Ask HN: How to get people to talk to you?

Getting feedback and iterating is well understand to be important for getting a product to success. It relies on taking to industry people, potential and current customers and your network. Yet in my experience getting people to talk is outrageously difficult. I’m starting to believe there is a phenomena of deep fatigue around responding to anyone about anything.

By talk I mean respond in anyway: email, social media etc.

There are three groups that I expect to have different success rates:

1. Cold outreach. I expected this group to be the toughest and it is tough. I’ve discovered that even if you only reach out after extensively researching a person and know they will have at least minimal interest in the subject, don’t expect a response, like almost ever to any question (remember this is not sales, just an ask for a question or feed back). Some business books suggest if you just reach out people will be happy to talk. Nonsense in my experience.

2. Users of the product. You have a customer using the product but want to find out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Or you have a user who spent several hours using the product but hasn’t been back for a while. You want to know why. My expectation was that these people would be more keen to talk but the response rate may actually be worse than the cold outreach.

3. Your LinkedIn and direct social media contacts. This group includes people you have worked with in person, sometimes for several years. Not friends or family but certainly well known colleagues who definitely know who you are, what your face looks like, your voice, what you like to get for lunch. Expectation is these people will definitely talk. This one is the biggest shocker. They don’t! They ignore messages as if they don’t even know you.

Anyone else seeing this? Have you discovered you were making a big mistake with your approach and changed this up? We have more ways to communicate than ever but no one’s talking.