Summary

A short and practical book for testing (business) ideas and holding conversations with potential customers. Filled with useful questions and checklists. Wish I had read this earlier in my career. 

Key Takeaways

• The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and world views.
• The big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late. 
• Common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value to the customer rather than cost to you. And you can’t quantify the value received without prodding their financial worldview.
• They own the problem, you own the solution. Deciding what to build is your job.
• The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.”
• Reject their generic claims, incidental complaints, and fluffy promises. Instead, anchor them toward the life they already lead and the actions they’re already taking.
• Prep questions to unearth hidden risks:
  • If this company were to fail, why would it have happened?
  • What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?
• Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking a question which has the potential to completely destroy your currently imagined business.
• Most people have lots of problems which they don’t actually care enough about to fix, but which they’ll happily tell you the details of if you ask them. 
• Always pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person. 
• A meeting has succeeded when it ends with a commitment to advance to the next step.
• The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them. 
• Asking for and framing a meeting: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask
• Startups fail because they have too many options. Good customer segmentation helps avoid drowning.
  • Getting specific about who your ideal customers are allows you to filter out all the noise which comes from everyone else.
• It’s easier to guide the conversation and stay on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that you’re updating.
• The process before a batch of conversations:
  • If you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment 
  • With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals 
  • If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments 
  • If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to 
  • Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about 
  • If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first
• The big prep question: “What do we want to learn from these guys?”
• Rules of thumb:
  • Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.
  • You’re shooting blind until you understand their goals. (Jim note: read When Coffee And Kale Compete)
  • Some problems don’t actually matter.
  • Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are. 
  • If they haven’t looked for ways of solving it already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) yours.
  • 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 should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.
  • Start broad and don’t zoom in until you’ve found a strong signal, both with your whole business and with every conversation.
  • You always need a list of your 3 big questions.
  • The more they’re giving up (time, reputation risk, cash), the more seriously you can take their kind words.
  • Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.
  • If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t yet have a specific enough customer segment.
  • Good customer segments are a who-where pair. If you don’t know where to go to find your customers, keep slicing your segment into smaller pieces until you do.
  • If you don’t know what you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t bother having the conversation.

What I got out of it

I loved the introduction (“is this book for you?”) and wish more non-fiction books had this. Will steal this approach for my own ebooks and guides.

Fitzpatrick provides great structure, questions and checklists on how to go about testing (business) ideas by means of customer conversations. I wish I had had this book earlier, but still find value in it at age 30 – despite having learnt many of these principles from experience.

I also appreciate his cheatsheet at the end of the book in which he summarized all the questions and checklists throughout the book.

To internalize this approach and make this come naturally, I’ll have to practice. I think there’s little value in rereading it but a lot of value in using it as a reference guide when coming up with or testing new business ideas.

I found “Avoiding Bad Data,” “Asking Important Questions” and “Choosing Your Customers” especially powerful and must-read chapters, in my opinion, for want-to-be entrepreneurs and product builders.

The book has many nuggets, but a few that stood out to me:

• “Who else should I talk to?” This is one of the questions that transcends The Mom Test and is useful in many areas of life. Use this often.
• Customers/prospects give you a lot of useless fluff when asked about future behaviour and outcomes, but can’t hide what they actually care about when asked about past or present behaviour.
• Asking for and reframing a meeting. Fitzpatrick shortened it to: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask. I think this framework serves as a great cold outreach email.
• Being clear on what you want to learn from someone, knowing the 3 most important things you want to ask and learn, and having an existing set of beliefs you’re updating.
• You should ask a question that has the potential to completely destroy your currently imagined business.
• Customer segmentation, slicing and the questions Fitzpatrick asks to create who-where pairs. Aim: to go out and talk with prospects in less than an hour. Talking > imagining or planning.

Summary Notes

Introduction

Is this book for you?

Hello, You’ve read about Customer Development or Lean Startup and aren’t sure how to actually go about having your first customer conversation.

You’re a traditional business or sales person aiming to be more effective within a young company which hasn’t yet found its business model.

You mentor, support, or invest in startups and want to help them have more useful customer conversations.

You’ve fallen in love with a new business idea and want to figure out if it has legs before quitting your job.

You’re raising funding and the investors want to see more evidence that you’re solving a real problem.

You find this whole process incredibly awkward and really wish there was an easier way to do it.

You’ve got a vague sense of an opportunity and want to figure out exactly what it is.

