Distribution advice: Online Course Creators

Hey dear IndieHackers,

Hope you're all having an awesome week! 🙌🏼

A month ago, I started developing CourseKick, a platform that addresses online course creators' most burning problems. I'm not the target customer, so my solution was to try to source as many user interviews as possible to get familiar with the space.

My main bottleneck has been filling my calendar with interviews. Once I ran out of Friends and family, I had to get creative about where to find my users.

So far, I tried:

1. Udemy: Here you can get the LinkedIn of instructors. The response rate is 3 in 10.
2. LinkedIn: Although people don't add "Course creator" often as an experience (or do so with wordings hard to target by boolean search), I got relatively successful with people who label themselves as "Author" and "Keynote speaker." Hypothesis: People doing thought leadership are more likely to ship a course. Again, cold outreach was not the best, yielding a 3 in 10 response rate.

I'm highly frustrated, as I assume that if I have problems sourcing interviews, selling will be a nightmare because of distribution.

My next idea would be to create some lead magnets (eBook on creating online courses), and/or start building an audience on LI. However, both routes seem quite resource-intensive as compared to cold outreach.

Dearest distribution magicians, I'd so much appreciate hearing your creative ideas about what you have done in similar situations to get to your customers.

Warm regards, keep building! 🚀