37.3%
The Shocked
Transitioner
Operational Loss
"Experienced researchers recently forced into solo roles."
The Indonesia Solo Researcher Report 2026 · A first-of-its-kind look at the people doing research alone.
If you're the only researcher in your team, or trying to support someone who is, this report is for you. We surveyed 53 solo researchers across Indonesia. The numbers are bigger than we expected, and the gaps are more structural than personal.
100%
of every researcher surveyed doubted the quality of their own work
76%
are operating in survival mode, while trying to keep themselves mentally steady.
72%
have never had a mentor or senior researcher to turn to in their career
Solo researcher maybe is one of the least-studied roles in Indonesia. Before this survey, there was no public data on how many they are, what they need, or why they keep leaving the profession. We hope this report opens the door to further research.
53 Solo Researchers
actively working in Indonesia, representing diverse roles, industries, seniority levels, and company sizes.
Structured Survey
Google Forms with quantitative scales, multi-choice items, and open-ended qualitative inputs.
Cross-Tabulation
Frequency distributions and group comparisons by persona, entry path, and industry sector.
Beyond Research
A learning community for industry researchers, consistently creating initiatives to help researchers grow their skills.
Each finding below is the answer to a question we kept hearing from solo researchers themselves. If you only have three minutes, the rest of the report just shows our work behind these numbers.
+67
From our data, solo researchers with 3–5 years of experience reported the highest need for support, even more than newcomers. This suggests that experience alone does not make working solo easier.
76%
of solo researchers reported dissatisfaction with their current working conditions, suggesting that working alone is not just challenging, but often unsustainable without the right support system.
60%
frequently feel stuck in their careers, largely due to the lack of a clear growth path and the absence of mentors who can help guide their next steps.
57%
early-career researchers, who are still building their own research fundamentals, are also expected to establish the research function from the ground up within their organizations.
80%
prioritized an active online community above any other support format, highlighting the need for peers who share similar experiences and truly understand the realities of working solo.
Pause for a second — before the data starts
100%
Of every respondent — literally all of them —
have at some point doubted whether their work was good enough. Junior. Senior. Across every discipline. One thing in common.
Self-doubt is normal. Self-doubt with no one to check it against isn't. That is the single condition this whole report is about: capable researchers, carrying uncertainty alone, because the system around them was never built to hold it.
We assumed solo researchers would cluster in one type of company. Maybe small startups, maybe one discipline. Turns out, they don't. Every research field, every industry, and every company size is represented in the data.
For this report, we grouped Market and Consumer Research together, and Product and UX Research as another category, based on the similarity of their research practices. The Other / Specialized Research group includes social, program, environmental, and other research fields.
Whatever kind of research you practice, the probability that you're practicing it alone in Indonesia is essentially the same.
We initially assumed solo research might be concentrated in certain industries or company sizes. However, the survey shows that working as the only researcher can happen across different sectors and organizational scales. Solo research is no longer a niche condition; it has become a common reality across the industry.
Solo researchers in Indonesia do not come from one single path. Some are hired to build research from zero, some become solo after organizational changes, and others choose independent work. But across these different journeys, the shared reality is the same: many researchers are carrying complex research responsibilities with limited team support.
For each experience level, how long have they been working as a solo researcher?
Before we tell you why, a question we asked ourselves first: if you could only fix one thing about how solo researchers work in Indonesia, what would you change? We expected one answer. The data gave us two, and they correlated with each other.
of solo researchers report dissatisfaction with their current working conditions.
That number didn't surprise us, to be honest. What we found pointed to a deeper problem.
While solo researchers experience different day-to-day challenges, the survey shows that their struggles tend to trace back to two recurring root causes: low research maturity within the organization and limited leadership support.
Some organizations still lack a clear understanding of what good research actually requires. For solo researchers, this often translates into excessive workloads, expanding project scopes, and timelines that are unrealistic from the start.
↳ leads to Burnout
Without senior researchers to learn from, mentors to review their work, or a clear career path to follow, many solo researchers are left without a reference point for what "good" looks like. Over time, that lack of guidance can turn into self-doubt.
↳ leads to Declining Confidence
And here's why it's so hard to escape.
When burnout and declining confidence happen together, dissatisfaction starts to build. Solo researchers become more exhausted, feel less supported, and grow less certain about the quality of their own work.
