Episode Details

Core premise: for many impact-focused programs, it's not enough to have a plausible theory of change; you also need buy-in from your users. All products/interventions have users, even if they’re not your intended beneficiaries. Successfully meeting real user needs is usually a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for scaling a cost-effective program; users who are bought-in are more likely to follow through with the recommended high-impact actions, and programs with strong demand can scale more easily.

A useful way to think about this is that you want to seek “product-market-impact fit”. This means building programs that users genuinely want to engage with and that create cost-effective impact. The phrase is stolen from Peter McIntyre, based on the startup concept of product-market fit. It's a process I’ve been learning, implementing, and refining through my ~7 year career in impact-focused talent search and community building, as co-founder of Animal Advocacy Careers → Managing Director at Leaf → Courses Project Lead at the Centre for Effective Altruism.[1]

But it's not just important for community building. For example, some researchers produce rigorous work that nobody acts on, because they never asked decision-makers what they needed. Others orient their research around the needs of [...]

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Outline:

(02:24) Why: You have users too

(05:32) How: Find user needs, then work out how to address them through pilots/MVPs

(05:40) In theory

(07:58) In practice

(11:42) FAQs

(17:39) Try it out

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First published:
March 13th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DyncXLQ2ysb9K9dfR/you-need-user-buy-in-to-scale-your-impact

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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