Many people running small, new, or startup businesses are a little tight for cash. It’s hard to make ends meet when your cash flow is still just trickling. One of the most difficult, and still most important, things to do when starting or running a business is to conduct market research. Market research is what helps you take your fledgling company in the right direction.

What Market Research Can I Do?

So you’re left wondering, what kind of market research can you do when you have no budget?

The informal kind.

Don’t worry about conducting some massive survey sent to thousands of people and analyzed with complex statistics. There will come a time for that, maybe. But you need to start simple.

What’s the Point of Market Research?

First, figure out what you want to achieve. Most of the time, you simply need to know what your customers or potential customers think about something. How do you do that? You simply draw from your network of friends, relatives, and friendly customers to hold informal focus groups, or more frequently, interviews.

Informal Focus Groups and Interviews

Here are some steps and ideas for conducting an informal focus group or interview:

1. Make a list of questions.

   Start with a small list of things you need to know—I would suggest keeping it to about 5 questions or so. Use open ended questions to solicit explanations of feelings, ideas, etc. Informal focus groups and interviews don’t have a large enough sample size to conduct rigorous numerical analyses.

2. Determine who to ask.

   If you think of the people you know, you probably know someone in just about every demographic you may want to target.

3. Ask them.

   Call your parents up. Talk to your children. Eat lunch with some buddies. Stop a customer at the cash register. Send a simple e-mail to your customer database. Come up with an excuse to call or get together, but don’t hide your motives. Ask for the simple favor of having a conversation about the topic that concerns you. Then ask your questions. Feel free to change the wording a little bit. Take good notes.

4. Say “Thank You.”

   A verbal thank you is often enough, but be sensitive to occasions when picking up the lunch bill or sending thank-you cards is appropriate.

5. Analyze your findings.

   Take your notes and compare the responses of different people to the same questions. You may see some trends emerging, find some repeated compliments, or clarify some concerns.

Be Constantly Aware

Keep your eyes peeled for any opportunities that you have to gather information—you’d be surprised when and where you may get the data you need. Keep something to take notes on with you all the time so that you don’t miss your golden opportunity.

Stick to It

Remember to do something simple—you won’t do it if it’s too expensive or complex. You may start with a 3×5 card with one question written on it and answers recorded on the card in pencil, but that’s enough to get moving. You’ll get better at holding informal focus groups and interviews as time goes on, too. As you consistently look to gather data, you will learn what you need to know, at least well enough to get your firm pointed in the right direction.