Sourcing emails from IG to do user interviews
I have come across a problem trying to source users to interview.
On the first hand and in my original idea I collated a massive amount of instagram users that were relevant to my target customer (ecommerce/resale power sellers). One problem I have with this is that the vast majority of these pages DO NOT have their email publicly listed and a scraper like rocket reach is not effective at getting emails associated with an Instagram account. This is obviously a problem since I cannot get into contact with the people I need to.
This has led me to the idea that It may serve me better to create a simple landing page which explains the basic principles of the product and collect emails using that since they are essentially an engaged audience who I have on hand to reach out to. This could be viewed as heresy according to my incubators instructor and many books due to potential that it is leading the customer to have a preconceived notion of the product. I want to hear some outside opinions on this from people who have done this before and if you have sourced emails from people whose presence is essentially 100% on Instagram how did you go about it? I'm probably going to test this out with a cheap set of ads and a easy landing page unless I have a reasonable reason not to.
Hey, is there anything stopping you from dm-ing them on Insta or finding them on another platform like twitter or Facebook?
Landing pages work well for mission validation, particularly if you get lots of signups, but they don't really help you understand the user problem. You are right - when interviewing users, it is better if they are unaware of what you are building so you can avoid bias when trying to understand their needs.
Finally, when interviewing users from landing page signups, you just have to be extra tactful when planning your questions: make it clear that you are in a research phase and ask them about their current processes and any past experiences and avoid showing how desperate you are to solve their problems ;)
Good luck!
You don't actually need any tool to use if you're not doing it on a massive scale.
I have written about this topic an article check it out: https://www.peakminute.com/how-to-find-instagram-influencers/
I'll check it out!