19. Finding People to Interview

Finding people to interview is not a networking task. It is a market access task.

The quality of your discovery depends on who you talk to. If you interview random friends, generic startup people, or anyone willing to take a call, you will collect noise. If you interview the right people in the right context, a small number of conversations can change the direction of the company.

The goal is not to get many calls. The goal is to get honest conversations with people who have the problem, understand the workflow, or control the buying decision.

The core interview-sourcing question is: are we speaking to people who can reveal real behavior, real buying constraints, or real workflow pain, rather than people who merely have opinions?

Start with an interview target

Before searching for people, define the target.

Write:

• Segment: who exactly?
• Role: user, buyer, operator, approver, influencer, blocker?
• Situation: what trigger or context makes the problem active?
• Company type or customer type: size, industry, geography, behavior?
• Exclusions: who should you avoid?

Weak target: “Small businesses.”

Better target: “Owners of 10-50 employee manufacturing businesses in Pune who manage sales orders through WhatsApp and Excel.”

Weak target: “HR teams.”

Better target: “Recruiting leads at Indian SaaS companies with 50-300 employees hiring engineering roles every month.”

Discovery improves when the target is narrow enough that patterns can repeat.

Warm sources

Warm sources are often the fastest way to start. They work because trust has already been partially transferred.

Friends

Friends are useful for introductions, not necessarily evidence.

Ask friends: “Do you know someone who fits this exact profile?” Do not ask them whether your idea is good unless they are the target customer.

Alumni

Alumni networks can be powerful in India because trust travels through college, workplace, and founder networks.

Useful alumni sources:

• College alumni groups
• Company alumni groups
• Founder communities
• WhatsApp groups
• LinkedIn alumni filters

Write a specific ask. Alumni are more likely to help when they know exactly whom you need.

Former colleagues

Former colleagues can introduce you to industry operators, buyers, and domain experts.

Be careful: if former colleagues like you, they may be too polite. Use them to reach the right people, then treat their feedback as one data point.

Customers

If you already have customers, they are a discovery goldmine.

Ask:

• Who else in your company deals with this?
• Who did you ask before buying?
• Which peer company has a similar issue?
• What would make this product more valuable?
• Why did you trust us enough to try?

Existing customers can reveal expansion, buyer mapping, trust, and churn risk.

Investors

Investors can introduce you to founders, operators, portfolio companies, and domain experts.

Do not ask for broad intros. Ask for a precise segment and explain what you are trying to learn. Investors are more useful when your ask is specific.

Advisors

Advisors can help you avoid obvious mistakes and reach buyers faster.

Good advisor asks:

• “Who experiences this problem most often?”
• “Which role owns this workflow?”
• “Who would never buy this?”
• “Can you introduce me to three people who match this profile?”

Community members

Communities can help when members share an identity or problem.

Examples:

• Founder communities
• SaaS operator groups
• D2C communities
• Finance and CA groups
• Developer communities
• School owner groups
• Doctor networks
• Retailer associations

Do not enter a community and immediately sell. Ask useful questions and request learning conversations respectfully.

Family business network

In India, family business networks can open doors to SMBs, traders, distributors, manufacturers, clinics, schools, and local service businesses.

These conversations can reveal how business actually happens outside startup circles. Be careful not to overgeneralize from one city or family network.

Cold sources

Cold sources are useful when warm networks are biased or too small.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is useful for B2B discovery if you search by role, company size, industry, geography, and trigger.

Use it to build a list, not to spam.

Good cold message structure:

1. Specific context
2. Clear learning ask
3. No pitch
4. Short time request
5. Easy refusal

Example:

Hi Ananya, I am studying how finance teams at 50-200 person SaaS companies manage collections from Indian enterprise customers. I am not selling anything; trying to learn the workflow. Could I ask you 5-6 questions for 20 minutes next week?

Email

Email works when you can identify the right person and write a relevant message.

Avoid long founder stories. The recipient should quickly understand why you reached them.