Over time, this creates a cycle: pressure leads to doubt, doubt leads to withdrawal, and withdrawal makes the pressure feel even heavier. Without peers or a team to help interrupt that cycle, many researchers are left carrying it alone, which is exactly why community support becomes so important.
Same label. Three very different journeys: The Solo Native, The Shocked Transitioner, and The Struggling Newcomer. Each one arrives at solo research from a different starting point, carries a different kind of damage, and needs a different kind of help. Treating them as one group is exactly how community programs fail them.
37.3%
"Experienced researchers recently forced into solo roles."
35.3%
"Experienced researchers long accustomed to working solo."
27.5%
"Early-career researchers starting out alone."
79%
of Market / Consumer Researchers are Shocked Transitioners they used to have a team. Now they don't.
67%
of UX / Product Researchers are Solo Natives they've been working alone since day one.
What explains this divergence? Two things explain it: how long each role has existed, and how big each team typically is.
Market and consumer research has been around in Indonesia for a long time. UX and product research is much newer, it grew alongside the startup boom of 2014–2019. Market research also tends to run on bigger teams with bigger budgets. UX research was always built to run lean.
That context matters. When companies started cutting costs, market research teams got smaller, and researchers who used to have colleagues suddenly found themselves working alone. UX researchers, on the other hand, were often solo from day one. They never had a team to begin with.
Same job title. Very different situations. And as this report will show, very different needs.
They are technically capable, but they are starting to realize that capability alone is not enough. They do not always know what they have not yet been exposed to.
Solo Natives appear to be the most adapted group. After three to five years of working alone, they have learned how to manage projects, convince stakeholders, create their own systems, and make decisions with little guidance. Technically, they are capable.
But their challenge is no longer about survival. It is about growth. After years without senior guidance, peer calibration, or a clear career path, they begin to feel an invisible ceiling: they can keep doing the work, but they are less sure whether they are growing in the right direction.
This helps explain why Solo Natives reported the highest urgency for support, with an urgency score of +67. The longer they work in isolation, the more clearly they feel the absence of direction, feedback, and senior perspective.
For this group, the main root cause is limited leadership support. Low research maturity still exists, but many Solo Natives have become experienced enough to manage it.
What they cannot solve alone is the lack of mentorship, career visibility, and strategic guidance.
They do not need basic tutorials. Rather, they need a mirror and a map: someone who can validate their current direction, challenge their thinking, and show them what the next level looks like.
Solo Natives require a different kind of mentoring from early-career researchers. They need access to senior researchers not just to learn research techniques, but to discuss strategic questions, like: "Is my approach sustainable?" or "How do I move to the next level?"
Supporting this group means helping capable researchers move beyond survival and into intentional growth.
"Their struggle is not about not knowing how to do the work. It is about losing the support system they once had."
Shocked Transitioners are not struggling because they do not know how to work, since many of them have worked within research teams before. They know what good collaboration, shared standards, and peer discussion can look like. Their challenge is the experience of losing the system that once supported their work.
This makes their solo journey particularly frustrating. Every day, they feel the gap between the research environment they know is possible and the conditions they now have to operate in. They are not only tired from doing the work alone; they are also aware of exactly what is missing.
Unlike other personas, limited leadership support is not necessarily the deepest issue, because their past team experience already gives them an internal reference point for quality. What they lack is not basic guidance, but the infrastructure that used to surround them: templates, shared tools, peer input, and reliable systems that made research work easier to sustain.
They need an ecosystem that can partially replace the team they lost: practical templates, useful tools, locally relevant resources, and spaces to ask questions when they encounter situations they used to bring to their teammates.
"They are carrying two learning curves at once: becoming a good researcher, and surviving as a solo one — without anyone beside them to ask."
Struggling Newcomers face the most complex condition among the three personas. They are carrying two learning curves at once: learning how to become good researchers, while also learning how to survive as solo researchers. Each challenge is already difficult on its own, and experiencing both at the same time makes the pressure much heavier.
What makes this especially difficult is the absence of reference points. Without enough prior experience and without someone to ask, it becomes hard to separate normal research difficulty from personal inadequacy. Every uncertainty can start to feel like proof that they are not good enough.
