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

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

The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and world views.

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.

Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.

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

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.

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.

Key takeaway from Intro

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.

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.”

you also need to search out the world-rocking scary questions you’ve been unintentionally shrinking from. The best way to find them is with thought experiments. Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces.

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

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

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.

Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Customer/market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them?

Pure Market Risk situations: B2B CRUD/SaaS apps, consumer apps Pure Product Risk: Cheaper hardware based products, Low freq and low cost transaction marketplaces, deep tech apps Consumer Risk: “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?” (p. 50) If you have product risk, having more conversations won't help, you need to start building product early, and even with less certainty. 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. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t talk to anyone if you’re building something with product risk. In the case of the farm fertility monitor, it’s good to know that the farmer isn’t opposed to switching tech, for example. For the nightclubs, it’s good to know that they’re at least theoretically willing to pay for promotion. It would be tragic to succeed at the hard work of creating the product or community only to learn nobody will pay for it. 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.

PREPARE YOUR LIST OF 3 Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (e.g. customers, investors, industry experts, key hires, etc). Update the list as your questions change.

Rule of thumb: You always need a list of your 3 big questions. Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation. 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. Dont worry about picking right questions, just ask whatever is most important right now, and those questions which you are avoiding to ask (Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.)