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I work at a large-but-not-huge company and this is one of my primary job responsibilities. I would take what I say with that lens of working in a corporate environment and not a startup, but I have a decent amount of experience in this for both large and small products. Firstly I would say that there are four types of market research: - Desk work - that's doing research at your library, looking at what competitors are doing. Basically anything that you could accomplish with Google. The goal of this work is to understand the landscape, and try to do as much work as you can FOR FREE. - Qualitative work - that's talking with small groups of prospective customers. This could be 1-on-1 conversations, focus groups, talking with professionals in the field, or doing follow-me-homes and literally following people around with a journal for several hours or a day. The goal is to understand your prospects at a deeper level. This isn't meant to be statistically significant, so don't worry about that. - Quantitative work - that's sending out surveys, questionnaires and other sorts of studies. Generally you want to try and have a large enough pool of respondents in your target market such that you can have reasonable confidence in the data that you analyze. For someone with no budget to run a survey, I'd suggest relying on surveys other people have run (there are a lot of them out there, likely in the field you're looking into). - Field testing - this is literally trying to sell your product, or the *idea* of your product (dry test), to your customer target. This is generally the most conclusive type of market research you can do. However, it takes a lot of work to get to this point. Here's a couple of tips based off of your situation, and not knowing about the type of product you want to sell. - You're at University! OMG the stuff university libraries have is amazing. When I was at university my library system had subscriptions to market analysts in many different fields. It had access to proprietary databases. If you're looking at technology, try to see if you can get access to Gartner or Forrester analyst reports - a subscription in the private sector costs north of $50K. Oftentimes universities have subscriptions to those publications. More importantly, you have access to research librarians who can help direct your desk research. Brief example: say you want to build a better lawnmower for landscaping crews. A librarian can help you figure out how many landscape crews there are in your country, based on national census data. Competitor research can tell you how much a comparable lawnmower costs. Price x Customer Base x Frequency of Purchase = Market Size - You have access to professors, so of whom study market research for a living. These professors in the public market could charge hundreds of dollars an hour to big companies for their expertise. If you can get their input for free, that's awesome. If your University has a business department, start there and see who would be willing to talk with you. - Focus on qualitative research to try and understand your customers' pain point. Other comments have mentioned coming in with open eyes. They're right. Don't assume anything, and try to let your interviewees lead you, rather than you leading them with questions. You can use your network of friends & family to try and find your first customer interview list. At the end of every interview, ask if they can recommend 3 other people with the same problem that you can talk with. - Don't worry as much about quantitative research. That typically costs money, and there are likely other studies out there that get to the info you're looking for anyway. Try to do as much work as you can for free. - Create a prototype of what you're trying to sell, and try to get people to pay for it. You'd be surprised with what you find. There's no amount of surveys you can run that replaces having customers in hand. After you get your first customers, talk with each of them. Try to understand why they bought it, what they think of your product, and if they have any suggestions for improvement. Best of luck! More on reddit.com

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I agree with u/thefrenchman27 about needing to be able to write well and excel/ppt/spss skills. Critical thinking skills and a general curiosity is also very helpful. Being able to take business questions and translate them into a questionnaire and analysis plan is very important. More on reddit.com