For this group, both root causes are happening at the same time. They face low research maturity in their organizations before they have enough experience to navigate it, while also lacking leadership support, mentorship, and peer guidance.
As a result, burnout and declining confidence can rise together, making them the most vulnerable to a downward spiral.
Struggling Newcomers need a more hands-on form of community. They show strong interest in offline workshops, regular peer review sessions, and even support group formats. For this persona, community is not only about learning research skills. It is also about knowing that someone is present, paying attention, and willing to walk with them through the early uncertainty of becoming a researcher.
Every recommendation below has a source: a specific number, a specific complaint, a specific gap a respondent named. We deliberately avoided generic advice and tried to write each one in a way you could brief a program manager with.
80.4% said they want an online forum, a real space where they can ask something and actually get a response from someone who gets it. That makes sense when you look at the broader findings.
The isolation they described does not happen on a schedule, it shows up mid-project, the night before a presentation, in the middle of a debrief with no one to turn to. A WhatsApp group that goes quiet after week three does not solve that. It just confirms what they already suspected, that no one is really there.
For community builders61% of researchers say they want mentoring. More importantly, 72.6% feel they're falling behind because they don't have one.
Beyond Research is in a rare position here. We already have the network, and people in it who have done this work and are willing to share what they know. It does not need to be formal. It just needs to be intentional. Of everything this data points to, this is where the most change can happen.
For program design76.5% of researchers doubt the quality of their own work, but only 3.9% would join a support group. The need is real. The label is the problem.
Sessions built around case studies, peer review, or research standards feel professional. They feel like development. Frame the same conversation as "sharing your struggles" and most researchers will quietly opt out. The content does not need to change, just the way it is positioned.
For content strategyMore than half of the researchers surveyed were the first hire of their kind in their organization. No predecessor. No internal reference point. No one who had figured out the org before them.
There is no content, no community, and no resource built specifically for someone who has to learn the craft while also convincing everyone around them why the craft matters. That combination is the most common experience in Indonesian research right now. Unfortunately, almost nothing exists to support it.
For content + programSolo Natives scored the highest urgency (+67) in this survey, yet they are the group most likely to get passed over in community programs, simply because they look like they have it together.
But managing the work and actually feeling fulfilled by it are two different things. Researchers who have been doing this alone for years are not looking for the basics. They need peers who can match their depth, and mentors who can push them further.
For program tiers100%
doubt their own work. The condition is universal, not personal.
76%
are dissatisfied with their conditions. Two root causes that feed each other.
72%
have never had a mentor. They're calibrating quality with no reference point.
+67
Solo Natives need help the most. Counterintuitive: it's the experienced, not the newcomers.
57%
are first hires. Learning the craft and building the function at the same time.
80%
want an active online community. Not only a group chat, but some place that a question gets answered.
The question this report leaves open: who's going to build the support these researchers were never given?
The next section is our attempt at one answer. If you're working on another, please tell us. We'd rather collaborate than compete on this.
This report was never meant to stop at findings. It became the starting point for something more practical: A-Lone Researcher Club, a small and intentional space built for A-Lone Researchers who need support, shared thinking, and a way to keep moving through the solo journey together.
A-Lone Researcher Club
Max 5 per cohort. Bring your real problem. Get diverse perspectives. Leave with clarity and next steps.
Dedicated 1-on-1 Sessions
Personal guidance with someone who has navigated the solo researcher path. Practical, honest, and non-generic.
Research Nuggets
Bite-sized templates, frameworks, and practical notes from a researcher who built everything from zero.
The Indonesian Solo Researcher Experience survey was initiated and conducted by Beyond Research in 2026. A total of 51–53 respondents participated — active solo researchers from diverse industries, roles, and experience levels across Indonesia. Data was collected via Google Forms.
The variation in respondent count (51–53) reflects the structure of the survey: multi-select questions had varying drop-off rates, so individual items have slightly different n values. All percentages are reported against the relevant n for that question.
Analysis was conducted using pivot tables to identify frequency distributions and cross-group patterns. Three personas — The Shocked Transitioner, The Solo Native, and The Struggling Newcomer — were constructed from a combination of entry path into the solo role and respondent demographic characteristics. They represent analytical patterns, not rigid categories.
For questions, feedback, or collaboration inquiries: beyondresearch.id@gmail.com