High Level Thoughts

How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. The Mom Test is an excellent guide to having useful customer conversations. Learn how customer conversations go wrong and what you can do to fix them. Validate the value of your business and find out when your big idea’s not going to work, so you can save yourself from tragedy and pivot to a successful business. Learn which type of stakeholders will buy and which will waste your time and turn into “zombie leads”. Learn important facts about your customers you can use to build your business.

Lesson Table of Contents

How to Pass the Mom Test

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

We find out if people care about our business idea by never mentioning it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

Eventually you do need to mention what you’re building and take people’s money for it. However, the big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late.

Rules to pass the Mom Test

Talk about customers lives instead of your idea
Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
Talk less and listen more

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution. Once you’ve taken the leap, you confirm that it’s correct (and refine it) through getting commitment & advancement.

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.

How to Avoid Bad Customer Conversation Data

Three Types of Bad Data

Compliments
Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future)
Ideas

Sometimes we invite the bad data ourselves by asking the wrong questions, but even when you try to follow The Mom Test, conversations still go off track.

Once you start to notice, it’s easy to get back on track by deflecting compliments, anchoring fluff, and digging beneath ideas.

Deflect Compliments

The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid them completely by not mentioning your idea. If they happen anyway, you need to deflect the compliment and get on with the business of gathering facts and commitments.

Instead of getting caught up in the emotional high of receiving a compliment, take these opportunities to ask for more detail.

Why is this interesting to you? When has this been helpful to you in the past? What else have you tried which failed to solve your problem? When’s the last time you suffered this problem? How much money would this save you? How does this problem fit into your life?

If you don’t know, then you’ve got a compliment instead of real data.

Anchor Fluff

The 3 types of fluff you get in customer conversations:

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

When someone starts talking about what they “always” or “usually” or “never” or “would” do, they are giving you generic and hypothetical answers that are bad data.

Instead of letting these important questions go without useful answers, 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.

The worst type of fluff-inducing question is, “Would you ever?” Of course they might. Someday. That doesn’t mean they will.

Fluff-inducing questions to avoid:

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

“What do you usually…?” is the most dangerous of these questions because its focus on the past implies it would provide useful answers, but people aren’t aware enough of their behavior to provide useful and reliable answers.

The mistake in asking a hypothetical fluff question is in valuing the answers, not asking the questions. Sometimes asking fluff questions can help transition into more concrete questioning.

How to transition from asking fluffy questions to a concrete ones:

“Do you ever X?” → “When’s the last time that happened?” → “Can you talk me through that?”

Customer conversations are like scientific experiments. You should test and try to disprove your hypothesis.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are.

To determine if a problem is valuable to solve, you need data on whether customers are motivated enough to take action. Only past behavior demonstrates true willingness to behave this way in the future.

If customers don’t already care enough to try to solve their problem, they aren’t going to care about your solution.

Dig Beneath Customer Ideas

When you hear a customer ideas and requests, 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.

Questions to understand customer ideas and requests:

Why do you want that?
What’s the pain you experience in your process?
Why do you bother doing it this way?
What’s the goal you’re trying to achieve?
How are you coping without the solution you’re asking for?
How would that fit into your day?

You should dig around emotional signals to understand where they’re coming from. Any strong customer emotion is worth exploring. Is someone angry? Embarrassed? Overjoyed?

Questions to understand customer 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?

How to Ask Important Questions

Apply The Mom Test to the questions which matter.

In addition to ensuring that you aren’t asking trivialities, you also need to look for the world-rocking scary questions you’re shrinking from. The best way to find them is to run 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.

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.

Love Bad News

One of the reasons we avoid important question is because asking them is scary. It can bring us the upsetting realization that our favorite idea is fundamentally flawed. Or that the major client is never going to buy.

If you have an exciting idea for a new product and go talk to a couple customers who don’t actually care about it, then that’s a great result. You just saved yourself however much time and money it would have cost to try building and selling it.

You’re searching for the truth, not trying to be right. And you want to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible. Learning that your beliefs are wrong is frustrating, but it’s progress. It’s bringing you ever closer to the truth of a real problem and a good market.

The worst thing you can do is ignore the bad news while searching for some tiny grain of validation to celebrate.