Track open/reply manually if needed, but the real metric is qualified conversations, not messages sent.

Communities

Cold community outreach can work if the community allows learning requests.

Good post:

• Names the segment
• Names the problem area
• Says you are learning, not selling
• Asks for a short conversation
• Offers to share learnings back if appropriate

Events

Events are useful when the target segment gathers in one place.

Use events to:

• Observe language
• Ask short questions
• Book follow-up interviews
• Identify buyers and influencers
• Understand competitor presence

Do not treat an event conversation as a full interview. Use it to earn the next conversation.

Directories

Directories can help you build target lists.

Examples:

• Startup directories
• Industry directories
• School or hospital directories
• Retail associations
• Exporter/importer lists
• Marketplace seller lists
• Government MSME or industry listings where appropriate

Use directories ethically and avoid violating platform rules or privacy expectations.

Job postings

Job postings reveal pain.

If a company is hiring for operations, compliance, data, sales ops, customer support, or automation roles, the job description may reveal what is breaking internally.

Use postings to identify trigger events:

• Scaling team
• New geography
• Compliance need
• Manual process overload
• New function being built

Reviews

Reviews of existing products reveal unmet needs.

Look at:

• App store reviews
• G2/Capterra-style reviews
• Amazon/marketplace reviews
• Social complaints
• YouTube comments
• Community discussions

Reviews are not interviews, but they help you form better hypotheses before interviews.

WhatsApp groups

WhatsApp groups are important in India but require trust and etiquette.

Do not scrape or spam groups. Ask for permission, be clear about your learning intent, and move interested people to direct conversations.

Local associations

Local associations can be useful for SMB and industry discovery.

Examples:

• Traders associations
• Manufacturers associations
• Restaurant associations
• School associations
• Medical associations
• Apartment associations
• Export councils

These sources can reveal local workflows and trust paths that online research misses.

India-specific sources

Trade associations

Trade associations help when the market is organized around industry identity.

They can provide:

• Buyer access
• Event access
• Industry vocabulary
• Regulatory context
• Regional clusters

CA networks

Chartered accountants often sit close to business reality: GST, invoices, compliance, payroll, collections, loans, and owner concerns.

For SMB-focused startups, CA networks can reveal real workflows and introduce business owners.

Local business groups

City-level business groups, chambers, and local entrepreneur circles can help you reach non-startup customers.

These conversations are especially useful if your product targets traditional businesses.

College networks

College networks can help for student products, hiring, early adopters, founder intros, and alumni operators. But they can also bias you toward English-speaking, urban, tech-aware users. Use them deliberately.

MSME clusters

India has industry clusters: textiles, manufacturing, auto components, jewellery, logistics, pharma, food processing, and more.

Cluster discovery helps you understand shared workflows, local competition, intermediaries, and trust structures.

City-level business communities

Behavior can differ by city. Bengaluru SaaS buyers, Surat textile businesses, Pune manufacturers, Delhi traders, Mumbai finance teams, and Chennai industrial customers may not behave the same.

If geography matters, interview by city or cluster, not just by persona.

Qualifying interviewees

Before booking the call, confirm:

• They match the segment.
• They have experienced the problem recently.
• They can describe the workflow.
• They are not only giving general advice.
• They can connect you to the buyer or user if needed.

A polite call with the wrong person costs more than no call because it creates false confidence.

Build a discovery recruiting funnel

Treat interview sourcing like a small sales pipeline.

Track:

Stage	Meaning
Target identified	The person appears to match the segment.
Qualified	You know why they can speak about the problem.
Contacted	Outreach sent through warm or cold channel.
Replied	They responded with interest or context.
Booked	A time is scheduled.
Completed	Interview happened.
Useful	The conversation produced real behavior, workflow, or buyer learning.
Follow-up	They agreed to intro, data share, pilot, or second call.

This keeps you honest. Sending 100 messages is not progress if only two qualified conversations happen. Ten high-fit targets can beat 200 generic cold messages.

