Written by 
From Duolingo, Typeform, Notion, Monzo & more.
Recruiting users for research is hard.
An email to 1000 users might get you a handful of call bookings at best. That’s 0.2–0.5% conversion.
Pretty demoralising 💀
Especially at early-stage startups where you may not have well-oiled communication channels, an allocated budget or many users to contact.
But, there are many ways to recruit users for research depending on your available budget, time and resource.
You can try:
- Guerrilla testing: i.e. going out into the wild and asking people. It’s scary but free and quick
- Asking colleagues, friends, family: quick & free but potentially not the right users
- Recruitment tools: pay services to find you users or use an unmoderated testing platform (I like userbrain)
- Run paid ads to recruit people: I’ve never tried this, watch out for costs and targeting limitations on ads
- Ask your users in your product: pop up a little modal asking a question or linking to a survey. Often requires development resources or a drag-and-drop tool to be implemented
- Ask your users via CRM: free & easy. Requires an…