You’ve defined your hypotheses. You’ve determined what you want to learn from your interviews. You’ve come up with your questions.

Now you need to find some people.

Finding subjects for customer development interviews can be a challenge depending on who your target customer is, but here is a short list to hopefully jump start your search:

1. Attend meetups that your target customer would likely attend
2. Contact everyone you know who may be able to put you in touch with your target customer
3. Leverage Twitter, Facebook or any other social network requesting an interview
4. Use services such as OpenHours.org and Clarity.fm to find people in (or people who know people in) your target customer segment
5. Contact bloggers who have a readership of your target customer segment
6. Join some LinkedIn groups that have people from your target customer segment and request an interview from anyone interested in helping solve some of their problems
7. …and most importantly, ask every interviewee if they know anyone who may also have the problem you’re trying to solve

You’ll notice that several of these options are contacting others to help connect with you with the people you need. While some people may be magnanimous enough to do this out of sheer goodwill, make it easier for them to say yes by putting it in their best interest. Tell them that you’re looking for a way to solve the problems of this customer segment and if they do help, keep them updated as your idea takes form.

I’m sure I missed a few so feel free to add some more suggestions to the comments below.