Interview the buying system, not only the friendly person

For B2B and SMB ideas, one person rarely contains the whole truth.

Try to interview:

• The daily user who suffers the workflow.
• The owner or manager who pays.
• The finance, IT, legal, procurement, or operations person who can block.
• A former employee or consultant who has seen the workflow across companies.
• A current vendor or agency that solves part of the problem manually.

This matters because each person sees different reality. The user explains pain. The buyer explains priority. The blocker explains risk. The vendor explains what customers already pay for.

How many interviews are enough?

There is no magic number, but there is a practical rule.

In one narrow segment:

• 3 interviews help you improve questions.
• 5 interviews reveal early patterns.
• 10 interviews can show whether the segment is worth deeper validation.
• 15-20 interviews are useful when the buying system is complex or the market is unfamiliar.

Do not count interviews across mixed segments as one pool. Five school owners, five SaaS finance managers, and five restaurant operators do not equal 15 interviews for one idea. They equal three weak samples unless the idea truly spans all three.

Quality checks for sources

After each completed call, ask:

• Did this person match the target segment?
• Did they describe recent behavior?
• Did they know the workflow directly?
• Did they reveal buyer or budget reality?
• Did they use specific language, examples, tools, or documents?
• Did they introduce someone else or agree to a next step?

If most calls fail these checks, improve sourcing before you interpret the market.

Outreach scripts

Warm introduction ask

I am studying how [specific segment] handles [specific problem]. Do you know 2-3 people who deal with this directly? I am not pitching; I want to learn how they handle it today. A 20-minute intro would be very helpful.

Cold message

Hi [Name], I am researching how [role/company type] handles [problem/workflow]. I saw [specific reason they are relevant]. I am not selling anything at this stage. Could I ask you a few questions for 20 minutes? Happy to work around your schedule.

Community post

I am trying to understand how [specific group] solves [specific problem] today. If you have dealt with this in the last 3 months, I would love to ask a few questions. No pitch. I can share a summary of what I learn with the group.

Build The First 50-Person List

If you cannot build a list of 50 possible interviewees, you may not yet understand the segment or channel.

Use this mix:

Source	Count	Notes
Direct warm intros	10	People you can reach through friends, ex-colleagues, alumni, customers, or family network.
Second-degree intros	10	People your first 10 can introduce. Ask specifically.
LinkedIn search	10	Role, company size, city, industry, recent trigger.
Industry or local directories	5	Schools, clinics, manufacturers, exporters, associations, SaaS companies, agencies.
Community members	5	Relevant WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Discord, alumni, or trade communities.
Review or complaint sources	5	People or companies visible through reviews, posts, job descriptions, or support complaints.
Experts and blockers	5	CAs, consultants, recruiters, IT/security people, procurement people, agencies, channel partners.

For every name, write why they qualify. If you cannot write the reason, remove them.

Response Rate Reality

Cold discovery outreach often has low response rates. That is normal, but bad targeting makes it worse.

Track:

• Messages sent.
• Replies.
• Qualified replies.
• Calls booked.
• Calls completed.
• Useful calls.
• Follow-up actions.

If replies are low, improve relevance. If replies are high but calls are weak, improve qualification. If calls are useful but no one takes a next step, the pain, buyer, or ask may be weak.

Respectful Follow-Up

Many good interviewees are busy. Follow-up is allowed if it is respectful.

Suggested sequence:

1. First message with specific learning ask.
2. Follow-up after 3-4 days with one-line reminder.
3. Final follow-up after 7-10 days with an easy opt-out.

Example:

Quick follow-up in case this got buried. I am trying to understand [specific workflow] for [specific segment]. If you are not the right person, no worries. If someone else owns this, I would appreciate a pointer.

Do not guilt people. Do not send long essays. Do not pretend urgency where none exists.

Interview Incentives

Most B2B discovery should not require payment if the ask is respectful and the topic is relevant. But incentives can help in consumer, student, or professional research.

