Date: 2021

Background & Problem

I was hired by Coinbase in Oct 2020 to lead its institutional user research function. This space is challenging for a few reasons, but the primary difficulty is in recruiting research participants.  

We needed to hear from individuals who manage crypto investment portfolios and/or trade crypto on behalf of institutions. Think: hedge fund managers (niche), but crypto hedge fund managers (niche of a niche). There are not that many of them in the world, their time is extremely valuable, and–like many crypto-forward individuals–-they tend to take privacy very seriously.

Process

I explored many scrappy tactics in my 14 months in that role, most of which fit into three categories: hiring vendors, building & maintaining a participant list, and scrappily gathering user insights. Here’s a round-up…

Hire vendors to do the heavy lifting – This is an obvious choice, but it can get very expensive, and there’s not just one way to do it or one type of vendor. 

1. Hire a traditional recruiting agency with strong B2B experience like NewtonX, Bellomy, or Escalent. 
2. Hire an expert network like GLG, AlphaSights, or Coleman. 
3. Use Respondent to find your target users via social media.
4. Hire traditional panel suppliers like Ipsos, Dynata, User Interviews, or Usertesting. 
5. Work with market intelligence firm like Bellomy to build a custom panel or online community.

Build your own list of potential research participants – This is a more cost effective way to scale the research practice, as long as you can find the right target users.  

1. The no-brainer: work with Sales to establish a list of existing customers you’re allowed to contact independently.
2. Subscribe to a database of relevant people (in the financial services industry, start with Discovery).    
3. Attend industry conferences. If in-person, bring an iPad with a Google form so people can sign up to be contacted for upcoming research. If virtual, post an opt-in form in the chat windows during sessions.
4. Include research opt-ins within in-product surveys (such as Sprig). 
5. Work with customer experience / customer service to identify potential research participants.
6. Use Meet-up to find social gatherings that will be attended by your target users. Solicit research opt-ins in person or online by joining these groups. 
7. Identify and join appropriate subreddits, ask for research opt-ins. 
8. Use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to find target participants and use an automation tool like Skylead or Expandi to automate research-participation invitations. (This one is not entirely above board. Proceed with caution.) 
9. Use usertesting’s panel management tool if you need something more robust than a spreadsheet to keep track of who you’ve contacted and when.

Scrappily gather user insights – Sometimes the audience is so niche that you just can’t operate within what we’d consider to be traditional user research.  

1. Attend in-person industry conferences and conduct quick-and-dirty research with the people you meet there. 
2. Use internal, client-facing employees as proxies for your target users.
3. Recruit users that are similar to your target users as proxy participants.
4. Combine multiple studies with similar recruit criteria into one research study to stretch the impact of each participant.
5. Attend industry conferences (in-person or online), and infer the needs of the target user group by determining which conference topics trigger the most audience engagement and by taking notes of the topics and discussions in Q&A sessions.

Results

Ultimately, none of these tactics enabled me to build a scalable research practice in institutional crypto. In 2021, there were too few target users, and they were too high-value, to participate in traditional research studies. I moved to a team that focused on retail customers, and institutional user research was sunsetted at Coinbase.

That said, this exercise was a great opportunity to learn creative methods for recruiting participants and capturing user insights, and I’ll surely use many of them again!