For folks who have seen me post here before, I’ve always been a huge advocate of talking to users in your idea validation process, not just reading forums and communities.
I’m curious what experiences people have had, trying to do outreach to their ideal user/customer profiles.
- What creative ways have you used to connect and reach out to these people?
- How successful were you in finding someone who was willing to talk to you?
- How much time were you spending on this process of outreach vs actually talking to the person themselves?
- What was the problem space / industry you were trying to reach out to?
In my personal experience, here’s a few things I’ve done for B2B startup problems spaces:
- LinkedIn outreach (both adding connections and sending InMails)
- Email outreach
- Finding folks manually in domain specific forums / communities (eg. Reddit, Discord, Slack)
Would love to hear everyone’s experiences and thoughts!
Testing out a new idea: Finding people with a problem I can solve or help with automatically on reddit/twitter/linkedin and then jump in manually to chat with them. Saves like 80% of the time spent searching