Possible incentives:

• Share a useful summary of learnings.
• Offer a free workflow review.
• Pay for time in consumer research.
• Donate to a cause for sensitive communities.
• Provide early access if the product is relevant.

Avoid incentives that distort the conversation. You want honest behavior, not people performing interest to earn a reward.

Discovery Recruiting Operating System

Discovery recruiting is a funnel. Treat it with the same seriousness as sales, but with a different goal: learning quality, not persuasion.

Use this weekly operating system:

Step	Founder action	Output
Define	Pick one segment and one problem hypothesis.	Clear qualification rule.
Source	Find 30-50 possible interviewees.	Named list with relevance notes.
Prioritize	Rank by fit, recency of problem, and buyer access.	Top 20 outreach targets.
Reach out	Send specific, respectful messages.	Conversations booked.
Qualify	Ask 2-3 screening questions before the call if needed.	Fewer weak interviews.
Interview	Run the conversation and ask for next intros.	Evidence plus network expansion.
Track	Log response, completion, usefulness, and follow-up.	Source quality data.

The most important metric is not messages sent. It is useful qualified conversations completed.

Qualification Rules

Before adding someone to the list, write the reason they qualify.

Good qualification:

• “Head of finance at a 200-person SaaS company; likely owns monthly revenue reconciliation.”
• “Owner of a 3-location clinic; recently hired front desk staff and uses WhatsApp for patient follow-up.”
• “Admissions head at a private school; public posts mention parent communication issues.”

Weak qualification:

• “Works in startup.”
• “Looks senior.”
• “Friend said they are smart.”
• “Might know something.”

Weak interviews create false confidence because they still feel productive. A founder can spend two weeks speaking to impressive people who are not the customer.

Source Quality Review

At the end of each week, score each source:

Source	Response rate	Qualified-call rate	Insight quality	Buyer access
Warm intros
LinkedIn outbound
Community post
Trade association
Existing customers
Expert network

Double down on sources that produce qualified conversations, not only friendly replies. In India, warm networks can open doors, but they can also bias the sample toward people who want to be helpful. Balance warmth with relevance.

The Intro Chain

Every good conversation should end with an intro ask.

Ask specifically:

Who else deals with this problem directly, preferably someone who would disagree with your view?

Or:

Who owns the budget or approval for this workflow?

Or:

Is there someone who handles this operationally every week?

The best discovery networks grow through specific asks. “Can you introduce me to anyone?” is too vague. “Can you introduce me to the person who handles collections for your finance team?” is much better.

Avoid The Comfortable Sample

Watch for these sampling traps:

• Only interviewing founders because they are easy to reach.
• Only interviewing friends because they are kind.
• Only interviewing English-speaking metro customers when the market is broader.
• Only interviewing users when the buyer is elsewhere.
• Only interviewing enthusiastic people and ignoring skeptical operators.
• Only interviewing large companies when your first customers will be SMBs.

The sample shapes the company. Bad sampling can produce the wrong product even when the interviews are well-run.

Source Mix Quotas

For a serious discovery sprint, deliberately mix sources. A single source creates a single worldview.

Start with this mix:

Source Type	Minimum Target	Why It Matters
Warm intros	5 conversations	Fast access and richer context.
Cold outreach	5 conversations	Tests whether the segment can be reached without social capital.
Operator-level people	5 conversations	Reveals workflow reality below senior opinion.
Buyer-level people	3 conversations	Reveals budget, urgency, and authority.
Skeptics or lost prospects	3 conversations	Reveals why adoption may fail.
Ecosystem people	2 conversations	Consultants, vendors, accountants, community leaders, or partners reveal market structure.

The numbers are not magic. The discipline is the mix. If every conversation comes from founder friends, the team may learn how friends speak, not how the market buys.

