Market research for small business (without spending much)

By Tom Hill, Editor. Updated November 12, 2026.

How to do market research for a business idea

Before any survey, most new owners need to know who already buys, how many competitors there are, and what people pay now, and the US government publishes most of that for free. Our page on what percentage of businesses fail covers why so many don’t make it.

Work through these steps in order. Each costs little or nothing, and each can tell you to stop.

When to stop: you know who buys, how many of them live nearby, what they pay now, and one person you don’t know has offered to pay you. Then run the ten questions on our home page against your idea.

A local service lives on the households within a short drive and the competitors already there, which is what steps 1 and 2 answer by county or ZIP. An online idea has no county to count, so it leans on steps 4 and 5. A site-based business has its own version of step 5: our page on whether vending machines are profitable starts by asking ten nearby workplaces whether they’d host a machine.

Free US data you can use

The smallest area each source covers matters: a county count suits a cleaning business that drives across town, but says little to a café that draws from a few blocks.

County Business Patterns leaves out businesses without employees; Nonemployer Statistics leaves out those with under $1,000 in receipts, except construction. County Business Patterns 2023 uses 2017 industry codes and Nonemployer Statistics 2024 uses 2022 codes, so check that your industry’s code is the same in both.

Google calls Keyword Planner “a free resource”, but you need a Google Ads account, with billing details entered, to use it⁹. Its numbers are estimates, often shown as ranges. Google Trends shows each point as a share of all searches in that place and time, so it shows relative interest, not how many people search⁸.

Census also has a free mapping tool, Census Business Builder¹⁰, which we haven’t tested. For more free sources, the SBA’s market research page lists federal data sites¹¹, and the Library of Congress Small Business Hub lists free sources alongside paid databases you may be able to use through a public library¹².

Worked example: a cleaning business in Travis County, Texas

Say you want to start a house-cleaning business in Austin, which is mostly in Travis County. Here is what the free data say, next to Franklin County, Ohio (Columbus), for comparison. All of it comes from public Census and BLS files.

The business counts are for NAICS 561720, which includes office and building janitorial firms as well as house cleaners, so they overstate your direct competitors. The spend row covers households only and applies a national average ($187.92 per consumer unit, roughly a household, in 2025) to two counties with different incomes. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a forecast, and don’t divide it by the business counts. Only 6.79% of households report paying for housekeeping services in a given quarter⁴. The ± figures are the Census margins of error.

What this tells you:

• Most of the market is one-person operators. About 95% of cleaning businesses in Travis County have no employees, and they average about $25,000 a year in receipts^1,2. Receipts are sales, not profit. A new house cleaner competes mostly with thousands of one-person operators (some of them clean offices, not homes), not with a few big firms.
• Neither county is obviously easier. Travis has higher incomes, but a similar number of cleaning businesses for its size: about 116 households per cleaning business, against about 120 in Franklin^1,2,3. These ratios are approximate: the employer counts are for 2023 and the one-person counts for 2024. The data alone don’t say where a new cleaner does better.
• What the data can’t tell you is whether anyone will pay you. That’s step 5: ask for a first booking.

Do this for your county. On data.census.gov, open each table ID, then filter by your county and industry code (we checked these routes on 12 Nov 2026):

1. Competitors with employees: CBP2023.CB2300CBP, code 561720 for cleaning¹.
2. One-person operators: NONEMP2024.NS00NONEMP, code 56172².
3. Households and median income: ACSDT5Y2024.B11001 and ACSDT5Y2024.B19013, for your county or ZIP³.
4. Spending: in the BLS spreadsheet, find your category’s row, such as “Housekeeping services”⁴.

The next free step for a Travis County reader is the Austin Public Library, which offers business databases such as AtoZdatabases, Gale Business: Insights and Factiva, plus SizeUpAustin, which “does not require an Austin Public Library card”¹³.

What market research costs

We checked the prices of the cheap methods on vendors’ own pages on 12 Nov 2026. Most of the methods in this guide are free.

Vendors’ own pages, seen 12 Nov 2026. Panel prices rise with targeting, and no vendor shows a price for a local audience. The agency estimate is from Drive Research, which sells research. Typeform prices are for monthly billing. Pollfish and Carrd show prices with a “$” sign but don’t name the currency.

About $100 covers the free data plus roughly 100 untargeted panel responses⁶. A panel aimed at people in your area, and an ad test, aren’t priced on any vendor page we checked. Google’s budget help page states no minimum daily budget, but your spend on a given day can reach “two times your average daily budget for most campaigns”¹⁹. If you want to try ads as a test, Draper’s guide to running ads to test an idea covers how.

A paid survey of strangers tells you what people say. For a business that hasn’t opened, a deposit from one real customer usually tells you more.

Tom Hill, our editor and Growth Lead at Draper, puts it this way: “The biggest thing we’ve learned at Draper is that most people’s first ideas aren’t their last. To be a good founder you need to be able to change your idea to meet the evidence you see.”²⁴ Cheap research is how you see that evidence before you commit money.

Free help: SBDCs and your public library

• Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs): “no-cost business consulting and low-cost business training” from nearly 1,000 centers²⁰. Through your local SBDC adviser you can order custom market research from SBDCNet, which is “provided at no-cost to prospective or existing small business owners”²¹. SBDCNet also publishes free industry snapshots, such as one on pet care services²¹.
• Your public library: many give free access to business databases with a library card. Denver Public Library offers Data Axle and Simply Analytics, and its BizBoost appointments need a Denver card¹⁴. Austin’s are listed in the worked example above¹³. Rules vary by library, so ask yours.
• Library of Congress Small Business Hub: a guide to free sources and to the paid ones you may be able to reach through a library¹².

Validate Your Idea, a free Draper workshop (made by us), comes after this desk research, not before it. It is free with no card²², and it helps you turn the numbers into a list of assumptions and one test, which suits online and product ideas best. It doesn’t pull Census tables, choose a site, check local competitors or commission a survey; an SBDC adviser or a librarian is better for those. Draper as a whole is about 50 workshops through every step of starting a business²³, on Draper Start at US$25 a month²².