How to Find the Right People for Discovery Interviews
Even a perfectly designed set of interview questions produces misleading results if asked to the wrong people. Finding the right interview candidates is arguably more important than the questions themselves, because no amount of skillful questioning can fix a fundamentally unrepresentative sample. Here’s how to find people worth interviewing.
Define Your Target Audience Specifically
Before recruiting anyone, write a specific, narrow description of who has the problem you’re investigating. “Small business owners” is too broad to be useful; “owners of independent coffee shops with 1-3 locations” gives you something concrete to search for and compare answers against. The more specific the definition, the easier it becomes to judge whether patterns you’re seeing are real or coincidental.
Where to Find Candidates
Relevant online communities
Industry-specific forums, subreddits, Slack or Discord groups, and professional communities are often full of people actively discussing the exact problems you’re investigating, unprompted and independent of you.
Direct, cold outreach
Reaching out directly to people matching your target description — via LinkedIn, email, or another professional channel — takes more effort but produces a genuinely independent sample, since these people have no prior relationship with you.
Existing customers or users, if you have any
If you already have some users of a related product, or contacts through prior work, they can be a useful starting point, but be cautious about treating their feedback as fully representative of a colder audience.
Referrals from earlier interviewees
At the end of an interview, ask if the person knows anyone else who might be facing a similar situation. This “snowball” method often surfaces well-matched candidates you wouldn’t have found through cold outreach alone.
Be Cautious With Friends and Family
Interviewing people you know is a reasonable way to practice your interview technique, but their answers should be weighted more lightly than genuinely independent conversations. People close to you are naturally more encouraging and less likely to give critical or lukewarm feedback, which can quietly inflate your sense of validation — a risk covered in more detail in why friends and family are usually not enough to validate an app idea.
How to Frame the Ask
When reaching out to a stranger for an interview, be direct about what you’re asking for and why: “I’m researching how people currently handle X, and I’d love to learn about your experience — would you have 20 minutes for a call?” Framing it as research rather than a product pitch tends to get a more positive, and more honest, response.
Expect a Drop-Off Between Outreach and Completed Interviews
Not everyone you contact will respond, and not everyone who responds will follow through. It’s common to need to reach out to significantly more people than the number of interviews you actually complete — often two to three times as many, depending on your channel and audience.
| Recruitment Source | Typical Response Quality | Effort Required |
|---|---|---|
| Friends and family | High response, low objectivity | Low |
| Existing customers/users | Good response, some bias | Low-Medium |
| Relevant online communities | Moderate response, good objectivity | Medium |
| Cold outreach to target profile | Lower response, high objectivity | High |
| Referrals from earlier interviewees | Good response, good relevance | Low-Medium |
Avoiding a Skewed Sample
If all your interviewees came from the same single source — one community, one referral chain, one existing customer list — you may be capturing a narrow, unrepresentative slice of opinion rather than a genuine cross-section of your target audience. Where possible, mix recruitment sources so that a pattern you observe isn’t just an artifact of where you happened to look.
From Recruitment to Real Evidence
Finding the right people to interview is the foundation that makes everything downstream — question design, pattern analysis, and eventual build decisions — actually meaningful. A well-designed interview guide asked to the wrong audience still produces evidence you can’t trust, so this step is worth the extra effort it takes.
Struggling to Find the Right People to Interview?
MVPHUB helps founders define target audiences precisely and design recruitment approaches that reach genuinely representative interview candidates. Book a free consultation with MVPHUB to plan your recruitment.
Book a free consultation with MVPHUBFrequently Asked Questions
Should I interview friends and family for customer discovery?
It's fine as practice, but friends and family tend to be more agreeable and less representative than strangers, so their answers should be weighted more lightly than interviews with people reached independently of your personal network.
Where can I find people to interview who don't already know me?
Relevant online communities, industry forums, professional networking platforms, and targeted outreach to people matching your target audience description are all good starting points, since they reach people with no social obligation to be encouraging.
How specific should my interview candidate criteria be?
As specific as possible while still being findable. A criteria like "freelance graphic designers who bill more than $3,000 a month" is more useful than "creative professionals," because it makes patterns easier to spot and interpret.
How many people should I try to recruit for interviews?
Plan to reach out to more people than you actually need, since response and conversion rates for interview requests are often lower than expected. Reaching out to 30-40 people to land 10-15 interviews is a reasonable starting expectation.
Is it a problem if all my interviewees came from the same source?
It can be. If everyone came from the same community or referral chain, you may be capturing a narrow slice of opinion rather than a genuinely representative sample of your target audience. Diversify your recruitment sources where possible.
