How to validate your idea with $100 or less

Step by step guide to recruit participants for your user research and customer interviews on a low budget

When I first got this idea — to make a customer interview and find out if the product I was about to build actually solved somebody’s problem — it was 3 years ago. My experience was pretty sad. I searched and searched, and searched. And found nothing that could help me with running this experiment on a low budget.

I could probably hire a marketing agency. But I imagined no one would rush to do all the heavy lifting for $200–300 I was inclined to spend. Online survey market players (like SurveyMonkey) offered access to their panels — but it was not for interviews, it was for surveys. In case you’re not sure about the difference: the survey is a set of questions with pre-defined answers to choose from (pretty often, it’s something like “How would you rate our service on a scale from 1 to 5?”). When the interview is an open conversation between you (an interviewer) and a person who has the problem you’re solving with your product or you think they do). At an early stage, while you haven’t built anything yet and about the define the core features of your MVP or just validating your idea, surveys are pretty much useless. What to rate if there’s no product yet? What you need…