Interviewee Quality Score

Score each completed conversation from 1 to 5 on usefulness:

Score	Meaning
1	Interesting person, weak fit, mostly opinions.
2	Some fit, but no recent problem story.
3	Qualified user with recent workflow evidence.
4	Qualified buyer or operator with workaround, cost, and urgency.
5	Qualified buyer/operator who gives follow-up action: intro, data, pilot discussion, document, or paid test.

Track the average score by source. A channel that produces fewer calls but higher-quality evidence may be more valuable than a channel that produces many polite conversations.

Recruiting From The Edge Of The Market

Do not only recruit obvious early adopters. Also speak to the edge cases:

• A customer who recently stopped using a competitor.
• A customer who refuses software and prefers people.
• A customer in a smaller city or non-English workflow if the market includes them.
• A customer who tried to solve the problem internally.
• A customer who bought a solution and churned.
• A customer who should care but does not.

These conversations reveal adoption barriers earlier. They may also expose a sharper wedge than the one you started with.

Interview Sampling Plan

Before outreach, decide what sample would make the evidence trustworthy. Many founders accidentally build the product for the easiest people to reach.

Create a sampling plan:

Sample bucket	Why it matters
Core target users	The people who feel the daily workflow pain.
Economic buyers	The people who approve spend or own the outcome.
Operators	The people who know the messy reality behind the senior story.
Skeptics	The people who should care but do not, or who rejected similar tools.
Current workaround users	People actively using spreadsheets, agencies, WhatsApp, manual staff, or existing software.
Recent switchers	People who bought, churned from, or replaced a competing solution.
Non-metro or non-English users	If the market includes them, do not validate only with elite metro behavior.

The goal is not statistical purity. It is to avoid the most dangerous sampling mistake: confusing access with evidence.

Minimum Viable Sample

For one narrow B2B segment, a useful first sample might be:

• 8-10 users or operators.
• 3-5 buyers or budget owners.
• 2-3 people who tried a workaround or competitor.
• 2 skeptics who look like the target customer but do not feel urgency.
• 2 ecosystem participants such as consultants, accountants, implementation partners, agencies, or community leaders.

If the segment is consumer, replace buyer interviews with behavior-heavy interviews from different price, geography, language, and trust contexts.

Outreach Pipeline Metrics

Treat discovery recruiting like a small funnel. If you cannot reach the segment, that is market evidence too.

Track:

Metric	What it tells you
Targets added	Whether the segment is identifiable.
Messages sent	Whether the team is doing enough outreach.
Replies	Whether the problem or ask resonates.
Qualified calls booked	Whether the right people are reachable.
Completed calls	Whether the channel produces real conversations.
A/B-grade calls	Whether the conversations produce evidence.
Follow-up actions	Whether people care enough to continue.

Do not celebrate vanity outreach. Sending 200 messages to the wrong people teaches little. Ten conversations with correctly qualified people can change the company.

Referral Ask Scripts

Use specific asks:

I am trying to understand how finance teams in 50-300 person companies handle monthly reconciliation. Is there one person you know who directly owns this workflow?

I am not selling anything right now. I am trying to learn the current process from someone who does this work weekly. Would you be comfortable introducing me to the operator, not only the department head?

This may not be relevant to you, but I am looking for people who recently tried to fix this and were unhappy with the result. Do you know anyone like that?

Specificity helps the referrer think. It also reduces low-quality introductions.

Source Bias Audit

Every discovery source has bias. Do not remove bias by pretending it is not there. Remove it by naming it and balancing the sample.

Source	Likely Bias	How To Balance It
Founder friends	Polite, supportive, too similar to founder.	Add cold and skeptical prospects.
Investor introductions	Senior, polished, may overstate strategic interest.	Add operators and budget owners.
Communities	Loud pain, peer influence, uneven buying power.	Check payment behavior and segment fit.
LinkedIn outbound	Easier to reach certain roles and English-speaking segments.	Add local, offline, or operator sources if relevant.
Customers of competitors	Strong category awareness.	Add non-consumers and workaround users.
Early adopters	Curious and forgiving.	Add mainstream buyers and blockers.
Channel partners	Understand market structure but may see through their own incentive.	Validate directly with end customers.

