There is a much higher effort way to find participants for user research. Consider becoming a subject matter expert in whatever your product does and starting a blog, newsletter, Facebook group, or email list. This is a method I call audience building, and it's useful beyond user research, since these people can become your early adopters.

Mattermark is a great example of this. Danielle Morrill started the company with a series of interesting blog posts on the subject of startup funding. She continues to give away some of the content for free to build an audience while she charges for access to more data.

Once you've started creating content, reach out to important people in the space and ask to interview them for your blog. Use this as a way to both get early adopters and build an audience that you can reach out to for user research participants.

For example, if you're creating a product for tax preparers, create a blog about tax preparation techniques, and include some profiles of local tax preparers. Call people you'd like to interview for research purposes and interview them for the blog first. It helps create good relationships, and you can later go back to these folks for further research purposes.

Again, this is not the easiest way to find research participants! But sometimes extraordinary measures are necessary if you're going to find very specific types of people.

Pros:

• Audience building helps you build relationships and get potential customers for your eventual product, especially in the B2B space.

Cons:

• This is probably the highest effort method of recruiting.