Had a few customer interviews today. Felt like blogging.

I'm looking into problems in the job searching space. This week in order to find customers, I used the Airbnb and Uber alumni directory to cold call a bunch of people, as well as Linkedin. Here's what I sent them:

"Hi <redacted>,

I’m an Indie Hacker that makes helpful tools to for software engineers on the job search like you, do you have 30 min - 1 hour to talk to me about problems that you’ve had and services that you’ve used during your search so far? No hard feelings if you're too busy, my job searches have been ridiculously stressful and that was before a killer virus took over the world :).

Sincerely,
Hide"
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Tried to keep it light and humorous but no hits :(.

Sent about 20 emails or so, aimed at a large variety of different software engineers in terms of age, gender, experience, bootcamp vs CS degree, nationality. Mainly used Linkedin to determine all these things. Used their resume if it was posted.

Later on I sent Linkedin messages to a bunch of connections (around 20). Some context, most I don't know personally and just randomly connected with. Here's the template I used:

"Hey <redacted>,

Could I ask for your help? I recently left Instacart to pursue a dream of working for myself. My goal is to build an online business in the job search space.

My plan is to find a niche in job searching where I can make software engineers' lives awesome. Hopefully once I can do this at a high level I can start to build a business around it. To do that I need to form 1 on 1 relationships with my potential customers and create a feedback loop where I’m listening to their problems, serving them solutions, and gauging responses. My current obstacle is that I’m struggling to find people who are job searching and connecting with them. Though there are plenty of job seekers now, that information usually isn’t visible on Linkedin and I would have to know each person as a friend.

I was hoping that you could connect me with software engineers in your network that are currently job searching and open to sharing problems that they’ve had? Once I talk to enough people and have an understanding of their problems, I can start coming up with solutions and services for them to try."
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Cringing a bit from that now, they weren't good messages, especially after reading this today: https://leanb2bbook.com/blog/b2b-customer-interviews-with-cold-emails/

I think I see a few problems with this:

• either I gave not enough or too much information.
• I made it about me, I should've talked more about their expertise.
• It basically implies I want to sell them something and reading both emails now, it's not clear how any exchange with me benefits them in any way.
• I did personalize the messages a bit, but more or less used the same templates.
• There's way more but I don't want to focus on this right now b/c I'm using a different strategy to get interviews that works much better.
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I tried a different strategy after this, talked to friends about job searching and surprisingly got a decent amount of info. Then I would ask if they could introduce me to people who are currently job searching or just finished. Currently I've done 3 in the past 2 days, need to do way more but I'm starting to get a better understanding of their problems already. Technically these interviews don't really count b/c they're friends and they won't give me the best unbiased data, but it's nice to get some traction. Also I always ask at the end if they know anyone else in the job search as a way to get more leads. Have several referrals already.

Few concerns I've had:

• I haven't really heard any big blockers in anyone's process yet, so no obvious problems.
• No one's really tried to solve any solution to any problem they've had either, which either means there's no problems significant enough, or the 3 that I've interviewed aren't early adopters.
• There was 1 problem that my friend had, a really great one. It was lack of info around culture fit so I just linked him keyvalues.com and he said thank you so much haha. I guess Lynne beat me to it.

To the people reading this, thank you for lending me your time. And also, what does it look like when you're customer interviewing someone and you realize they might actually be an early adopter in your problem/solution? How many do you need (# people like this/total # people you interview) to realize there may be opportunity here?