My 2 PRACTICAL tips so far for conducting user interviews

So I recently did few posts about user interviews.

I just began, but I already have 2 practical tips to share with you:

1. Find people who STRUGGLE with the topics you want to interview about.

I initially did broad invitations for the interviews. I just said I am looking for people to talk about "X". This resulted in lot of initially interested people, but most of those did not follow through with an actual call.

What helped was targeting people. Instead of making a general post on reddit, I now look for posts that relate at least in some way to the questions I want to ask.

I just found a great post where in the title a guy literally he says he STRUGGLES to find the proper solution. Unsurprisingly, he was very keen to talk about the problems he just posted about.

Find people who are angry / depressed / lost and just want to vent.

2. Warm up people to the idea of an interview.

This applies if your target niche is more consumer than business based. Regular folks have no f***ing clue what "user interview" is, so the proposition to talk with them for 45 minutes about "their problems" just sounds alien and bizarre.

When I tried to setup interviews immediately, people started flaking on me. That's because they didn't really understand what I want from them / what kind of questions I will ask.

After doing the initial part of the interview on chat / email, people had an occasion to see what questions I will ask and after that were much more willing to schedule an actual call.