How do you recommend researching on a very limited budget?

There are so many ways to conduct research on a limited budget—and even for free!

• Gen AI. You no longer need to hire expensive agencies or consultants to write well-structured surveys. Use AI tools as a starting point and refine it. (See for yourself what happens when you ask ChatGPT “can you write a 10 question concept testing survey that will help me validate 3 new product name options?”)

• Templates. Same point as above - here’s an excellent set of templates (scroll to bottom).

• Online communities. Ask questions or post surveys in specific online communities, like LinkedIn groups, Reddit, or Quora. 

  • One caveat about courtesy (and general good karma): make sure to give back to the communities. Don’t just pop in to ask people to take your survey or schedule an interview with you and then disappear; provide your help, time, and expert opinions to others in the community who ask for it.

• Affordable (quality) panels. 

  • It will cost some money to field a survey to a panel of respondents. Harder-to-find respondents cost more than others easier to find ones. To lower your cost, you can evaluate opening up your criteria to a broader set of targeting attributes and then use screening questions to filter out unqualified survey-takers. This can sometimes cost less than pricing respondents with highly specific criteria.

  • Also, the cost per respondents usually differs across panels and you can hunt for the most reasonable prices. Just remember to weigh this with the reputation of the panel—or run your survey to a small set of respondents to assess quality for yourself. You can do this by seeing if open-ended questions are being answered by real people—not bots or trolls, and by analyzing the close-ended questions to make sure there isn’t satisficing, straight-lining, or no insights at all (bot randomization).

• Free tools. Pretty much every survey platform has a free option (SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, etc.). The functionality is more limited than a paid plan, but you can be smart and creative about what you ask. Paid plans are usually < $500/year.

• Owned channels. Conduct A/B tests on channels that you own, such as:

  • Website: Run A/B tests on landing pages or your company’s website. (Just make sure you have enough traffic or can run it for long enough to get statistical significance on the test. Directional changes are not significant and thus due to chance.)

  • SEM: Test variations of messaging, positioning, concepts, or offers in your ads. You can measure CTR to know what’s most interest-piquing, which will get you very quick results (roughly 2 weeks, depending on your budget). You can measure CPL or another top-of-funnel conversion rate metric (may take a little longer), and you can measure down funnel quality (will take longer, depending on your sales cycle) to understand quality in the middle and bottom of the funnel (AOV, LTV, etc.).
    Email: Test marketing emails to prospects measuring similar metrics outlined above in SEM, or test cold sales outreach emails to prospects measuring engagement (what prompts recipients to engage, reply, convert?). You can test subject lines, content, CTAs, length, or anything else.
    In-product: If your company has a logged-in web or app experience, you can test in there.
    Social: You can test sets of paid social ads, or you can post on your own social media channels for free. Measure which variations get the most engagement and conversion. (Note: the audiences are often quite different for paid and organic social—often your followers are existing customers, and the people you show paid ads to are prospects.)

  • Sales, Account Management, and Support calls: Identify a select few counterparts on these teams and provide them with different call scripts, slides, and talk tracks to handle objections, promote new products/offers, or test new positioning. Listen to the call recordings (we use Gong) or ask them to note how the conversations differ and what resonates most on their calls. If you have enough volume, you can measure things like deal close rate and sales cycle length. 

• Existing data. You may already have existing data at your disposal, in which case you do not necessarily need to gather more information. You can leverage these existing insights, or analyze the data sets again from new angles. 

• Existing customers. Research can be with people you know, and they’re often more willing to share their opinions for free (or lower compensation) than people that you or your company don’t already have a relationship with. This could mean recontacting people you’ve interviewed before, conducting fresh interviews with a different sample set, listening to call recordings (we use Gong), or sending them a survey.

I've already shared some ways that you can be scrappy with research, but one more thing I will add here is that even without some of these low-cost programs product marketing still has access to a mountain data that they can mine for insights. Sales and success are talking to customers every day, product are running their own research programs, support is sitting on a mountain of customer feedback via tickets, and the list goes on!

If you don't have the budget or bandwidth to do your own research, find ways to tap into these sources to get some insight into the market. Even better, recruit these functions to help answer any questions that you might have. Looking for some messaging validation? Work with your favorite salesperson to test it out in their talk track. Want to explore new persona development? Customer success could be a great channel to access that persona in the customer base for qualitative interviews. Just like other product marketing disciplines, those who can effectively lead by influence are setting themselves up for long-term success.

Don't overthink it. there is a lot of free information and data available. Look through patterns in your CRM or call data. join Sales on pitches. Listen in to SDR calls. Reach out to LinkedIn contacts or other internal contacts and simply ask for 15-30 mins of their time and interview them

When I was working at startups, I have done really scrappy qualitative research by reaching out to people directly on LinkedIn and simply asking for their time. You would be surprised at how many people are willing to help and share their expertise (even better if you can offer a small monetary incentive or a donation to a charity of their choice). Conducting as little as 8-10 interviews can help you identify common themes to inform product decisions, develop a POV on the buyer persona, or gather feedback on messaging/value props.

Here is the message template that you can personalize further: "I saw that you are an expert in _____. Curious if you'd be open to giving honest feedback on the product I'm building in _____. I'd be happy to compensate you with a $75 gift card of your choice for your time. To make scheduling easy, here is a link to sign up for a time that works best for you..."

We're currently exploring AI tools like outset.ai to let AI conduct, moderate and synthesize conversations -- will share more details in my next AMA as we're just getting started.