You’ve always wanted to build your own company and want to start making real progress today.

This book is for you.

The Mom Test 

The Mom Test is a set of simple rules for crafting good questions that even your mom can’t lie to you about.

Doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing at all. When you know you’re clueless, you tend to be careful. But collecting a fistful of false positives is like convincing a drunk he’s sober: not an improvement.

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

The big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late. 

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.

The Mom Test:

1. Talk about their life instead of your idea 
2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future 
3. Talk less and listen more. 

Rule of thumb: Opinions are worthless.

Ask:

• How they currently solve X and how much it costs them to do so. 
• How much time it takes. 
• Them to talk you through what happened the last time X came up. 
• If they haven’t solved the problem, ask why not. Have they tried searching for solutions and found them wanting?
• Or do they not even care enough to have Googled for it?

Rule of thumb: Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.

Rule of thumb: People will lie to you if they think it’s what you want to hear.

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.

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

“Why do you bother?”

Good question. I love this sort of question. It’s great for getting from the perceived problem to the real one.

Rule of thumb: You’re shooting blind until you understand their goals.

“What are the implications of that?”

This distinguishes between:

• I-will-pay-to-solve-that problems and 
• thats-kind-of-annoying-but-I-can-deal-with-it “problems”.

Some problems have big, costly implications. Others exist but don’t actually matter. It behooves you to find out which is which. It also gives you a good pricing signal.

Rule of thumb: Some problems don’t actually matter.

“Talk me through the last time that happened.”

Whenever possible, you want to be shown, not told by your customers. Learn through their actions instead of their opinions.

Rule of thumb: Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are.

“What else have you tried?”

It’s easy to get someone emotional about a problem if you lead them there.

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

Common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value to the customer rather than cost to you. And you can’t quantify the value received without prodding their financial worldview.

“How are you dealing with it now?”

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.

“Where does the money come from?”

This isn’t something you would necessarily ask a consumer (though you might), but in a B2B context it’s a must-ask. It leads to a conversation about whose budget the purchase will come from and who else within their company holds the power to torpedo the deal.

“Who else should I talk to?”

End every conversation like this. Lining up the first few conversations can be challenging, but if you’re onto something interesting and treating people well, your leads will quickly multiply via intros.

“Is there anything else I should have asked?”

Rule of thumb: People want to help you, but will rarely do so unless you give them an excuse to do so.

Deciding what to build is your job.

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals.

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.

Avoiding Bad Data 

Bad data gives us false negatives (thinking the idea is dead when it’s not) and—more dangerously—false positives (convincing yourself you’re right when you’re not). 

Three types of bad data:

1. Compliments 
2. Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future) 
3. Ideas

Fluff comes in 3 cuddly shapes:

• Generic claims (“I usually”, “I always”, “I never”)
• Future-tense promises (“I would”, “I will”) 
• Hypothetical maybes (“I might”, “I could”)

Follow The Mom Test and bring them back to specifics in the past. Ask when it last happened, for them to talk you through it, how they solved it, and what else they tried.

The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.”

Folks are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the future. They’re always more positive, excited, and willing to pay in the imagined future than they are once it arrives.

Fluff-inducing questions include:

• “Do you ever…” 
• “Would you ever…” 
• “What do you usually…” 
• “Do you think you…” 
• “Might you…” 
• “Could you see yourself…”

Reject their generic claims, incidental complaints, and fluffy promises. Instead, anchor them toward the life they already lead and the actions they’re already taking.

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.

You should dig in the same way around emotional signals to understand where they’re coming from. Just like feature requests, any strong emotion is worth exploring. Is someone angry? Dig. Embarrassed? Dig. Overjoyed? 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 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.”

Rule of thumb: 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.

To deal with The Pathos Problem:

• Keep the conversation focused on the other person 
• Ask about specific, concrete cases and examples. 
• Once someone detects that your ego is on the line, they’ll give you fluffy mistruths and extra compliments.

Rule of thumb: If you’ve mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.

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

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

Asking Important Questions 

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.

You can tell it’s an important question when the answer to it 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.

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

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

Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.

Rule of thumb: There’s more reliable information in a “meh” than a “Wow!” You can’t build a business on a lukewarm response.

Most people have lots of problems which they don’t actually care enough about to fix, but which they’ll happily tell you the details of if you ask them. Before you have solid evidence that you’re fixing a meaningful problem for your customer segment, you can really mess yourself up by zooming in too quickly.

