The Mom Test

Every startup needs to be doing customer development. This book is about mastering the customer conversation piece of customer development. How to ask the right questions. Ones that DO NOT bias your customer and render your interviews useless.

You shouldn't ask anyone if you business is a good idea. It invites them to lie to you in order to make you happy, like your Mom would. The Mom Test is a simple set of rules for crafting good questions that even you Mom can't lie about.

The Mom Test:

Do you think it's a good idea? 👎

Only the market can tell you. Opinions are worthless.

Instead, ask:

Would you buy a product which did X? 👎

Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.

Instead, ask:

How much would you pay for X? 👎

People will lie to you if they think it's what you want to hear.

Instead, ask:

What would your dream product do?

Kind of okay. The value comes from following up and understanding WHY they want the features. You don't want to just collect features, but instead understand the motivations and constraints.

People know what their problems are, but they don't know how to solve them.

Why do you bother doing X? 👍

This question points towards their motivations and gives you the why.

What are the implications of that? 👍

Some problems have big, costly implications. Some problems don't really matter. Also helps give you some indicators around pricing.

Talk me through the last time that happened. 👍

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

If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) yours. Try to understand what they're using now and how much it costs. What they love vs hate and what the fixes would be worth. How difficult would it be to switch to a new solution?

Would you pay X for a product that did Y? 👎

People are overly optimistic about what they would do and want to make you happy. People stop lying when you ask them for money.

How are you dealing with it now? 👍

Try to understand what tools and/or services they use to solve the problem today. How much do those cost? It's rare for someone to tell you how much they'll pay you, but they will show you what it's worth to them.

Where does the money come from? 👍

Whose budget does the purchase come from and who has the power to derail a deal. Understanding this will avoid any snags along the sales cycle and help you plot the steps.

Who else should I talk to? 👍

End every conversation like this. If you're on to something, your leads will quickly multiply.

Is there anything else I should have asked? 👍

Asking this question gives them a chance to politely "fix" your line of questioning. And they will. People want to help you. Give them an excuse to do so.

Three types of bad data:

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

When an interviewee gives you a compliment, they're almost certainly lying. They're trying to be supportive, protect your feelings, get rid of you, or your excitement is rubbing off.

Learn to deflect the compliment and get on with gather data. Avoid compliments by not mentioning your idea at all.

Example of deflecting a compliment:

You: "...and that's it. It's like X for Y, but better because of Z."

Them: "That's really cool. I love it."

You: "Whoops — sorry about that— I got excited and started pitching. Listen: you guys seem to be doing a good job in this space — do you mind me asking how you're dealing with this stuff at the moment?

Example of a good (negative) conversation:

Them: "That's really cool. I love it."

You: "How are you dealing with this stuff at the moment?"

Them: "Oh, it's really not that big of a deal. We kind of just ignore it."

When you hear a teammate say something like "That meeting went really well" or "Everybody I've talked to loves the idea," try to get more specific. Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save them? How would it fit into their life? What else have they tried?

Three types of fluff:

When someone talks in this way 👆 they are giving you generic, hypothetical fluff. You need to anchor them back to specifics in the past or actions they're taking now. Talk me through when that last happened. How have you solved it, what have you tried?

The worst type of fluff-inducing question you can ask is "Would you ever?" Of course they might. It doesn't mean they will.

Fluff-inducing questions:

Example of transitioning a fluff answer into more concrete questioning:

You: "Do you ever X?"

Them: "Oh yeah, all the time."

You: "When's the last time that happened?"

Them: "Two weeks ago."

You: "Can you talk me through that?"

At some point during a good conversation, the person you're talking to may start listing ideas, possibilities, and feature requests.

When you hear a request it's your job to understand the motivation which led to it. Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.

Example:

Them: "Are you guys going to be able to sync to Excel? I really think that's a killer feature."

You: "What would syncing to Excel allow you to do?"

Them: "We've got all these legacy reports and we need to go through them every now and then. It would be nice to have everything in one place." Not a key buying criteria.

or:

Them: "We've tried a bunch of these things and it's always the syncing that kills it." Actively searching for solutions that are missing this key feature. Potential differentiator.

or:

Them: "We have a decent workaround, as you saw. But it takes nearly a week at the end of the month to pull the reports together. It's a big pain and totally stalls our work." They've created their own solution, know it's costing them money, ideally suited to become a customer.

Another example shared by the author was when MTV requested campaign analytics and reports in their app. After the company took months to build it, MTV kept asking for manual CSVs to be sent every Friday, then PDFs. It wasn't until they asked for their logo to be added to the PDF that the product team asked why. Turns out the reporting was for their clients. Instead of building fancy analytics in their tool, they could have made something simple to meet the actual need.

Questions to dig into feature requests:

Questions to dig into emotional signals:

The main source of compliment-creation is seeking approval, either intentionally or inadvertently. In most cases, we aren't looking for contradictory information.

When you expose your ego, you lead people to feel they ought to protect you by saying nice things. Even if you give people permission to be honest, they're still going to pull punches.

Keep the conversation focused on the person and ask about specific, concrete examples.

Being pitchy is the dark side of "seeking approval." You hold someone hostage and won't let them leave until they've said they like your idea. Anyone will say your idea is great if you're annoying enough about it.

Examples:

If you catch yourself slipping into pitch mode, just apologize. Cut yourself off and say something like:

You: "Whoops — I just slipped into pitch mode. I'm really sorry about that — I get excited about these things. Can we jump back to what you were just saying? You were telling me that..."

