Article

When You Have Nothing: How to Find Customers to Interview

Jason Cohen · A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) Free Intermediate

This is the piece written for exactly your situation: no audience, no network, no obvious way to reach the people you need. Cohen lays out concrete channels to find strangers who fit your customer, from communities to cold outreach, when you are starting from zero. It removes the most common excuse, that you cannot find anyone to talk to.

  • You can find interviewees even with no audience or list
  • Go where your target users already gather online
  • A handful of the right conversations beats a big launch
Open on longform.asmartbear.com ↗

It answers 5 questions

  1. Where do I find people to interview when I have zero audience?
  2. How do I build customer personas that are actually useful and not fiction?
  3. Should I do customer interviews live over a call, or is survey data good enough at the start?
  4. How do I recruit and interview my competitor's customers without it getting weird or them shutting down?
  5. How do I validate an idea when I'm building outside the big startup hubs and don't have easy access to target users?

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