What's stopping you from talking to customers?

I actually come from an engineering background. About 4 years ago I switched to doing more product design and discovery work because I was coding projects for other people that ended up nowhere because of poor discovery.

My answer to this was moving more towards the upfront work of understanding the problem and designing solutions to save engineers their time.

Depending on what role you play (tech or product) it can feel like they're both doing busy work but I'd argue that it's much more difficult or costly once you start coding because then the cement starts to set.

I agree that it's really difficult for one person to do both roles but there are several indie hackers/solopreneurs who've been successful at it. The common theme amongst the successful ones is that they're usually solving a problem for themselves or have 1st-degree experience of the struggle that they're solving for.

My answer so far if you're doing both research and development as a one-man team, is to not identify with your work and try to be less wrong because if you are it can be really costly!

Hey Pragyan,

I've a couple of ideas. I'm not sure if you're in an exploratory phase or have a product already built. In any case, here's what I'd to recruit prospective customers to interview:

1. Ask people you already know to make an introduction/connection
   When I don't have enough people in the pipeline to interview, I usually ask people that I do know during the interview (at the end of it) whether they know other people who may have the same problem (or whose trying to get the same job done). Then I follow up with them afterwards to make an introduction. You could try this or even just shooting a message to people you do know to make an introduction should work well.

2. Give value first
   When you have a good understanding of the pain point offer something of value upfront before asking for a call. The value could vary from a blog post to a secret thing you know that could really help make their lives more awesome or less awful.

Here's an example of Alan from growth gorilla sending a cold email to Irina head of product marketing at Hunter with 5 minute video tips to increase traffic to their content.

You can then make an ask for a 9-12 minute call to do your discovery. This will work based on our need to reciprocate as humans and also because once they've said yes to something small it's easier to say yes to something a little bigger like a discovery call.

3. Look at reviews on websites of competitor products
   You can use websites like Capterra or G2 and browse through the reviews to find people who are describing the pain that you're solving. Then reach out to them on other channels like Linkedin and relate to their post on the review site. Or even better couple it up by giving value first. 👍

4. Join niche communities
   Use Reddit or other places like facebook groups where your prospects might be hanging out. Since you mentioned it was a niche product this should be relatively easy. Depending on the audience offer them an incentive like an Amazon Gift card as a thank you for participating.

Use a couple of these tactics and test out what works. Don't be discouraged when people don't respond back and even if they don't just follow up with them.

Also! Michele Hansen has a great book called Deploy Empathy - chapter 5 is about recruiting users. It also has scripts so you can easily copy paste and edit them.

Let me know if you have anymore questions!