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 find out if people care about what we’re doing by never mentioning it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

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

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? If so, what’s the sticking point? If not, why not? Where are they losing money with their current tools? Is there a budget for better ones?

Ask how they currently solve X and how much it costs them to do so. And how much time it takes. Ask them to talk you through what happened the last time X came up. If they haven’t solved the problem, ask why

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.

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

It’s great for getting from the perceived problem to the real one.

You're shooting blind until you understand their goals.

Some problems don’t actually matter.

Whenever possible, you want to be shown, not told, by your customers.

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.

walked through their full workflow answers many questions in one fell swoop: 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?

What are they using now? How much does it cost and what do they love or hate about it?

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

"Who else should I talk to?"

You’ll notice that none of the good questions were about asking what you should build.

Did you notice that in the conversations above, practically every response contains a sneaky compliment? They are pervasive, constantly trying to trick us into thinking the meeting “went well”. Ignoring compliments should be easy, but it’s not. We crave validation and, as such, are often tricked into registering compliments as reliable data

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

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.

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.”

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

“What would syncing to Excel allow you to do?” Maybe there’s an easier way I can help you achieve the same thing.

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.

Questions to dig into feature requests: “Why do you want that?” “What would that let you do?” “How are you coping without it?” “Do you think we should push back the launch to add that feature, or is it something we could add later?” “How would that fit into your day?”

Questions to dig into emotional signals: “Tell me more about that.” “That seems to really bug you — I bet there’s a story here.” “What makes it so awful?” “Why haven’t you been able to fix this already?” “You seem pretty excited about that — it’s a big deal?” “Why so happy?” “Go on.”

To deal with The Pathos Problem, keep the conversation focused on the other person and ask about specific, concrete cases and examples.

Folks tend not to lie about specific stuff that’s already happened, regardless of your ego.

You will be hugely tempted to interrupt and “fix” their understanding. Alternately, they’ll raise a topic you have a really good answer to. For example, they’ll mention how important security is, and you’ll want to cut in and tell them you’ve thought about all that already. Both interruptions are mistakes. In each case, the customer was about to give you a privileged glimpse into their mental model

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. If you get an unexpected answer to a question and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing, it wasn’t a terribly important question to begin with.

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

I once heard the general life advice that, for unpleasant tasks, you should imagine what you would have someone else do if you were delegating it. Then do that. And remember, you’re allowed to ask about money.

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.

if you have $50k and spend $5k to learn you’re running down a dead end, that’s awesome. You can use the rest to find a viable path to your goal, with the advantage of all the extra things you now know.

Some of the most informative (and thus best) responses you can get are along the lines of, “Umm, I’m not so sure about that” and “That's pretty neat.” Both are lukewarm responses which tell you they don’t care.

Everyone has problems they know about, but don’t actually care enough about to fix. And if you zoom in too quickly and lead them to that semi-problem, they’ll happily drown you in all the unimportant details. Zooming in too quickly on a super-specific problem before you understand the rest of the customers life can irreparably confuse your learnings.

“Does-this-problem-matter” questions: “How seriously do you take your blog?” “Do you make money from it?” “Have you tried making more money from it?” “How much time do you spend on it each week?” “Do you have any major aspirations for your blog?” “Which tools and services do you use for it?” “What are you already doing to improve this?” “What are the 3 big things you’re trying to fix or improve right now?”

Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person

Your 3 questions will be different for each type of person you’re talking to. If you have multiple types of customers or partners, have a list for each. Don’t stress too much about choosing the “right” important questions. They will change. Just choose whatever seems murkiest or most important right now.

When you strip all the formality from the process, you end up with no meetings, no “interviews”, and a much easier time all around. The conversations become so fast and lightweight that you can go to a industry meetup and leave with a dozen customer conversations under your belt, each of which provided as much value as a lengthy formal meeting.

Maybe i could find writers groups in L.A.

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.

Early conversations are very fast. The chats grow longer as you move from the early broad questions (“Is this a real problem?”) toward more specific product and industry issues (“Which other software do we have to integrate with to close the sale?”)

it only takes 5 minutes (maximum) to learn whether a problem exists and is important.

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. You’ve lost the meeting when you leave with a compliment or a stalling tactic.

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

Keep an eye out for the people who get emotional about what you’re doing. There is a significant difference between: “Yeah, that’s a problem” and “THAT IS THE WORST PART OF MY LIFE AND I WILL PAY YOU RIGHT NOW TO FIX IT.” Steve Blank calls them earlyvangelists (early evangelists).

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.

Paul Graham suggests that generic launch can be a solid start for the same reason. Get your product out there, see who seems to like it most, and then reach out to those types of users for deeper learning. This is starting to bring the customers to you instead of going to them, but still involves sending a mostly cold email. Next, we’ll look at how to run with this principle to make our lives even easier.

Organise meetups For marginally more effort than attending an event, you can organise your own and benefit from being the centre of attention. 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.