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.” lukewarm responses which tell you they don’t care.

In this context, “best” means learning, not selling.

If you’re trying to decide whether to invest your time and money in developing, building and promoting that gadget, then lukewarm is a terrific response. It gives you a crystal clear signal that this person does not care. It’s perfectly reliable information you can take to the bank.

If customers are still engaged in the conversation after providing lukewarm responses, it’s worth asking a couple follow-up questions to understand the nature of their apathy. Is the “problem” not actually that big of a deal? Are they fundamentally different from your ideal customers? Do they not care about the specific implementation? Are they worn out and skeptical from hearing too many pitches, or are they just plain tired today?

After asking lukewarm respondents your followup questions, say a big thanks and leave them to their day. They’ve probably helped you more than the guy who said he loved it.

Look before you zoom

Another way we miss the important questions is by spending our time on ultimately unimportant details. This can happen when we get stuck in the details before understanding the big picture.

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.

If you focus the conversation too quickly on one problem area, you can think you’ve validated a “top” problem when you haven’t. You just led them there.

“What are your big goals and focuses right now?” Products which solve problems on this list are infinitely more likely to get bought. We might alternately ask for major annoyances, costs, or joys.

It doesn’t hurt to ask leading questions when you’re about to abort the conversation anyway. If they come back with a positive, just be a little extra careful in making sure they aren’t lying.

Sometimes we know the problem exists as a top priority and we can safely zoom in immediately.

We can immediately zoom in on the problem if we are 100% certain it’s a must-solve problem which people are ready to pay for.

If we aren’t sure it’s a must-solve problem, we start more generic to see if they care at all about the problem category, in which case they’ll mention it.

“Have you looked into what your options are?”

When someone says they suffer from a problem and don’t know what to do, it’s easy to rush in with a solution, but that usually a mistake. To see if customers actually care enough to pay for a solution, you need to know if they have tried to solve the problem on their own.

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.

Questions to find out if a problem matters to customers:

“How much time do you spend on it each week?”
“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?”

Finding out whether the person we’re talking to is taking this problem seriously. Are they spending money or making money? Is it in their top 3 business focuses? Are they actively looking for solutions?

Find the Elephant in the Room

Successful startups tend to depend on avoiding multiple failure points.

If any of the conditions required to avoid these failing points doesn’t exist, we have to significantly overhaul our idea. It’s tempting to obsess over the most interesting of several failure points and ignore the others. It’s a great way to miss important questions.

Understand the difference between product and market risk

Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Will they keep using it?
Market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay? Are there enough of them?

You don’t want to overlook one or the other.

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 a list of 3 questions to ask each type of stakeholder

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.

If we go through an unplanned conversation, we tend to focus on trivial stuff which keeps the conversation comfortable. Instead, decide what to ask with your team in a calm environment. 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.

The “right” important questions will change. Just choose the 3 questions which seem murkiest or most important right now. Doing so will give you firmer footing and a better sense of direction for your next 3.

You’ll experience overlap and repetition in the questions between the types of stakeholders you talk to, but you don’t need to repeat the full set of questions with every participant. Pick up where you left off from your previous customer conversations and validation efforts and keep filling in the picture.

Take advantage of good customer conversation opportunities when they come up.

Instead of running into that dream customer and asking to exchange business cards so you can “grab a coffee” (exactly like everyone else), you can just pop off your most important question. That goes a long way toward Keeping it Casual.

Keep Customer Conversations Casual

When you strip all the formality from the customer interview process, you end up with no meetings, no interview questions, and a much easier time.

You can go to a industry meet-up and leave with a dozen customer conversations under your belt, each of which provided as much value as a formal meeting.

The structure of separate problem/solution/sales conversations is critical for avoiding bias, but it’s important to realize that the first customer conversation doesn’t actually need to be a meeting.

Formal meetings can cause us to overlook perfectly good chances for serendipitous learning.

Learning from customers doesn’t mean you have to be wearing a suit and drinking boardroom coffee. Asking the right questions is fast and touches on topics people find quite interesting. You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meetings until you have something concrete to show.

How long should customer conversations last?

Early conversations are very fast. 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

Lessons from The Mom Test