Customer Development?
I'm looking to do customer development for a SaaS product I am considering building. As part of that, I need to find potential customers to interview.
So far, I am looking at Facebook Groups, Reddit, and my personal network.
What I am finding is that Facebook Groups generally auto-block posts for whatever reason and the most relevant subreddits have rules against any similar discussion.
What are folks using to recruit customers for customer development interviews? Are there better places to look?
I had the same problem, when I started to build chat-bot for accountants (and I'm not an accountant, I even have no friends who works as accountant) and it was very hard for me to get interviews. Somewhat that worked - just DM people in LinkedIn, but conversion was not so good.
Guess what - my chat-bot for accountants failed in 3-4 month. And I switched to the field where I was working for a decade and things become 100x easier. I knew the problem is real, I knew people who had the same problem (first interviews were with them), soon I found out that cold messaging in LI works great here too. I think here's combination of factors - I knew target audience, I know where to find them, knew their pain points. That really helped that we were able to do first pilots with them manually before single line of code were written.
If it will be hard to find people for interviews - that can be not a good sign. I'm not saying it would not work, but evaluating your target audience for interviews and find where they are and which communication resonates with them is a good research itself, so keep trying but be honest with yourself regarding if potential customers pay interest for the interview theme.