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

I’m going to refer to chatting with people as “customer conversation” (lowercase) instead of “Customer Development” (uppercase).

The Mom Test: 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 It’s called The Mom Test because it leads to questions that even your mom can’t lie to you about.

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

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.

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.

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

So, I finally—and inadvertently—did the smart thing when I asked, “Why do you want this feature? What do branded reports get you that unbranded ones don’t? It’s the same data, right?” They replied, “Oh yeah, of course. I mean, nobody even reads these. Our clients just like to get something emailed to them at the end of every week and we think they’d be happier if it was a bit fancier, you know?” I knew exactly. They had asked for analytics. We had jumped to the conclusion that they wanted to better understand their data. But they had really just wanted a way to keep their own clients happy.

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

The Meeting Anti-Pattern is the tendency to relegate every opportunity for customer conversation into a calendar block. Beyond being a bad use of your time and setting expectations that you’re going to show them a product, over-reliance on formal meetings leads us to overlook perfectly good chances for serendipitous learning.

In the consumer space, it’s the fan who wants your product to succeed so badly that they’ll front you the money as a pre-order when all you’ve got is a duct-tape prototype. They’re the one who will tell all their friends to chip in as well. They’re the person reading your blog and searching for workarounds.

Or, in shorter form: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

“Very Few Wizards Properly Ask

The UX community (who knows their customer conversation!) says you should keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information.

If you’ve run more than 10 conversations and are still getting results that are all over the map, then it’s possible that your customer segment is too vague, which means you’re mashing together feedback from multiple different types of customers.

When you have a fuzzy sense of who you’re serving, you end up talking to a multiple customer segments all at once, which leads to confusing signals and three problems: You get overwhelmed by options and don’t know where to start You aren’t moving forward but can’t prove yourself wrong You receive mixed feedback and can’t make sense of it

Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone. Forgetting about all the possibilities and focusing on who would most likely buy,

It turns out that “students” is a broader segment than we initially expected. The first is a PhD student. The second is an ambitious youngling at a prep school. The third is a homeschooling parent who wants to use it with her kid. The fourth is a rural village in the Indian rice belt where the local kids are self-educating through the one shared computer. The fifth is in Africa, running the app off a shaky cellphone connection. All are “students”.

As a quick example, say I’m building some sort of high-end fitness gadget for busy professionals. It’s going to be expensive, so I figure they have to be high-income (finance professionals?), and it’s going to be digital, so I imagine they’ll be young (25-35?). And finance professionals live in big cities, so we’ll tack that on. So my customer segment is “finance professionals, age 25-35, living in a major city”, right? No! This is a totally worthless segment because it doesn’t help me make better decisions and doesn’t help me find them. On the other hand, if I slice it down further to the sub-group who wants it most, then I can get somewhere. We could slice that initial segment into something like: finance professionals in London currently training for a marathon. Better!

If you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals