1st: Your address book.

The first place you want to start looking at is your address book. Thats a simple yet very overlooked place to start. Figure out who in your contacts fits some of the criterias you defined for your early adopters and shoot them an email asking them if they would like to help you out by giving you 15 minutes of their time. If you are afraid of interviewing your own contacts, or for some reason you don’t know anyone who fits your defined criterias, then the next solution is for you.

2nd: Referrals.

Asking for referrals to your contacts or during interviews is a must. Because asking the interviewee for referrals or introductions is a good way to meet new candidates for the experiment but also a way to break out of the “cold email” situation. In fact, referrals have the highest probability of a close, the lowest cost, and all you have to do is ask for them.

If you are being introduced by someone you have a much higher chance that the person would agree to meet with you.

3rd: Go to the places where these people meet or go.

Sounds simple, isn’t it? This is very overlooked also. Most of the times there is a good chance that the kind of customers you described for your experiment, are already meeting somewhere else. Let me give you some examples.

For instance, if you targets are parents or people with kids, there is a good chance you will find them at schools either dropping or picking up their kids, or at football practice, etc. If they are runners, there are particular locations in your city that are very well known by runners as great places to go practice, you could go there. If its people looking for a place to work with their computer, you can go to coworking spaces, starbucks, libraries, etc. You get the idea.

In general there is a really good chance they are already going to a particular place easy to find and get to. Just show up and ask.

4th: Find communities where these people engage.

If it exists, there is a community about it. How else would you explain this and this.

Online communities are a great way to get to know your customers and how they think about the problem you are trying to solve. It is a good way to understand them and to find information and early adopters since people who join and engage in online communities are usually very motivated and passionate about it so they will probably be happy to help you understand.

The moral of the story being, you just need to find those communities, or create them! Although that last part is very demanding and time consuming.

Also, lurking or posting in communities is not a replacement for actually talking to your customers.

These are just a few places you could look for them: meetup.com, mailing lists, google groups, reddit, linkedin, facebook, etc.

5th: Paid advertisement + Landing Page

This is a very well known method. If you have heard Eric Ries’ talk or read The Lean Startup, you probably know about it. However, the times where you could do this for $5 a day are over.

Competition for certain keywords in most Adwords campaigns is pretty high nowadays. Meaning you need to spend more. Not something you want to try if you are on a tight budget.

6th: Your current product or service.

If you already have an existing customer base, you can take advantage of that by A/B testing some of your assumptions with them.

There are several tools that will allow you to do that with little or no effort. Google Analytics Experiments is one of them.

Just be careful not to end being booed like Facebook.

7th: UX testing sites.

You can run your own user experience tests, either by A/B testing or by interviewing people directly. However there are ways to do that in an easier way and in some cases for free.

Sites like UsabilityHub, UserTest and others allow you to submit your questionnaire and mockups, chose a segmentation criteria and run a number of experiments to test some of your assumptions regarding the user experience of your site.

Don’t underestimate the power of user experience testing. You can find real gold nuggets there.

8th: Cold emails.

Cold emails are hard to write for most people. When you are trying to contact someone you don’t know and get the to pay attention to you it is not so simple, especially if they are busy people. But is it available, if you know how to do it.

Here are some a good articles with some practical advice on how to use cold emails to build relationships with the press or others.

9th: Message boards. (like craigslist)

By posting a real or fake ad, you can get people to give you the feedback you need.

10th: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Although this could be considered some kind of “cold” communication, a very good ways to find people that fit some of your profile characteristics are to use the already established social networks that exist.

By searching and filtering results on these networks by demographics etc. you can find potential people to interview. I use socialbro.com to segment and find people to follow, or just monitor what people are saying.

11th: Amazon Mechanical Turk or similar.

I have a friend who hates the whole concept of the Turk Machine. But like this article explains it can be very helpful if used right.

That’s all for now!

Which other ways do you use to find your customers? I would love to hear about them. Remember to share this article or comment I would really appreciate the feedback!