How to interview a 100+ users in a week
Our team went guerilla last week and interviewed 100+ users in two countries in four days at zero cost. How did we set it up, what were the key learnings and why you absolutely should start doing it.
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I’m Mikhail and I'm excited to share my learnings to help you navigate the complex waters of product management, leadership, and corporate dynamics. Subscribe to unlock the full value
In today’s PAID newsletter:
Fast on-street interviews - how to do them, what are they good for;
Key take-aways from interviewing 100+ people in four days;
Questionnaire that we’ve used for street interviews that you can start applying immediately.
Let’s be honest. We’ve all invented clever ways to avoid talking to customers. There’s an urgent problem we need to execute on. It’s expensive and time-consuming to recruit people. You might not have the necessary skillset or the right UX people available.
I fully get it and have been in those places multiple times. It’s more convenient to sit in the office cube and dream hypotheses about user persona and behavior. But it’s a dangerous path, which only increases your chances of shipping useless features and wasting resources.
Last week, our team went to hunt for users on the streets. It’s not our first time, but it has never been at such a scale. We went to Berlin and Lisbon for four days and believe it or not, talked to 100+ people on the streets (a team of four people).
How do you arrange zero-cost street interviews? Are people even willing to talk? Can you actually extract value from them? How to structure such interviews to get in-depth insights?
Read on. I’ll share my key takeaways and findings so you can easily replicate them. After reading this article you won’t have any more justifications about why you’re not talking to your customers.
🎙️ Why do guerilla interviews?
Let’s start with definitions first. Internally we label such interviews as “guerrilla”. In a nutshell, you come to random unknown people and try to initiate a conversation with them. Guerrilla implies that those talks are performed in an impromptu way and without prior authorization.
That’s what we did. We agreed on locations, split into teams of one and just approached people on the street.
Specifics and benefits
Talk to non-users. Guerrilla interviews give you a privilege to talk to absolute outsiders, who never considered using your product. This allows you to not only calibrate the utility of your value prop but also the general awareness.
Measure sentiment. They are invaluable when you measure the general attitude of people towards your product. After ~20-30 interviews, you’ll start getting a sense of what people really think. Of course, you can dig deeper with the right mindset and questionnaire.
Massive reach. You set the limits on how many people to talk to. Every single person on the street is your potential interviewee. This gives you a massive reach in the shortest time possible.
Close to zero cost. Recruiting a single respondent for an on-site interview costs ~50-100€ depending on the country. Guerrilla interviews come at zero cost. Of course, you can always complement people with promo codes and bonuses, but that is entirely optional.
Helpful in shaping hypotheses for the in-depth interviews. Such interviews are great for exploration at an early divergence phase. Hence, they help to draw context and add fidelity to your existing hypotheses for in-depth interviews.
🧠 What I’ve learned?
Open rate 50-80%. When I first went in the field my expectation was similar to:
In reality, people are way more friendly and willing to share than I’ve assumed. On a rainy Monday in Berlin ~50% of people were open to have a conversation. On a sunlit Tuesday and Wednesday in Lisbon, up to ~80% of people opened up (remaining 20% didn't understand English). The trick here is only to talk to people that are standing and waiting. There’s a higher likelihood they will be ready to dedicate some time to you.