When it’s not clear whether a problem is a must-solve-right-now (e.g. you’re selling a painkiller) or a nice-to-have (you’re selling a vitamin), you can get some clarity by asking cost/value questions like the following.

“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?”

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.

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

Always pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person. Pre-planning your big questions makes it a lot easier to ask questions which pass The Mom Test and aren’t biasing. It also makes it easier to face the questions that hurt.

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.

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

Keeping It Casual 

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

Being too formal is a crutch we use to deal with an admittedly ambiguous and awkward situation.

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

It only takes 5 minutes to learn whether a problem exists and is important.

Learning how someone currently achieves a certain goal or solves a problem is also quick.

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

Commitment And Advancement 

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

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.

A meeting has succeeded when it ends with a commitment to advance to the next step.

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

Commitment can be cash, but doesn’t have to be. Think of it in terms of currency—what are they giving up for you? A compliment costs them nothing, so it’s worth nothing and carries no data. The major currencies are:

• Time
• Reputation risk
• Cash

A time commitment could include: 

• Clear next meeting with known goals
• Sitting down to give feedback on wireframes 
• Using a trial themselves for a non-trivial period 

Reputation risk commitments might be: 

• Intro to peers or team 
• Intro to a decision maker (boss, spouse, lawyer) 
• Giving a public testimonial or case study 

Financial commitments are easier to imagine and include:

• Letter of intent (non-legal but gentlemanly agreement to purchase) 
• Pre-order 
• Deposit

Rule of thumb: The more they’re giving up, the more seriously you can take their kind words.

The worst meetings are the wishy-washy ones that you leave with neither rejection nor advancement.

A lost meeting can often be saved by just pushing for a commitment at the end while you’re being brushed off with a compliment.

Rule of thumb: It’s not a real lead until you’ve given them a concrete chance to reject you.

Keep an eye out for the people who get emotional about what you’re doing.

1. When someone isn’t that emotional about what you’re doing, it’s pretty unlikely that they’re going to end up being one of the people who is crazy enough to be your first customer. Keep them on the list, but don’t count on them to write the first check.
2. 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 turn into your first sale.

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

Finding Conversations 

Going to them

The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them. You hustle together the first one or two from wherever you can, and then, if you treat people’s time respectfully and are genuinely trying to solve their problem, those cold conversations start turning into warm intros.

How to find cold conversations:

• Cold calls
• Seizing serendipity
• Find a good excuse
• Immerse yourself in where they are
• Landing pages

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

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 a business. Just have a good conversation.

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.

I’m skeptical of the quantitative validation of landing page metrics. But they are certainly a great way to collect emails of qualified leads for you to reach out to and strike up a conversation with. Paul Graham recommends a generic launch for the same purposes. Get your product out there, see who seems to like it most, and then reach out to those users.

Bringing them to you

How to bring people to you:

• Organise meetups
  • You’ll be the centre of attention.
  • You’ll gain instant credibility as the organizer.
  • It’s the most unfair trick for rapid customer learning.
• Speaking & teaching
  • You’ll find chances at conferences, workshops, through online videos, blogging, or doing free consulting or office hours.
• Industry blogging
  • If you have a reasonably sized and relevant blog audience, lining up conversations is a total non-issue.
• Get clever. Examples:
  • Organise a semi-monthly “knowledge exchange” call between the department heads of 3 top universities to discuss the challenges around his topic of choice. Other universities could dial in and listen to the best practices of the big 3. This gave instant credibility by mere association (bias).

Creating warm intros

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.

Examples of warm intros to consider:

• Industry advisors
• Universities
• Investors
• Cash in favours 

Asking for and framing the meeting

The framing format I like has 5 key elements.

1. 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.
2. Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell.
3. Show weakness and give them a chance to help by mentioning your specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster.
4. Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help.
5. Ask for help.

Or, in shorter form: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / 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.

Once the meeting starts, you have to grab the reins or it’s liable to turn into them drilling you on your idea, which is exactly what you don’t want. To do this, I basically repeat what I said in the email and then immediately drop into the first question. If someone else made the introduction, I’ll use them as a voice of authority

The Advisory Flip

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.

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.

How Many Meetings 

This isn’t about having a thousand meetings. It’s about quickly learning what you need, and then getting back to building your business. You should be able to answer almost any customer question and move onto new ones within a week.

