How do you GET users for interviews?
Hi everyone! There are numerous articles on the Internet on how to conduct interviews with (prospective) users but I could not find a good source on how to get to these people in the first place. I already messaged a few dozen people through LinkedIn, Twitter, and contacted my personal network.
My experiences so far:
- LinkedIn didn't work so far. It feels wrong to lure people cold to then ask them "Walk me through your day" and the like without anything tangible to offer.
- Twitter ... tough crowd! Didn't work.
- Personal network worked but the problem here is that I could not get the snowball effect of "Can you recommend another person I speak to about this?" and I am now running out of people to speak with.
I wanted to see if there is someone on here who has been in this situation and can share his or her experience. Questions that would be interesting to know:
- How you contacted them, i.e. which channel or community
- What you told them
- How you established the relationship quickly and get to the information you needed
- ... and if you want, the product or service this was about in order to put things in perspective.
If you have a good resource on that matter, I would be keen to read it too!
I tried a lot of different things.
The only thing that I believe ACTUALLY works is:
Find people who really, really struggle with problem you are trying to research / validate.
It is kind of funny, because the mere fact that you will be getting a lot of people willing to talk to you will mean that you are onto something.
On the other hand, if you are not getting a lot of people willing to talk, this likely means that the problem you want to discuss is not actually very important to those people.
So for me invitations like "I would like to talk about your study habits" did not work, because it does not mention any specific problem a user might have.
On the other hand "Hey, a quick question: do you struggle with finding answers to math exercises when you study math?" would elicit strong, emotional responses and those people would be much more likely to talk with me, because it was a conversation about a specific problem that really concerns them.
Thanks for the elaborate response! This makes sense.
Can you expand on where you typically go out and find these people? I know that it is different for different issues and that it's part of understanding the user better but maybe you could see some places work better than others, to begin with.
Edit: I sometimes heard that people found some initial traction by just putting a landing page and 100-200€ out on AdWords. But your description read like you get to this 100% organic – correct?
Well, you are overthinking it. I am literally just asking random folks on reddit.
What helps is if they recently posted some post that touches upon the problem that you are researching / validating.
So if I want to build an app that helps you to study mathematics, I will go on r/math or r/learnmath and look for posts like:
"Guys, please help me, I am depressed, I suck at mathematics"
"I am studying for hours and still can't understand this stupid problem"
etc. and I will just write DMs to those people.
It's kind of creepy, but I specifically look for posts that express sadness / depression / anger.
Which is funny, because I do have a newsletter and a small audience, but ironically my own audience was less likely to respond because - it seems - they currently do not have a problem that I am aiming to solve right now.
Which again drives the point home - look for people who are struggling in your niche.
Now you might say "okay, but you are making some cute math thingy, it's not a <<serious>> product, I can't relate to that".
If I was researching something more typical for IH crowd, say - email marketing tool - I would go to marketing reddits / fb groups / forums, and look for posts like:
"I am looking for alternative for email tool X"
"Why I hate modern email marketing"
"I am failing in my email marketing, please help"
And talk to those people. They don't necessarily have the exact problem YOU are trying to solve, but they are still more likely to exert some effort by talking with you compared to some people who don't currently care/complain about their email marketing workflow.
PS. Take this advice with a grain of salt. I sound like some kind of interview guru here, but I am not. I just managed to get a few solid interviews recently and I am just sharing what made a biggest change for me because I also struggled with finding participants :)
As Arne said, this is gold. Thank you so much for sharing this approach as I have been struggling to find beta testers.
This is gold, even with the salt on it. I have never looked at it this way but it ties into much of the things I read elsewhere (e.g. how Zapier grew) but I couldn’t transfer that to my issue just yet.
Again, thanks a lot – I highly appreciate you taking the time to respond!
Yeah, it's not a novel advice, simply what others were telling me, but it wasn't clicking until I actually tried it. :)
Let me know how that works for you, I am curious.
I reeeeeally liked this answer. IH should have a bookmark feature.
I think that people actually enjoy helping others. I've had good success rates with Facebook groups and Slack channels. Have a look at this thread right here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/people-hate-surveys-but-like-being-interviewed-4af96eeaef
I've even gotten an interview while waiting for a doctor's appointment. A guy next to me looked like a programmer (don't ask), so I just asked him directly: "hey, you look like you work with computers, can I ask for your feedback?".
Depends upon the role,
Co-Founder - founderlist, CoFoundersLab.
Developers - SO, GitHub.
Professionals- Linkedin, AngelList.
Hardware - SO, Tindie.
Design - Dribble.
Taken from my curated list of startup tools - https://startuptoolchain.com/.