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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

How do you usually find the people you interview?

You can use a platform like Respondent to recruit extremely specific demographics. It's not cheap, but if you're strategic with your interview questions you can get really concrete directional signals with as few as five participants.

Ah very cool, thanks for the pointer!

I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.

If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.

Thanks, but I meant more in a tactical/practical sense. What channels do you tend to use to look for those people and contact them?

Depends on the audience, the not-so-technical marketing term for the concept is a "watering hole".

First step is guessing who your customers might be.

Yep, makes sense, have any good illustrative examples? Thanks for the term, though, makes it more googleable.

Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.

Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.

But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.

Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):

* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd

* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)

* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps

Thanks very much :-)

My question exactly.

Also my question

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