The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

by Rob Fitzpatrick

They use heavy-handed questions like “do you think it’s a good idea” and shatter their prize.

The advice that you “should talk to customers” is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. It’s like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to “just be cooler.”

The saddest thing that can happen to a startup is for nobody to care when it disappears. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.

For the most part, I'm assuming you already agree that talking to customers is a good idea. I’m not trying to convince you again, so this book is more “how” than “why”.

But collecting a fistful of false positives is like convincing a drunk he’s sober: not an improvement.

The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and world views.

That’s kind of weird, right? We find out if people care about what we’re doing by never mentioning it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions. Doing this is the easiest (and biggest) improvement you can make to your customer conversations.

Talk about their life instead of your idea Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future Talk less and listen more

Rule of thumb: People will lie to you if they think it’s what you want to hear.

The value comes from understanding why they want these features. You don’t want to just collect feature requests. You aren’t building the product by committee. But the motivations and constraints behind those requests are critical.

Rule of thumb: You're shooting blind until you understand their goals.

Get as close to the real action as you can. Seeing it first hand provides unique insight into murky situations. But if you can’t get in there, asking them to talk you through the last time it happened is still a huge help.

Rule of thumb: If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) yours.

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution. Once you’ve taken the leap, you confirm that it’s correct (and refine it) through Commitment & Advancement, which we’ll look at in Chapter 5.

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

Imp

It could happen because you got excited and started pitching;

With the exception of industry experts who have built very similar businesses, opinions are worthless. You want facts and commitments, not compliments.

Remember though: you don’t need to end up with what you wanted to hear in order to have a good conversation. You just need to get to the truth. Here’s a good conversation with a solid negative result.

Ignoring compliments should be easy, but it’s not. We crave validation and, as such, are often tricked into registering compliments as reliable data instead of vacuous fibs.

Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save him? How would it fit into his life? What else has he tried? If you don’t know, then you’ve got a compliment instead of real data.

Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.

When someone starts talking about what they “always” or “usually” or “never” or “would” do, they are giving you generic and hypothetical fluff. Ask good questions that obey The Mom Test to anchor them back to specifics in the past. Ask when it last happened or for them to talk you through it. Ask how they solved it and what else they tried.

But folks are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the future.

The mistake is in valuing the answers, not in asking the questions.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

Them: “I’ll do it next time.” Not a real problem.

You can’t help but laugh when you overhear these exchanges. “Someone should definitely make an X!” “Have you looked for an X?” “No, why?” “There are like 10 different kinds of X.” “Well, I didn't really need it anyway.”

To move toward this truth, you just need to reject their generic claims, incidental complaints, and fluffy promises. Instead, anchor them on the life they already lead and the actions they’re already taking.

Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.

Consider how much easier our lives would have been if we’d understood the motivation behind the request.

When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause.

Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? Dig.

Digging into a signal is basically just giving them permission to do a brain dump.

Rule of thumb: Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.

Accidental approval-seeking is what I call “The Pathos Problem.” It happens when you expose your ego, leading people to feel they ought to protect you by saying nice things.

Once someone detects that your ego is on the line, they’ll give you fluffy mis-truths and extra compliments. Disregard that data and use The Mom Test to re-focus on the person, their life, and their goals. Folks tend not to lie about specific stuff that’s already happened, regardless of your ego.

In short, remember that compliments are worthless and people’s approval doesn’t make your business better. Keep your idea and your ego out of the conversation until you’re ready to ask for commitments.

If you slip into pitch mode, just apologise. You’re excited about your idea. That’s good! Otherwise you wouldn’t have taken this crazy leap in the first place.

You: “Whoops—I just slipped into pitch mode. I’m really sorry about that—I get excited about these things. Can we jump back to what you were just saying?

You can’t learn anything useful unless you’re willing to spend a few minutes shutting up (even if you have something really smart to say).

Rule of thumb: The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.

Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.

Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.

One of the reasons we avoid important question is because asking them is scary. It can bring us to the unsettling realisation that our beloved idea is fundamentally flawed.

Learning that your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it’s progress. It’s bringing you ever closer to the truth of a real problem and a good market. The worst thing you can do is ignore the bad news while searching for some tiny grain of validation to celebrate. You want the truth, not a gold star.

The classic error in response to a lukewarm signal is to “up your game” and pitch them until they say something nice. Unless they’re holding a check, the only thing to gain from “convincing” them are false positives.

Rule of thumb: There’s more reliable information in a “meh” than a “Wow!” You can’t build a business on a lukewarm response.

Everyone has problems they know about, but don’t actually care enough about to fix.

The reason this conversation is so very bad is because, if you aren’t paying attention, it seems like it went well. When you zoom in too quickly on one problem area, you can think you’ve validated a “top” problem when you haven’t. You just led them there.