How to find users to interview - some ideas
This is part of a longer article, so if you want to read the full post, you can do it here: How to conduct user research when creating a SaaS content strategy
Start with the segment of users that you’re trying to attract. If you’re going after early adopters, you can recruit people from communities dedicated to entrepreneurs, startup founders, technology enthusiasts, and so on.
If you want to adjust your content strategy so as to reach more of the early majority, look at social media groups and communities gathered around a specific market or solution, not around an idea.
The following places can be a good starting point:
- Ask your connections, if they fit your target profile
- Ask in LinkedIn or FB groups
- Ask in Reddit groups and Slack channels
- Find relevant communities for your niche and target group, like Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Growth Hackers, etc.
- Ask on Twitter, based on relevant hashtags
- Reach out to newsletter owners
- Reach out to podcast and YouTube creators
- Find participants who attend Meetups in your niche
- Reach out to bloggers and vloggers in your target group
- Reach out to the people featured in case studies posted by your competitors
- Reach out to Quora or Medium users who are in your target group
- Place your interview invitation on Haro
Make sure to also interview your internal team, as follows:
- SMEs: they can help you understand the market and target audience, the industry and product specifics, the problem that you’re solving, and its importance in the big picture.
- Product team: they’ll help you understand why the product exists, what its benefits are, and why users should care about it.
- Salespeople: they’ll tell you which type of customer is easier to convince and what message or solution is easier to sell.
- Developers: they’ll tell you what the product is doing versus what it could do, and they’ll help you understand whether your messaging and content is on point or over-promising.
- Customer service team: they’ll tell you what customers complain about, what’s unclear when using the product, how they try to work around the product issues.
Trending on Indie Hackers
Be aware of biased users/customers of your close friend circles. They are often not a very representative customer segment, though an easy way to recruit. Tendency to fall into social desirability bias.
The most important lesson here is to constantly validate your assumptions in cylces. Iterative cylces. Thanks @andreeamaco for the extensive list!
Forget about close friends. They will tell you the bullxxxx answer.
Here’s my framework to customer interview success:
You need to decompose a simple “choice” into 3 buckets:
What were the things the customer saw (observations) which led them to believe something (inferences) and then to act on it (conclusion)
Thank you for your article! 2 years later it still makes sense.
I've just launched my app and started doing many of the suggested actions but no success so far. Will try harder and hopefully I'll find the right channel for acquiring users.
Nice article, thanks for the tips
Sure :)
Wonderful tips!
I am in the process of creating a product to help people conduct a better research. Thanks for making this @andreeamaco
Welcome :)
Really nice advice.
Could I ask for feedback on how to connect with business owners for our niche?
At RecoMind we are looking to chat with prospects in the niche of e-commerce with number of employees between 10-100, location Europe or US, selling through platforms like Shopify, woo commerce or similar, with a large number of items to sell >100, with monthly traffic of >20k users, and willing to personalize their user experience offering with product recommendations.
Any advice would be welcomed
Hi, I checked your page, here are my first thoughts: your product aims to help webshop owners or marketers upsell and cross-sell through product recommendations. Let's say your first target is Shopify stores.
Regardless of the size of company you're targeting, since you're going after Shopify stores, it's very likely that these people - owners or marketers - will want to solve their problem (recommending products) with the help of a Shopify app.
It's more likely for them to search for a solution in the Shopify marketplace than to go after some custom product that requires a demo. So you can first look at https://apps.shopify.com/search?q=product+recommendations - these are your potential competitors.
You can approach this in two ways:
If your goal is to interview a few people, look at which companies are using the apps made by competitors. Do this by going through reviews and once you identify a few that meet your criteria (store has US address for example and sells more than 100 products), search for their contact details with a lead mining tool and reach out for interviews. Examples of tools here: https://www.g2.com/categories/lead-generation
When you search for contact persons in these companies, keep in mind that in a smaller company the decision maker might be the end user, while in bigger companies the end user might be a marketer - digital marketer, CRO specialist etc, while the decision maker might be the marketing manager.
Another way to find people to interview is to google queries like "product recommendations app shopify site:www.reddit.com". Read through the topics, see what people are recommending (which competitors), and start conversations with them.
Another alternative - if you can afford more expensive tools - is to search for an ABM (account based marketing) tool. Examples: https://www.g2.com/categories/account-based-analytics
Now, if your goal is not to interview people but to get them on your website through organic search and to make them book demos, you have a few problems:
Like previously said, it's very likely that these people don't want to go through demos if they can solve the problem with an app. For you, this means that you should be present in the Shopify marketplace.
On your website, you need to clarify: what your product does, how it does it (process), how it's installed / integrated, FAQs that people might have (for example do they have to upload product feeds into your solution, does your solution behave like a widget that they can show on their product pages etc).
If you want to attract them through organic search, you'll need landing pages for the specific use cases (upsell, cross sell), that clearly explain how the product works. These will be focused on the problem, so you should target queries like "how to add product recommendations to shopify". These pages serve as top of the funnel content.
If you want to go after the middle of the funnel searches, create content (blog articles/landing pages) that compare your product to alternatives. For example, take 2 of the top rated apps in the Shopify marketplace and write a detailed comparison that shows why and how your solution is better.
@andreeamaco I really appreciate your comments
Here is a great resource on finding "Design Partners", early users that can give you product feedback and potentially become your first customers.
https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/picking-design-partners
Some great tips here @andreeamaco!
I've come from a research background so I know how annoying this stage of the process can be at times, but it is one of the most important too!
When we are conducting customer interviews, we should be not just listening, but actively listening. It is one of the hardest skills to master, but can be so powerful!
Another easy, often overlooked way: Hope on a call for customer support. Give a white glove experience solving their problem first, and while you have them on the line starting asking your research questions second.
Customer support is an area not utilised enough for customer research. Often used to solve issues, rather than utilising people who have a listening skillset to understand how they can improve the business
Hey Andreea! Thanks so much for pointing me toward this post :-) I really appreciate it - it's super helpful.
Do you have any pointers for how to phrase it when asking to chat for these customer discovery interviews? In the past I've been roasted for asking in certain subreddits for setting aside like 15minutes of time for a chat - maybe I'm asking the wrong subreddits or asking on Reddit is just more likely to come off as offensive or annoying :")
Or how would you phrase it in a tweet for example?
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.