Proven Tactics to Recruit Your Early Adopters Champions

One of the most common questions we hear is:

• How do I find people for customer interviews?
• How do I find early adopters for my MVP?

The answer to these questions is: build a trusted circle of champions from the early days of your product.

As soon as you have laid out your idea - it's time to start talking with people in order to get validation.

Finding people to participate in your first round of problem discovery and validation interviews doesn't need to be hard.

Your personal network is one of your biggest assets

One way to start is to look into your own personal network. Your friends, family, and colleagues are great to start with, as they will be more willing to talk thanks to your relationship with them. Worrying about being misled by people who are saying what you expect to hear? If you are following a well-built interview script that explores their previous experience and avoids opinionated questions, you will still get great insights out of the conversation. Most importantly, you end the interview by asking for referrals - people that your friends and family know who are from the same customer segment. This way, you get out of your personal network pretty quickly.

If you don't know any representative of your customer segment - it's time to start building your network. Show up where your target customers used to hangout and build new connections.

Cold calling just doesn’t work

Sometimes, getting from "Hi, nice to meet you" to "Do you mind spending 30 mins with you talking about your personal life" can feel hard, and you may get a low response rate. In such cases, making a small gesture from your side can make a big difference:

• offering to buy a coffee while having the conversation

• a low amount gift card showing your appreciation

• taking them to lunch or a drink after work

• offering a special perk as part of what you are building (exclusive discount or special place in your community)

Different tactics may be appropriate in different case but there are many options to choose from. The underlying theme is show up as a somebody who is ready to give while asking for a favor.

Once you are do your first round of interviews, you have your outer circle of friendly people with whom you already have existing relationship.

These are great candidates for followup studies - people get excited when they feel their opinion is valuable and their feedback contributed to the success of somebody else.

Wondering where to find your first customers?

Go back to the customer interviews that you did and find those people for which the problem was most burning and where most dissatisfied with the current alternatives. They will have highest motivation to try out a new solution.

Thanks to your previous conversations, you have a deep understanding of the customer problem for each individual and understand their personal story. This will help you create a proposal they just can't resist.

In addition, your existing relationship will increase the engagament and the response rate compared to cold calling random people from LinkedIn.

Sounds good, but will it work?

Yes, that's the process we followed while building Icanpreneur and it worked great. From the initial set of customer interviews, we identified and recruited our Customer Advisory Board - amazing group of people who saw the vision even before the product was build and became trusted advisors during the build phase of the platform.

Later on from all the interviewees, we identified the most appropriate people to become early adopters. People who were so fed up with the current state of entrepreneurship that they were ready to test out an early product that still had some sharp corners here and there.

Among many other benefits, doing a customer research will not only give you invaluable insights about how to building a winning product but will help create your own personal network of people who believe in what you are doing and need your idea to materialize to make their life better.

Using Icanpreneur to get to first customers

Icanpreneur is a platform that helps entpreneurs conduct customer interviews with ease according to industry's best practices. The Icanpreneur Virtual Assistant will be next to you at any step of the process offering helpful suggestions, capturing insights, or listening to your conversations and giving you tips for improving your interviewing skills.

The latest update of the platform makes it extremely easy to bring contacts from your LinkedIn profile into the Icanpreneur platform and to add them to a research.