How to find respondents for customer interviews
Written by Eugene Nikiforov, PM at The Product Gene
Nowadays, pretty much anyone from the tech space agrees that communicating with users on regular basis is crucial for shipping product and features that people will use. But when it comes to actually getting out there and talking to customers, many product managers or founders simply don’t know how to find the right respondents. This is due to the lack of established process for finding respondents and organizing interviews. Corporations and late stage startups eventually start investing time and money in setting up these processes, but the early-stage startups often don’t have enough resources or don’t consider it a priority.
In this post I’ll try to outline simple principles of doing low budget lean customer development. The main idea is that any Product Manager should be able to proactively talk to the users on their own, without having to get the budget approved by the stakeholder. This could be extremely useful in teams that are acting based on stakeholder’s vision and lack data to support their decisions.
Finding respondents if you already have a userbase
If you already have an established userbase, setting up regular interviews with your users could be relatively easy. The main challenge here is to find a scalable way with good conversion to reach out to them. The following ways may be worth a shot:
- Emails — incredibly simple, but usually converts poorly
- Push notifications — converts much better, but has a narrow applicability
- Plain phone calls — may work in B2B
- Going to a place, where you can find your users — works best for offline products
- Popups/banners inside the product interface — may distract from using product
- Messaging tools like Intercom
- Ivan Zamesin suggests setting up a private group (e.g. in Slack or any other messenger) with couple of dozens of loyal users and approaching them regularly for interviews / feedback.
In some cases it makes sense to offer little incentives for an interview (like a discount). For offline products you might need to get creative to find ways to get to your users, but it’s almost always could be done without high costs attached. If none of these approaches works, it might be a good idea to question the value you are providing to your users.
Finding respondents before launch
This one is much more tricky, since you don’t have a collected more or less loyal userbase from the target audience and you have to look for them from scratch. At the same time, not talking to users at this stage could be lethal to a startup. Here are some ideas on finding respondents:
- LinkedIn: although LI became notorious for the massive spamming, it’s still possible to find respondents there. I suggest using automation tools lke Linked.helper for connecting, but making pitch messages personal. You could try framing your pitch around different problem hypotheses and see which convert into interviews better.
- Cold emails: you could buy a ready base with emails of your target audience. If you write a good pitch and the base turns out to be relevant, you could expect a 0.1–1% conversion into interviews. But be careful with this instrument, it’s in morally grey area, plus can mark your domain as spam.
- Forums, Blogs, Slack communities: any platforms, where your target audience goes, communicates, learns, looks for advice or information.
- Finding your audience offline might be the best option for many products. Meetups and conferences are a good place to start, plus the conversation there may be natural and not contained within “interview” frame. The best experience you could get out of it is observing your target audience solving problems that you want to address, using other solutions in real life.
- Paid respondents: there are services like respondent.io, that could attract target audience. You could find respondents there for approximately $100 per interview. However, in my experience, the value you are getting from paid respondents is for some reason less, than from those, who do it for free.
Offering respondents some incentives or discounts may boost your conversion, but I advise caution. If you start offering 3 months free access to the product after launch (like I did when I started doing interviews), you are going to end up with a bunch of non-representative users who are using the product for free.
The rule of thumb for finding respondents is that the more painful the problem is, that you are trying to solve, the easier it’d be for you to find respondents to chat about it. When I was doing problem interviews for PG last month, I had people immediately agree to do the 25–45 min interview and show signs of excitement about the problem we are trying to solve. If noone really wants to talk about the problem you solve, maybe it’s not that big of a problem.
Join our Slack community to stay up-to-date with our product and business results and help us deliver the best product to the market.
