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

We want to find the truth of how to make our business succeed. We need to dig for it—and dig deep—but every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person we’re talking to and rendering the whole exercise pointless. It happens more than you’d ever imagine.

Bad customer conversations aren’t just useless. Worse, they convince you that you’re on the right path. They give you a false positive that causes you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team.

I learned that there’s a big gap between textbooks and check books.

The saddest thing that can happen to a startup is for nobody to care when it disappears.

People say you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea. That’s technically true, but it misses the point.

The Mom Test is a set of simple rules for crafting good questions that even your mom can't lie to you about.

I have rationalised the price outside of a real purchase decision, made a non-committal compliment, and offered a feature request to appear engaged.

When you know you’re clueless, you tend to be careful. 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.

With an idea this vague, we can’t answer any of the difficult questions

Mom was unable to lie to us because we never talked about our idea. 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.

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

When you do it right, they won’t even know you have an idea.

Rule of thumb: Customer conversations are bad by default. It’s your job to fix them.

“Talk me through the last time that happened.”

“Talk me through your workflow.”

“What else have yo...

“How are you dealing with it now?”

“Who else should I talk to?”

“Is there anything else I should have asked?”

only the market can tell if your idea is good. Everything else is just opinion. Unless you’re talking to a deep industry expert, this is self-indulgent noise with a high risk of false positives.

You might ask them to show you how they currently do it. Talk about which parts they love and hate. Ask which other tools and processes they tried before settling on this one. Are they actively searching for a replacement?

Where are they losing money with their current tools?

Is there a budget for be...

take all that information and decide for yourself whether...

Rule of thumb: Opinions are...

Rule of thumb: Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.

How much does the problem cost them? How much do they currently pay to solve it? How big is the budget they’ve allocated? I hope you’re noticing a trend here.

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: People know what their problems are, but they don’t know how to solve those problems.

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

Rule of thumb: Some problems don’t actually matter.

how do they spend their days, what tools do they use, and who do they talk to? What are the constraints of their day and life? How does your product fit into that day? Which other tools, products, software, and tasks does your product need to integrate with?

Rule of thumb: Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are.

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

Common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value to the customer rather than cost to you. That's true. And you can't quantify the value received without prodding their financial worldview.

Rule of thumb: People stop lying when you ask them for money.

Rule of thumb: While it’s rare for someone to tell you precisely what they’ll pay you, they’ll often show you what it’s worth to them.

Often, you'll find yourself talking to someone other than the budget owner. Your future pitches will hit unseen snags unless you learn who else matters and what they care about. This knowledge of their purchasing process will eventually turn into a repeatable sales roadmap.

you don’t know the industry, they’ll often be sitting there quietly while you completely miss the most important point.

One of the recurring “criticisms” about talking to customers is that you’re abdicating your creative vision and building your product by committee.

Deciding what to build is your job.

You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution.

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.

track. It could happen because you got excited and started pitching; because you had to talk about your idea to explain the reason for the meeting;

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

The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid them completely by not mentioning your idea.

If we’re early in the learning process, the meeting could end here quite happily. We have the learning we came for. If we’re slightly later-stage and already have a product, we might continue by zooming in and pushing for commitments or sales.