How I do user research with no budget and no team

Everyone says "talk to users." Nobody says how, when you're one person with no budget. Here's what's worked for me, well enough to change what I built.

The methods that actually work solo

Five long conversations. Not demos — conversations. I ask about their problem's last occurrence: walk me through the last time this happened. Stories carry the truth that opinions flatter. Five people who match my target beat fifty who don't.

Watch the workaround. The best research is watching what people already do about the problem — spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, manual anything. The workaround is the competitor, and usually the roadmap.

Support is research. Every confused message is a design document written by a frustrated user. I log every question I answer twice; two is a pattern, and a pattern is a fix.

The silent churn autopsy. When someone stops using the product, I ask one short message: what happened? Few reply, but those who do say things no survey would surface.

The discipline

Ask about their life, not your product. "Would you use X?" gets polite fiction. "How did you solve this last week?" gets evidence. The difference between those two questions is most of what I know about research.