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:

• How many people do I need to talk to?
• Should I target existing or external users?
• What other characteristics should I screen for?

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

• Qualitative research (e.g., interviews) can help you uncover deep insights into user behavior and preferences. In my experience, qualitative research is typically the best method to answer product questions. It’s useful for problem definition and when you’re exploring new features or designs. You typically only need a small sample size to uncover insights (5-10 participants).
• Quantitative research (e.g., surveys) can help you measure and generalize findings to a larger population. This can be useful in validating and quantifying hypotheses and user trends. Depending on your total user base, you’ll want a larger sample size (100+ participants).

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

• Existing users are best if you’re asking questions that require participants to have experience with your product, such as if you’re trying to gather product feedback or test a feature you'll launch to existing users.
• External participants are best if you want to collect unbiased feedback from users who aren’t familiar with your product (e.g. testing user onboarding flows) or if you want to understand a customer group you don’t serve today.

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:

• At Bread Financial, when we were investigating how we could make improvements to our loan repayment flow, we conducted interviews with 5-10 existing users who had active loans where they had made at least one payment.
• When we wanted to test new designs for our checkout flow, we conducted usability tests with 5-10 external users who were US-based online shoppers within our target income range.
• At Uber, when we wanted to understand how to improve restaurant to delivery handoff, we picked a mix of restaurant types across 3 unique cities and conducted interviews on site at those restaurants so we could observe the handoff process.

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.

• For B2B with Enterprise and Mid-Market customers, ask your customer success team to set up research sessions with customers. B2B customers are often very happy to share feedback and test out new features. We relied on this at both Vareto and Bread. Ideally, you’ll want to set these up as dedicated research interviews but sometimes we included them in existing customer check-ins.
• For B2C or B2B for smaller businesses, ask your analytics or customer support teams to help you filter and pull customer emails. You can then reach out to them over email with a survey or request for an interview. You’ll likely want to incentivize interviews with a gift card and surveys with a raffle. At Bread, we pulled customer emails from our database, and at Uber, our analytics team helped us create a list.
• Another option is to recruit directly from your app or website. You can embed surveys, like Versive’s, directly in your app to target customers.
• You can also establish customer advisory boards or groups of beta users. These groups of loyal customers and early adopters can be relied on for quick and regular feedback. You’ll just want to make sure that the group is representative of who you want to test with.

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.

• For an all-in-one solution, use research tools with built-in panels like Qualtrics, UserTesting, and SurveyMonkey. Versive is integrated with multiple B2C and B2B panels and allows you to conduct both surveys and AI-moderated interviews with external participants.
• Use panel providers like Respondent, Cint, NewtonX, and GLG to find participants. These panels are more expensive than DIY options (especially for specialized B2B participants) but they do the hard work of finding and filtering participants for you.
• You can also get scrappy and try to recruit your own participants with tools like Mechanical Turk or by placing search and social ads. For B2B, you can also do some prospecting yourself by reaching out to target users directly on LinkedIn or using sales tools like Apollo.io.
• You can also tap into your own network and online communities. Ask your team to refer target participants they know, post in Slack communities and Discord channels, and share your studies on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit.
• For B2B, you can also ask to sit in on sales calls. Sales discovery calls are a lot like user interviews, they are focused on asking customers questions to better understand their needs. This was a useful source of research for us at Vareto.
• Finally, if you have the budget, you can hire agencies to conduct research for you. Most agencies work with panels and can help you recruit participants. Plus, they’ll help you design, conduct, and analyze your research. This can be expensive ($10k+ per project) but allows you to outsource the work and expertise. We used agencies for select projects at Uber.

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, Co-Founder, Versive

April 3, 2024