Shannon Cooper shared some wisdom today on twitter. I shortened it to fit in a 140 character tweet with worlds best practice noted.
Startups should note that market research is for companies with big budgets. Not us bootstrappers. We can do clever things like run $100 worth of adwords on Google for our ideas and see what gets the most clicks. We can even do a bit of cheap split testing. But the best research comes from being active in market.
This is the key. Do it lots.