Talk less. You can't learn anything useful unless you're willing to spend a few minutes shutting up. The more you're talking, the worse you're doing.

Ask questions that matter, otherwise you're just spinning your wheels on useless minutiae.

You should be terrified of at least one question you're asking in every conversation. And you should love bad news. If you have $50K and spend $5K learning your customers don't care about it, that's a great result.

The worst thing you can do is ignore bad news in search of some tiny grain of validation. The classic error in response to a lukewarm signal is to try and pitch harder until they say something positive. This only gets you false positives.

Don't zoom to quickly on a super-specific problem or topic before you understand the big picture. It leads to data which seems like validation, but it's just false positives.

Here's an example:

You: "How often do you go to the gym?"

Them: "Not really ever."

Bad Response - You: "What would you say is your biggest problem with going to the gym?" We're zooming in on the gym without knowing if they care about it at all.

Good Response - You: "Why not? When's the last time that you did try? Have you ever joined a gym or taken up jogging or anything?"

Sometimes we already know the problem exists as a top priority and can zoom in right away. For example, "What are your big problems with marketing?" Every small business has marketing problems.

When you're not sure whether a problem is a must-solve (painkiller) or a nice to have (vitamin), ask these does-this-problem-matter questions:

Startups tend to have multiple failure points (Ex. the problems of our customers and their ability to pay us). Both conditions need to exist in order for a product to work.

In the case where you have both product and market risk, you'll need to start building things earlier and with less certainty, because you can't learn everything from conversations.

Always pre-plan the three most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (customer, investor, industry expert, key hire, etc.). Shoot for what seems the murkiest or most important right now.

Don't feel obliged to repeat questions you already have data on. Pick up where you left off and keep filling in the picture.

Knowing your "list of three" allows you to take advantage of chance encounters. Just pop off your top three questions and keep things casual.

Zooming prematurely and introducing your idea too early creates biases and bad data.

Steve Blank's book on customer development, 4 Steps to the Epiphany, talks about needed three separate meetings focused around the problem > your solution > the sale. But setting up three meetings is hard and time consuming.

The solution is to keep it causal, especially when learning about the customers' problem. Always be ready to ask your most important question. Strip out all the formality and the conversations become so lightweight that you can go to an event and come away with a dozen interviews.

Once you've learned about the industry, it's time to start introducing your product. But beware, this invites compliments. You need to cut through compliments with commitments.

Zombie Leads: potential customers or investors that keep say nice things, but never make a concrete commitment.

Advancement — moving to the next steps of your real-world funnel, getting closer to buying.

Commitment — giving up something they value like time, reputation, or money.

The worst meetings are the ones where you leave with no rejection or advancement. You don't learn anything. A lost meeting can usually be saved by brushing off a compliment at the end and pushing for a commitment.

You don't need to be overbearing. You're just cutting through the polite rejections to find out if they're actually interested and on track to becoming a customer/investor/partner.

Keep an eye out for Earlyvangelists — people who get emotional about what you're doing. They are desperate to solve a problem, have already tried to cobble together a solution, and are ready to throw money at you right now to try your product. They want your product to succeed badly and will tell their friends to support it.

If you treat people's time respectfully and are genuinely trying to solve their problems, cold conversations will start turning into warm intros. That's your goal.

Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask —> Very Few Wizards Properly Ask [for help]

Example Email:

Hey Pete,

I'm trying to make desk office and rental less of a pain for new businesses (vision). We're just starting out and don't have anything to sell, but want to make sure we're building something that actually helps (framing).

I've only ever come at it from the tenant's side and I'm having a hard time understanding how it all works from the landlord's perspective (weakness). You've been renting out desks for a while and could help me cut through the fog (pedestal).

Do you have time in the next couple weeks to meet up for a chat? (ask)

Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff. It could take as little as 3-5 for a relatively simple industry. If you've had 10 conversations and you're still hearing very different things, then you may be going too broad with your target customer.

Good customer segmentation is crucial in customer development. if you start too generic, everything is watered down. In the beginning:

Talking to multiple customer segments at once leads to:

Start with any segment and keep slicing off better and better subsegments. Ask:

Once you have a bunch of who-where pairs, decide based on who seems the most:

The incorrect process will get you bad results.

A common anti-pattern is for the business guy to handle all the meetings and subsequently tell the team what they should do.

Owning the conversations creates a dictator with a "the customer said so" trump card.

Avoid creating (or being) the bottleneck —> Prep, Review, Take Good Notes

If you don't know what you're trying to learn, you shouldn't have the conversation.

Logistically, you can choose to do this with a quick chat immediately after the meeting, have a weekly meeting to discuss all conversations, or use a chat tool to quickly share insights whenever you finish a meeting.

Good notes are the best way to keep your team, investors, advisors, in the loop. Make it harder to lie to yourself and provides something to refer back to later.

When possible, write down exact quotes. You can use them later in marketing language, fundraising decks, and to resolve arguments.

Use symbols, emojis, and shorthand to give your notes context.

Emotions:

:) 🙂 Excited

:( 😠 Angry

:| 🙈 Embarrassed

Their Life:

⚡️ Pain or Problem

🥅 Goal or job-to-be-done

🔲 Obstacle

⤴ Workaround

🗻 Background or context

Specifics:

✅ Feature request or purchasing criteria

💲 Money or budgets or purchasing process

👤 Mentioned a specific persona or company

⭐️ Follow-up task

Before a batch of conversations:

During the conversations:

After a batch of interviews