At the end of a sprint, write:

Our discovery sample is strongest for ______ and weakest for ______.
Before making a major decision, we need more evidence from ______.

This small note prevents a common founder error: building for the people who were easiest to interview.

Discovery Access Loops

The hardest part of customer discovery is often not asking questions. It is getting access to the right people. A founder should design access loops, not only send random messages.

An access loop is a repeatable path from one conversation to the next.

Loop	How It Works	Best For
Operator loop	Interview someone doing the work, then ask who owns the outcome.	Workflow-heavy products.
Buyer loop	Interview a budget owner, then ask who feels the daily pain.	B2B sales and enterprise tools.
Expert loop	Ask a CA, consultant, implementation partner, agency, or recruiter who sees many customers.	Mapping market structure quickly.
Competitor loop	Find users of existing tools, churned customers, or review writers.	Understanding alternatives and dissatisfaction.
Community loop	Post a specific learning ask in a trusted group and request referrals.	Founder communities, professional groups, city networks.
Customer-of-customer loop	Ask one side of a marketplace or workflow who they depend on.	Marketplaces and multi-sided systems.

Do not treat every intro equally. A good intro gives you one of four things:

• A qualified user.
• A buyer or budget owner.
• An operator who can show the real workflow.
• A skeptic who can explain why adoption will fail.

The Second-Degree Ask

The best discovery recruiting often happens at the end of the call.

Ask:

Who else sees this problem from a different angle?

Then get specific:

Is there someone who owns budget for this?
Is there someone junior who does the work every week?
Is there someone who tried to fix this and gave up?
Is there someone who would disagree with your view?
Is there a vendor, accountant, consultant, or agency who sees this across many companies?

The second-degree ask improves sample quality because it moves you beyond your own network. It also reveals the shape of the buying system. If every user points to a finance head, founder, procurement team, parent, department lead, or admin, that is market structure. Capture it.

Access Quality Score

Score each recruiting source:

Question	Score 1	Score 5
Qualification	People are vaguely related.	People match the target segment tightly.
Role diversity	Only friendly users.	Users, buyers, blockers, operators, and experts.
Repeatability	Every call requires luck.	The source can produce more qualified calls.
Honesty	People are polite or performative.	People show real workflows and objections.
Action	Calls end with praise.	Calls lead to intros, artifacts, pilots, or buyer access.

If a source scores low, do not simply push harder. Change the source. Discovery recruiting is itself market evidence. If you cannot repeatedly reach the segment now, sales may be hard later too.

Hard-To-Reach Interview Strategy

Some of the most valuable customers are hard to reach: busy founders, finance heads, doctors, school owners, factory operators, senior sales leaders, procurement teams, government-adjacent buyers, and high-intent consumers. Do not interpret low response as no pain too quickly. First improve the access strategy.

Use a ladder:

Access level	How to use it
Public observation	Study job posts, reviews, help forums, product reviews, tenders, webinars, event panels, and community discussions.
Adjacent expert	Talk to agencies, consultants, accountants, recruiters, implementation partners, customer success managers, and vendors who see the workflow repeatedly.
Operator	Reach the person doing the work, even if they do not control budget.
Manager	Ask the operator who reviews the work, gets escalations, or owns the target.
Buyer	Reach the person whose budget, risk, or metric is affected.
Internal referral	Ask every useful call for one specific person, not a vague intro.

Hard-to-reach markets require sharper asks. A generic “can I pick your brain?” wastes social capital.

Better:

I am studying how export teams handle documentation delays before shipment.
I am not selling anything.
Could I ask you 6 questions about the last time this created a delay?
If you are not the right person, who owns this workflow in your company?

