I work with university professors that develop high-tech solutions (all types) and one of the biggest problems they have is in market research. I think this is similarly true of many software startups. They can’t afford to pay a market research company thousands of dollars to write or provide a vague, useless report. They can’t afford to pay Google thousands of dollars for fake “impressions” that might suggest market interest.

So, what should these folks do? What is a no-BS process for doing decent market research that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars?

Thanks.

Hmm that's a really good question, I'm going to have a think about it before bed and see if a good night's sleep can help, but I'm not too optimistic I'll be able to write a particularly good article to answer that.

The brief thoughts off the top of my head are that the two options are either to spend money (which doesn't help the people in your question lacking money to spend on it), or to have someone(s) with enough experience in the broad area to be able to combine their gut feelings with some fairly light research.

So perhaps the best budget option would be to find someone you could hire for a couple of days of consultancy who can bring their gut feeling, though a) that's obviously not free and b) if you don't already have the right connection it can be hard to know whose gut to trust.

But it's an article I'd really like to either write or see written, so let me get back to you tomorrow, and if I can't think of enough useful guidance to make an article from it I'll ask some friends and colleagues and see if maybe someone else could.

p.s. Would be grateful of a thread upvote to help get more suggestions :)

edit: Am I right to infer from what you wrote that you're primarily thinking about market research in terms of figuring out if there is a potential product market fit, or also market research in a wider sense in terms of things like understanding competition, figuring out potential pricing, etc.?

More of the former than the latter.

Idea/Problem -> Innovative Solution -> Commercialization??

I'm afraid I don't think I've got an article in me about this, sorry :(

I've got pretty good instincts when it comes to figuring out likelihood of PMF when it comes to products for gamers, but I'm not sure I could articulate my process well even for that one area, let alone figure out how to broaden it out to get to a good guide for tech more widely.

The next few times I'm working on this sort of thing for a client I'll try to pay attention both to how I approach it and more importantly to how my partners do (I'm probably the least experienced of us when it comes to market research generally), because it's getting me down to realise what significant blind spot (relatively speaking) this is for me! So just maybe you'll see a HN submission about this from me in a year...

+1 to this I've struggled with it in the past and never saw a good guide before