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

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

fluff-inducing questions include: “Do you ever…” “Would you ever…” “What do you usually…” “Do you think you…” “Might you…” “Could you see yourself…”

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.

Even learning that the person is a non-customer is useful.

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

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.

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.

“Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” is generally a good quality for a founder to have. But when it creeps into a conversation that’s meant to be about learning, it works against you.

If they say they really want to hear about what you’re working on, promise that you’ll tell them at the end of the meeting or loop them in for an early demo, and that you just want to talk a bit more about their stuff before biasing them with your idea.

Rule of thumb: Anyone will say your idea is great if you’re annoying enough about it.

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

Both interruptions are mistakes.

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

You can tell it’s an important question when its answer could completely change (or disprove) your business.

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

that, for unpleasant tasks, you should imagine what you would have someone else do if you were delegating it.

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.

Is the “problem” not actually that big of a deal? Are they fundamentally different from your ideal customers?

Zooming in too quickly on a super-specific problem before you understand the rest of the customers life can irreparably confuse your learnings.

The premature zoom is a real problem because it leads to data which seems like validation, but is actually worthless. In other words, it’s a big source of false positives.

Start broad and don't zoom in until you’ve found a strong signal, both with your whole business and with every conversation.

Video games are pure product risk. What sort of question could you ask to validate your game idea? “Do you like having fun? Would you like to have even more fun?” Practically 100% of the risk is in the product and almost none is in the customer. You know people buy games. If yours is good and you can find a way to make them notice it, they’ll buy it. You don’t need to rediscover people’s desire to play video games.

What all this does mean is that if you’ve got heavy product risk (as opposed to pure market risk), then you’re not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone. The conversations give you a starting point, but you’ll have to start building product earlier and with less certainty than if you had pure market risk.

Pre-planning your big questions makes it a lot easier to ask questions which pass The Mom Test and aren’t biasing.

Knowing your list allows you to take better advantage of serendipitous encounters. Instead of running into that dream customer and asking to exchange business cards so you can “grab a coffee”

Rule of thumb: You always need a list of your 3 big questions.

In the early days, asking for the initial problem conversation was simply impossible for me. I wasn’t credible enough, so nobody wanted to take a meeting just to talk to me about their day. Steve recommends starting with friendly first contacts.

The most precious resource in a startup is its founders’ time. You have to put yourself where you matter most, and I wasn’t finding early customer meetings to be that place.

Rule of thumb: Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.

We’re going to strip the pomp and circumstance and reduce it from a meeting to a chat. If we do it right, they won’t even know we were talking about our idea.

You’re probably the first person in a long time to be truly interested in the petty annoyances of their day.

Rule of thumb: If it feels like they’re doing you a favour by talking to you, it’s probably too formal.

The potential speed of the early conversations is one of the big reasons I like keeping it casual and skipping the meeting.

Rule of thumb: Give as little information as possible about your idea while still nudging the discussion in a useful direction.

In sales, moving the relationship to the next stage is called “advancement”. It’s like pushing a customer into the next step of your real-world acquisition funnel.

They’ll either move forward or make it clear that they’re not a customer. Both are good results for your learning.

As always, you’re not trying to convince every person to like what you’re doing. When you’ve got the information you came for (even if it’s that they don’t care), you can leave.

Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as time, reputation, or money.

Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer purchasing.

“Customers” who keep being friendly but aren’t ever going to buy are a particularly dangerous source of mixed signals.

It took me years to learn that there’s no such thing as a meeting which just “went well”. Every meeting either succeeds or fails.

Not everyone is going to convert and at least you now know where you stand. You have a strong negative data point. That’s good learning!

Rule of thumb: If you don’t know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless.

The more they’re giving up, the more seriously you can take what they’re saying.

If you are very early stage, you might ask for an introduction to his boss or tech team or the budget-holder so you can “make sure you fully understand their needs.” The point is just to find something to ask for that they are going to think twice about giving you.

It's worth noting that you need to know your next steps to benefit from this. If you have to say, “Let me have a think about that and get back to you,” then you’ve ruined a perfectly good meeting.

The reason Kickstarter is so wonderful is because it forces customers who say they would buy it to actually pull out a credit card and commit.