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April 3, 2024
How to recruit users for research, a guide for startups
Research Tips

How to recruit users for research, a guide for startups

This guide is for startups looking for practical ways to recruit participants for user research. We'll cover B2B and B2C tactics and share tips on how to get started.


For startups, collecting insights from customers is critical (see my guide on why and when to conduct user research). However, when it comes to research, figuring out how to get in front of the right users is half the battle.

When I joined Bread Financial as the first designer, we didn’t have any tools in place for conducting research. It took a lot of work to get our first studies off the ground, but I’m glad we pushed through because they had a big impact on our business. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more at big companies like Uber, and on the B2B side at Vareto. We’ve also seen many success stories with our users at Versive.

So, I’ve decided to take my learnings and create the kind of guide I wish I had when I started at Bread. This guide is meant to be short and practical. It’s focused on the two questions that I hear most often: How do I decide who to talk to? and How do I find those people?

How do I decide who to talk to?

First, write out what you’re trying to learn. This will help you identify who you should be targeting. In particular, you’ll want to decide:

The number of users you need to talk to depends on the type of research you’re doing.

Who you target depends on what you’re trying to learn.

In addition to deciding whether you want to target existing or external users, you’ll also want to decide whether there are specific user characteristics you want to screen for. This might include targeting specific regions, demographics, and other user traits (e.g. jobs and habits). For existing users, this might also include specific user behavior like how active they are or whether they’ve used specific features.

Here are a few examples of how I've decided who to talk to in the past:

How do I find those people?

Now that we know who we want to talk to, we need to find them. Recruiting users is always a challenge, but it’s even harder at startups. At Uber we had a research ops team that helped with recruiting, agencies we partnered with, and a considerable budget for logistics and incentives. At startups like Bread and Vareto, we needed to be a lot scrappier in finding users.

Existing customers

If you’re lucky enough to have a base of existing users you can reach out to, this is often the best pool of participants for startups to conduct research.

External customers

External customers are harder to recruit when your budget is limited. However, depending on the use case, it may be worth putting in the effort or asking for the budget to pay for participants.

Questions?

Research can seem intimidating but, as we covered here, there are a lot of tactics that startups can employ to get in front of users. If you have any questions or suggestions, I'm always happy to chat. You can reach me at [email protected].

We founded Versive to enable teams to conduct user research faster and more often. If you're interested in learning more about how Versive can help you, reach out to us at [email protected].


Eric Li

Eric Li, Co-Founder, Versive

April 3, 2024