HN Explorer

Paying users/potential to talk to you?

10 points by ky0ung ↗ HN
Anybody have experience here? Obviously talking to your users is critical to understanding a problem space and what to build. But getting a hold of a large enough of potential users is a pain...is that pain worth paying for? I was thinking of paying a $50 consulting fee for 30 minute zoom for example.

10 comments

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solardev
Are you aware of services like https://www.usertesting.com/ and https://www.userinterviews.com/ that help connect you to research participants?
ky0ung
Thanks. Pretty interesting, but are the users they source mass market folks or bespoke? Can't seem to figure it out on their website. curious because if my startup solution is highly specialized, getting feedback from Joe won't provide insights.
shipwright
I know someone who is on the second platform, they're labeled B2B professionals and can be filtered to your liking- the rate is between 70 and 160 $/hr which does fall within the initially mentioned budget it seems :)
ipaddr
That's why paid surveys exist. The in person variety can be structured into a 30 minute open conversation. Select a few random existing users and offer them the opportunity for a 5 minute call and with the possibility of 50 for 30. Then you can preselect the people you want to target based on their prescreen
mitchbob
Paying participants is standard practice for user research. You're showing that you value their time. If you don't have ready access to the kinds of participants you looking for, in most metropolitan areas around the world there are market research films that can find suitable participants and help you decide what's appropriate to pay them. You want the incentive to be high enough that you're not missing out on great people, but not so high that they're only doing it for the money.
ky0ung
thank you. do you happen to know the rate that they charge for the participant + the research firm's fee on average?
mitchbob
Both depend on how hard it is to find the people you're looking for; there are no hard and fast rules. For a study I did with C-level executives at modestly sized companies, the incentive was US$500 for 45 minutes, and I believe the market research firm got at least US$300 for each qualified participant it recruited. For easy to find consumers, $50/hour each for the incentive and $100 each for recruiting might be plenty. For the incentive, you need to ask: what would a really well qualified participant expect to get in exchange for the time they're giving you? And different markets will have different costs; NYC will almost certainly be more expensive than Chattanooga for both incentives and recruiting.

Market research firms use a screening questionnaire to find participants with the right qualifications, and writing a good screener takes some experience. If you're new to this, you may want to reach out to someone who's done it before.

bhag2066
Jason Cohen from WP Engine did this to get his first customers. There's a write up about it on LinkedIn (I think) if you can find it.

Also, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson used the same trick to sell payment services to local retailers. As soon as he entered a store, he offered $100 to shop owners for their time to hear the sales pitch. It lowered barriers and in the end each prospect was just looking for an end to their problems, with no more of the broken promises and over promises he got from other providers. He made sales, and learned why customers buy.

WP Engine now does over $100M in sales per year, and Bryan Johnson sold Braintree to PayPal for $800M.

hasoleju
In my last job we regularly talked to users for $100 for a 1 hour interview and user test.

The money offer helped a lot to recruit participants because with this treat it was more easy for colleagues to advertise the interview with friends and family.

Using friends and family as a lead is always most effective.