Last Friday, I posted this tweet (is it still called tweet on X?), I wasn't trying to boast about my progress, to most the numbers aren't impressive but to me when I was thinking about the interviews I had done and the ones to come, I was hit with a strong rush of accomplishment.
2 weeks ago this challenge was just an idea that I hastily wrote down in my notes app, and now in such a short period, I've surprised myself with what I thought was possible.
The crazy thing (to me) is that it's just so easy to accomplish.
The only task I do every day is to find 3 people and reach out to them to see if they would be interested in being interviewed.
Most would have waited till the end of the 100 days to share something like this, but I figured 100 days still feels like quite a bit of time, it's significantly easier to feel motivated if you can see it's only been 2 weeks.
If you're considering trying something new this year, set yourself a 2-week challenge!
100 Interviews in 100 Days Challenge: Week 3
Alright, to keep these brief, I will try to share a shorter update each week.
Things have been moving quickly... perhaps too quickly, by my original estimation I should have booked ~16 interviews by now, but I've already overshot this with 27 interviews booked, that's over a week ahead of schedule!
There are a few factors that I believe have led to this:
- I shared last week's post on Linkedin and X, this resulted in 10 people reaching out who were keen to be interviewed.
- Alongside these inbound messages I've still consistently been reaching out to 3 people per day and the conversion rate on these messages has been surprisingly high with 56% of people whom I reach out to booking interviews. I assume the reason for this is that I have a strong relationship with most of these people.
The first 12 interviews complete
Over the last 12 interviews here are a few of the problems I've heard during these interviews. It's easy to start thinking of solutions and miss important information, but I found the more interviews I did, the better I got at listening and diving deeper into the problems.
- A recruiter's biggest pain point in their recruitment process is when a client doesn't involve all the people who will be involved in the hiring process upfront, leading to eventual misalignment on the desired candidate they're looking for and not making the hire, losing the recruiter time and money.
- A office manager of a growing manufacturing company is constantly running out of space for people and equipment.
- A scrum master struggles to keep up the team's performance when their team goals compete with the team leads.
- A content marketer spends most of their time finding interesting stories but struggle to get their team to share leads that could become stories.
"I've started looking at everyone's calendars on a Monday to see what interesting people they're talking to for story ideas."
– Interviewee
It's still too early to see common themes but with each interview, I'm finding that I'm getting better and better at asking questions that lead to some of my favourite insights so far.
I'll share the questions I've been using next week, I have a few variations I want to try out first
Narrowing down
When I started, I had no criteria on who I was going to contact, I didn't want to create any unnecessary difficulty in those first few days, but now 10+ interviews in, I'm ready to start tweaking the formula.
Cutting daily outreach from 3 to 2 people per day
Currently, my conversion rate from initial message to booked interview is 56% which means I'm booking more interviews than I expected. But having this many interviews in such a short period is not sustainable, (especially with a full-time job) and I'm worried the quality of interviews will drop off dramatically as well. So from today onwards I'm only reaching out to 2 people per day (14 per week).
Narrowing down my target audience
An observation I had from my interviews is that because most of them have been with people in vastly different industries from each other, it's made it difficult to see common themes between the interviews. In 2 of my interviews, the people shared a common background which made the insights feel as though they were building off each other in my mind, forming better conclusions together than from each interview by themselves.
From that insight, I'm going to trial a 2-week sprint and narrow it down to 4 different groups, reaching out to 7 people from each.
The groups are:
- Real Estate & Property Managers
- Accountants
- Lawyers
- Recruiters
I chose these groups because they were the industries I know nothing about, I'm going to be approaching them with completely fresh eyes and with some very dumb questions to help to get to speed with these industries.
If you or someone you know works in one of those industries, send me an email, I would love to chat with you ryan.walkerz46@gmail.com
Thanks again for reading!