset that you can sell access to lots of different customers, over and over again. When you own a popup restaurant (or any other small service business), your customer base is limited to the number of people you can physically serve. If, however, you own a software app that is the go-to place that people go for meals on demand, you can sell access to those customers to many small popup restaurants, and charge them a good fraction of the additional profits generated by customers you bring in the door.

That has a big effect on the market dynamics. There's room for many popup restaurants, because each is limited to a small number of customers. There's only room for one or two Yelps, or DoorDashes, and they all tend to get in each other's business, because there's no limit to the number of customers they can serve. If there's going to be thousands of companies in your space anyway because each of you is limited by your work ethic, there's no harm in buying information from a commodity information provider (who, BTW, is going to be making a lot of money). If there's only going to be one winner in your space, you better be it, and the existence of a market research firm who's aware of your market is a good indication that you're already too late.