The Mom Test

The Mom Test
Author: Rob Fitzpatrick

What is this book about?
How to have great conversations with your customers (rather anybody) to understand problems and build great products (solutions).

• You aren’t allowed to tell customers what their problem is; in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

Avoid bad data.

There are three types of bad data:

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

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

Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not
obeyed.

The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.

Asking Great Questions.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Sometimes we comfort ourselves by asking questions which don’t
  actually de-risk the business or resolve those critical, big, scary, lurking
  questions. We ignore the elephant in the room.

• Beyond the risks of our customers and market, we also have challenges with our own product. Overlooking the product risks is just as deadly as overlooking the goals and constraints of our customers.

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?

Tip: For your conversations with your customers, prepare a list of the Top 3 questions.

Keep it informal

• Being too formal is a crutch we use to deal with an admittedly ambiguous
  and awkward situation. Instead of leaving wiggle room for the unexpected,
  everything becomes a process.

• Don't make it feel like customers are doing a favor by talking to you. Even within a more formal meeting, you still might want to keep it casual if you’re hoping to get non-biased feedback. Give as little information as possible about your idea while still nudging the discussion in a useful direction.

Commitment & Advancement

• Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up
  something they value such as time, reputation, or money.

• Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world
  funnel and getting closer to a sale.

• In early-stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is just
  a side-effect.

• Rejection is not a real failure. But not asking certainly is. This can happen
  because you avoid the scary question or because you haven’t figured out
  what the next steps should be.

Finding conversations

• You can find anyone you need if you ask for it a couple times.
• 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. 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.
• Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone.
• If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t yet have a specific enough customer segment.
• If you don’t know where to go to find your customers, keep slicing your segment into smaller pieces until you do.
• Talk to people who are representative of your customers.

Running the process

• You create a learning bottleneck when all the learnings are stuck in your head instead of spreading to the rest of the team.
• Share learnings, through notes, with your team promptly and faithfully.
• When possible, write down exact quotes.
• Review Notes with your team.