One small change to my recruiting method tripled the willing participants among a tough B2B audience
I’ve been experimenting with recruiting, and the results have been surprising.
Recently, I’ve avoided recruiting participants for interviews directly. First, I start with a survey. But at the bottom of the survey, the last question asks if they’re willing to join an interview with me to share more feedback.
This isn’t really a new tactic. Yet since I’ve switched exclusively to this method of recruiting for interviews, I’ve actually tripled the willing participants among a tough B2B user base.
Yes, on average, three times as many people are willing to join even my longest, most challenging interviews.
How to get more research participants without higher compensation
This finding was a happy accident — I wasn’t originally trying to increase participation, though recruiting is always one of the toughest things about research. …
Launching a fee for a service that has been free for users is scary. Here’s what I learned.
It’s a fairly common scenario among startups: launch a free product to test and iterate, and attract as many people as you can, then start charging. It’s never easy to take the next step and charge customers, even if a fee model was always the plan. One can’t avoid the risk that customers will leave. We know companies eventually need to make money, but we all love a free lunch.
Have you ever been the user of a service that started charging you, seemingly out of the blue? No one likes change, especially when it means you’ll pay for something you used to have for free. …
About
