How do you recruit respondents if you don’t have time or money?

Not long ago, I was able to find more than 30 respondents for interviews.

They were specialists from the research departments of major IT companies such as Uber, IBM, Facebook, Amazon, UserInterview, etc.
In this post, I want to share a step-by-step structure on how to find respondents for research quickly and without budget.

Find a community on Slack / Telegram / Reddit / Facebook

There are a huge number of themed communities on these platforms. To find a community for your query — just type the query into the search, you can also use keywords to find the most popular communities for your topic on that site. Or even easier, you can type your query into Google and you will get a list of communities from different sources.

For example, when I was looking for researchers — I first joined about 30 product chats in Slack, Telegram — their total audience was more than 50 thousand, and then I additionally found narrower chats on ResearchOps.

At this point — you need to maximize the funnel of targeted people. The more communities you can find, the faster and easier you can find suitable and ready candidates.

Personalize the message

I’ll be honest — I hate spam emails, and I don’t think many people like it.So just sending an invitation to research is not a good idea. But, I found a solution to this problem. I started adding 4 personalized variables to the message: {name}, {company}, {position}, {context}.

Such a message is more personalized and gets more conversion than just ctrl c + ctrl v.

The most important thing is that the person sees that you are not just a machine to send spam, but a live person who needs help. Personalized messages will help you create empathy and increase conversion in response.

Include the reciprocity trigger

When communicating with professionals I’ve done newsletters to — I’ve tested different mechanics for engaging them in interviews, but it worked best when I did something for them: a small but valuable action.

For example, I needed to interview a segment of startups — I saw a huge number of people go out to PH (Product Hunt) and ask for an Approve for their project. I would do them an Approve, write feedback in the comments, and then just text them in private messages. The conversion rate in interviews was gigantic.

Also with the researchers, it worked very well that we gave them free demo access to the product and offered them some paid features — for free.

And it would work with your segments. Just think: what can you do that’s valuable that your potential candidate will appreciate?

Anyway, the moral is — do something for them (even some little thing) if you want to count on their help.

Thank them

A very important step that some people often forget. The B2B segment is a segment that has very limited time and the fact that they have given their time (which no one pays them) is worthy of respect and gratitude.

Conclusion

Just 4 steps that will allow you to find and talk to your potential audience quickly and without money. In my experience, in almost a week I was able to find and talk to 30 people who belonged to a fairly narrow segment. If it worked for me, it will work for you. Just take these 4 steps and repeat them with your project. That’s it.

Thank you for your attention, I hope you found it useful.