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

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

Even when I had no audience, I still found blogging to be helpful. When I sent cold emails from my blog email address, folks would often meet with me because they had checked my domain,

Hey Scott, I run a startup trying to make advertising more playful and ultimately effective (vision). We're having a load of trouble figuring out how all the pieces of the industry fit together and where we can best fit into it (weakness). You know more about this industry than anyone and could really save us from a ton of mistakes (pedestal). We’re funded and have a couple products out already, but this is in no way a sales meeting -- we’re just moving into a new area and could really use some of your expertise (framing). Can you spare a bit of time in the next week to help point us in the right direction over a coffee? (ask) People like to help entrepreneurs. But they also hate wasting their time. An opening like this tells them that you know what you need and that they’ll be able to make a real difference.

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’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.

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.