The New Business Road Test, 5th Edition

Chapter 15

Do-it-yourself marketing research for your new business road test¹

You can do it. And you don’t have to break the bank. If you are an early-stage entrepreneur, you may not have the resources to hire a professional marketing research firm to conduct the research that could be helpful in assessing your idea. Even if you had the resources, however, you might not choose to spend them this way, since the research may well show the idea to be a non-starter, a conclusion some are afraid to hear. So, if you’ve never done this before, how should you proceed?

Try the internet first?

Before diving into the kinds of more traditional research we’ll outline in this chapter, you might want to think first about running a simple online test. ...