When the customer is senior, make the conversation easy:

• Ask for 15 minutes, not 60.
• Show that you understand their context.
• Ask about a recent event, not a broad opinion.
• Offer to share a short summary of patterns later.
• Never ask for confidential details before trust exists.
• End by asking who else sees the problem from another angle.

The best discovery recruiting often starts with people who are not the final buyer but know where the pain lives.

Referral Chain Map

Every interview should improve your map of the market. Do not only ask, “Can you introduce me to someone?” Ask for a specific missing role.

Track referral chains like this:

Current contact	What they know	Missing perspective	Specific ask
Operator	Daily workflow and manual pain.	Buyer, approver, blocker.	”Who reviews this work or approves tools?”
Buyer	Budget, urgency, ROI, approval.	User workflow and adoption risk.	”Who would use this every week?”
Consultant	Patterns across customers.	Direct buyer proof.	”Which client type feels this pain most often?”
Vendor	Tool gaps and implementation friction.	Customer consequence.	”Who suffers when this breaks?”
Founder	Business priority and cash impact.	Operator detail.	”Who handles this in practice?”

This map prevents founder sampling bias. If you only interview friendly operators, you may find pain without budget. If you only interview founders, you may miss the workflow detail that makes the product usable.

After each call, write:

Which role did I speak to?
Which role is still missing?
What did this person know well?
What could they not know?
Who should I speak to next?

Discovery recruiting is successful when each conversation makes the next conversation more qualified.

Interview Recruiting Triage

When interviews are hard to book, diagnose the recruiting problem instead of assuming the market has no pain.

Symptom	Likely issue	Fix
No replies	Message is vague, segment is too broad, or trust source is weak.	Rewrite around a specific recent workflow and use warmer paths.
Replies from wrong people	Targeting is loose.	Tighten role, company type, trigger, geography, and qualification.
Calls happen but stay shallow	Interviewees are too polite, junior, or far from the pain.	Ask for workflow artifacts and second-degree referrals.
Users talk but buyers are unreachable	Buyer map is incomplete.	Ask users who approves, pays, blocks, and reviews the workflow.
Everyone is a friend	Sample is biased.	Add cold, second-degree, and expert channels.
People agree but postpone	Ask is too large or not urgent.	Ask for 15 minutes about one recent incident.

Use a weekly recruiting review:

Target segment:
Messages sent:
Qualified replies:
Useful calls booked:
Useful calls completed:
Roles missing:
Best source:
Worst source:
Next recruiting change:

The metric is not messages sent. The metric is useful conversations with people who can teach you about the real workflow, buyer, urgency, trust threshold, and current workaround.

Discovery Access Assets

Founders often improve recruiting by creating small access assets. These are not marketing campaigns. They are trust-building artifacts that make the interview ask easier.

Asset	Use when	Example
Short research note	Market is skeptical of random outreach.	”We are mapping how D2C brands handle RTO losses in India.”
Interview promise	Busy people need a clear reason to respond.	”15 minutes, no pitch, focused on the last time this workflow broke.”
Pattern summary	Interviewees want value back.	”I can share anonymized patterns after 10 conversations.”
Advisor intro note	Warm introducers need language.	A 3-line note they can forward without editing.
Role-specific ask	Different roles know different truths.	Operator: workflow; buyer: budget; expert: market structure.

For Indian founders, access often travels through trust networks: former colleagues, alumni, CAs, founders, investors, agencies, local associations, WhatsApp groups, and customer referrals. Make it easy for those people to help you. Give them a precise ask, not a vague request to “connect me with anyone.”

Reader action

Build a list of 30 target interviewees:

• 10 warm introductions
• 10 cold targets
• 5 India-specific sources
• 5 people who can introduce you to buyers or operators

For each person, write why they qualify. Then send 10 outreach messages this week and track qualified conversations booked, not total messages sent.

Related links

• 18. Customer Discovery Fundamentals
• 20. Running Customer Interviews
• 22. Problem Validation
• 132. 7-Day Customer Discovery Playbook
• 146. Customer Discovery Templates