All of these are the foundation for user research, but they are mostly speculation until you speak to actual customers.

You don't need a massive budget - incentives are surprisingly low for a 30-minute chat, and you might not need to pay at all if you can just, say, persuade delegates at an industry event to speak to you.

The point is, you cannot avoid having a properly experienced researcher in your company - if you don't understand your users properly, you are more likely to create products that customers don't want to buy, and that is the number one reason products fail - and only people trained in proper research know how to do it well.

I'm coming at this from the angle of having seen terrible research produced by non-researchers - biased, leading questions, unsupported conclusions - and it is dangerous in product terms.

So, yes, do the things on your list - as a highly experienced researcher, they're key tools in the tool chest - but please, please bring in a researcher to talk to real users before designing anything.