Rule of thumb: Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.

Choosing Your Customers 

Startups don’t starve, they drown. You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas. You have too many [options]. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything. When it comes to avoiding drowning and making faster progress, good customer segmentation is your best friend.

When you have a fuzzy sense of who you’re serving, you end up talking to a lot of different types of people, which leads to confusing signals and three problems:

1. You get overwhelmed by options and don’t know where to start 
2. You aren’t moving forward but can’t prove yourself wrong
3. You receive incredibly mixed feedback and can’t make sense of it

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

When the feedback is all over the map, it’s really hard to extract value. Once you get specific, you can learn.

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

Customer Slicing

If you’ve already got a product and users, you can explore your way to a good segment by seeing who likes it and focusing on that group. The other approach is to just make a best-guess.

You’ll want even more specific segmentation for your conversations than for your whole business.

Start with a broad segment and ask:

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

We now have a two groups of segments: the first is a collection of quite specific demographic groups and the second is a series of motivations.

When we look at them, some will be more generic than others. Go back through the generic ones and keep slicing. Just repeat the questions above.

Within that sub-group, who wants it most? 

Next we’re going to look at our groups’ behaviours and figure out where to find them.

• What are these people already doing to achieve their goal or survive their problem?
• Where can we find our demographic groups?
• Where can we find people doing the above workaround behaviours?

Now that we have a bunch of who-where pairs, we can decide who to start with based on who seems most:

1. Profitable 
2. Easy to reach 
3. Rewarding for us to build a business around

You needn’t be planning and theorising all day about this stuff — use it to quickly get to a specific, best-possible customer so you can go grab a few of them and move the business forward.

You can broaden your segment back out later. Make your life easy for now by choosing someone who is specific and who also and meets the three big criteria of being reachable, profitable, and personally rewarding.

Rule of thumb: Good customer segments are a who-where pair. If you don’t know where to go to find your customers, keep slicing your segment into smaller pieces until you do.

Talking To The Wrong People 

You can’t get the data you need if you’re talking to the wrong people. There are 3 ways to end up fall into this clearly unhelpful trap.

1. You have too-broad of a segment and are talking to everyone 
2. You have multiple customer segments and missed some of them 
3. You are selling to businesses with a complicated buying process and have overlooked some of the stakeholders

Running The Process 

The customer and learning has to be shared with the entire founding team, promptly and faithfully.

Avoiding bottlenecks has three parts: 

• Prepping
• Reviewing
• Taking good notes

Your most important preparation work is to ensure you know your current list of 3 big questions. Figure them out with your team and make a point to face the scary questions.

It’s easier to guide the conversation and stay on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that you’re updating. Spend up to an hour writing down your best guesses about what the person you’re about to talk to cares about and wants.

Prep questions to unearth hidden risks:

• If this company were to fail, why would it have happened?
• What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?

 All you’re trying to figure out: “What do we want to learn from these guys?”

Rule of thumb: If you don’t know what you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t bother having the conversation.

After a conversation, just review your notes with your team and update your beliefs and 3 big questions as appropriate.

Hiring out your learning is a guaranteed way to get bad signals. Until you’ve got a working business model and a repeatable sales or marketing process, the founders need to be in the meetings themselves.

The process before a batch of conversations:

• If you haven’t yet, choose a focused, findable segment 
• With your team, decide your big 3 learning goals 
• If relevant, decide on ideal next steps and commitments 
• If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to 
• Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about 
• If a question could be answered via desk research, do that first

During the conversation:

• Frame the conversation 
• Keep it casual
• Ask good questions which pass The Mom Test 
• Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals 
• Take good notes 
• If relevant, press for commitment and next steps

After a batch of conversations:

• With your team, review your notes and key customer quotes 
• If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage 
• Update your beliefs and plans 
• Decide on the next 3 big questions

The time scales of the process are important. The point is to make your business move faster, not slower. 

• Don’t spend a week prepping for meetings; spend an hour and then go talk to people. Anything more is stalling. 
• Don’t spend months doing full-time customer conversations before beginning to move on a product. Spend a week, maybe two. Get your bearings and then give them something to commit to.

Rule of thumb: Go build your dang company already.

Conclusion And Cheatsheet 

Having a process is valuable, but don’t get stuck in it. Sometimes you can just pick up the phone and hack through the knot.

The Mom Test Cheatsheet 

Buy the book 😉