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

If you’ve got a more developed product, you can take their credit card and just charge them nothing if they cancel within 30 days. The more they are giving up for you, the more seriously you can take their validation.

While you may already know what the market in general cares about, figuring out this particular customer’s unique situation will considerably improve the rest of the conversation.

Firstly, when someone isn’t too emotional about what you’re doing, they are unlikely to end up being one of your crazy first customers. Keep them on the list and try to make them happy, of course, but don’t count on them to write the first check.

whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and give you your first sale.

Rule of thumb: In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is a side-effect.

Beyond hard hustle, stay open to serendipity. There are lots of ways to get lucky when you’re in the mood for it.

If it sounds weird to unexpectedly interview people, then that’s only because you’re thinking of them as interviews instead of conversations.

The only thing people love talking about more than themselves is their problems.

By taking an interest in the problems and minutia of their day, you’re already more interesting than 99% ...

Rule of thumb: If it’s not a formal meeting, you don’t need to make excuses about why you’re there or even mention that you’re starting ...

When I open with an excuse, I tend to consider the chat to be a throwaway for one-time learning instead of an ongoing relationship.

Rule of thumb: If it’s a topic you both care about, find an excuse to talk about it. Your idea never needs to enter the equation and you’ll both enjoy the chat.

Want to figure out the problems HR professionals have? Organise an event called “HR professionals happy hour”. People will assume you’re credible just because you happen to be the person who sent the invite emails or introduced the speaker. You’ll have an easy time chatting to them about their problems.

As a bonus, it also bootstraps your industry credibility.

valued as both a learning and selling tool. Let’s say you’re making better project management software. In that case, you probably have both expertise and a strongly held opinion about how things could be better. That’s the magic combination for being an effective teacher.

Spend the time to teach. You can teach at conferences, workshops, through online videos, blogging, and by doing free consulting or office hours.

You'll refine your message, get in touch with a room full of potential customers who take you seriously, and will learn which parts of your offering resonate (before you’ve even built it). ...

If you have a reasonably sized and relevant blog audience, lining up conversations is trivial. You just write a post about it and ask people to get in touch. Of course, not everyone has a relevant audience. That’s one big reason to start blogging to your customers today.

When I sent cold emails from my blog email address, folks would often meet with me because they had checked my domain, seen my industry blog, and figured I was an interesting person to talk to. In other words, the traffic and audience were irrelevant.

Blogging about an industry is also a good exercise to get your thoughts in a row. It makes you a better customer conversationalist.

Every business is different. Don’t just copy what someone else is doing. Consider your situation and get clever.

The world is a relatively small place. Everyone knows someone. We just have to remember to ask.

This is even easier for consumer products. Not everyone knows folks at McKinsey, but everybody does know, for example, a recent mom or amateur athlete or theatre enthusiast.

Rule of thumb: Kevin Bacon’s 7 degrees of separation applies to customer conversations. You can find anyone you need if you ask for it a couple times.

You’ll get ignored a lot, but again, who cares? You aren’t trying to minimise your failure rate; you’re trying to get a few conversations going. The people you’re being introduced to won’t know the backstory anyway, so it’s a clean start from there.

I wouldn’t make a habit of doing stuff like this since it’s a bit annoying and can burn bridges, but sometimes you’re backed into a corner and need to get started somehow.

If you don’t know why you’re there, it becomes a sales meeting by default, which is bad for three reasons. First, the customer closes up about certain important topics like pricing. Second, attention shifts to you instead of them. And finally, it’s going to be the worst sales meeting ever because you aren’t ready.

You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z. Don’t mention your idea. Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell. Show weakness and give them a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster. Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help. Explicitly ask for help.

Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

Hey Pete, I'm trying to make desk & office rental less of a pain for new businesses (vision). We’re just starting out and don’t have anything to sell, but want to make sure we’re building something that actually helps (framing). I’ve only ever come at it from the tenant’s side and I’m having a hard time understanding how it all works from the landlord’s perspective (weakness). You’ve been renting out desks for a while and could really help me cut through the fog (pedestal). Do you have time in the next couple weeks to meet up for a chat? (ask)

These conversations are easy to screw up. As such, you need to be the one in control. You set the agenda, you keep it on topic, and you propose next steps. Don’t be a jerk about it, but do have a plan for the meeting and be assertive about keeping it on track.

If you’re banging your head against the wall trying to get people to answer your cold emails, then you’re probably taking the hard road. Spend your energy finding clever ways to generate warm intros instead. You’ll have a much easier time.

More subtly, calls damage the delicate power dynamic of these conversations. When someone is having a coffee with you, there’s the potential to chat as friends. You can just shoot the breeze about the industry for a bit. You can keep it casual. They’re enjoying the conversation.

In terms of mindset, don’t go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power. Instead, go in search of industry and customer advisors. You are just trying to find helpful, knowledgable people who are excited about your idea.

Willpower is a finite resource. The way to overcome difficult situations isn’t to power through, but rather to change your circumstances to require less willpower. Changing the context of the meeting to “looking for advisors” is the equivalent of throwing out all your chocolate when you start a diet. You change the environment to naturally facilitate your goals.

Every meeting has an opportunity cost. When you’re traveling to that meeting, you aren’t writing code or generating leads or drinking margaritas.

If you’re running a sales-driven business (especially enterprise sales), the opportunity cost of early conversations is low since many of them will become sales leads. You’re doubling up on learning and dealflow.

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.

It’s not about “how many” meetings. It’s about having enough for you to really understand your customers. You want to talk to them enough that know them in the same way you know your close friends, with a firm grip on their goals, their frustrations, what else they’ve tried, and how they currently deal with it.

This isn’t about having a thousand meetings. It’s about quickly learning what you need, and then getting ...

Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.

They say that startups don’t starve, they drown. You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas; you have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything. When it comes to getting above water and making faster progress, good customer segmentation is your best friend.

But they didn’t start there. If you start too generic, everything is watered down. Your marketing message is generic. You suffer feature creep.

In their early days, Google helped PhD students find obscure bits of code. Paypal helped collectors buy and sell Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies more efficiently. Evernote helped moms save and share recipes.

Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone.

This journey sounds obvious when we look at it as a case study. But when we’re in the moment, choosing a really specific customer segment just feels like we’re losing all the other options. And that loss is painful. Remind yourself that you’ll get to the whole world eventually. But you’ve got to start somewhere specific.

Getting specific about your ideal customers allows you to filter out all the noise which comes from everyone else.

an industry expert can be hugely helpful in providing a taxonomy of the industry. It will give you a better starting point for choosing where to begin.

Rule of thumb: If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t have a specific enough customer segment.

Within this group, which type of person would want it most? Would everyone within this group buy/use it, or only some? Why does that sub-set want it? (e.g. what is their specific problem) Does everyone in the group have that motivation or only some? What additional motivations are there? Which other types of people have these motivations?