Rob Fitzpatrick - The Mom Test: how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everybody is lying to you

The Mom Test: how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everybody is lying to you

by Rob Fitzpatrick

a foundercentric.com book

Contents

Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but its fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, youre liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.

I see a lot of teams using a bulldozer and crate of dynamite for their excavation. They are, in one way or another, forcing people to say something nice about their business. They use heavy-handed questions like do you think its a good idea and shatter their prize.

At the other end of the spectrum, some founders are using a toothbrush to unearth a city, flinching away from digging deep and finding out whether anything of value is actually buried down there.

We want to find the truth of how to make our business succeed. We need to dig for itand dig deepbut every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person were talking to and rendering the whole exercise pointless. It happens more than youd ever imagine.

The truth is our goal and questions are our tools. But we must learn to wield them. Its delicate work. And well worth learning. Theres treasure below.

Is this book for you?

Hello,

Youve read about Customer Development or Lean Startup and arent sure how to actually go about having your first customer conversation.

Youre a traditional business or sales person aiming to be more effective within a young company which hasnt yet found its business model.

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

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

Youre raising funding and the investors want to see more evidence that youre solving a real problem.

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

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

Youve always wanted to build your own company and want to start making real progress today.

This book is for you.

Talking to customers is hard

We know we ought to talk to customers. Many of us even do talk to customers. But we still end up building stuff nobody buys. Isnt that exactly what talking to people is meant to prevent?

It turns out almost all of us are doing it wrong. Ive made these mistakes myself and seen them happen a hundred times over with other founders. Despite the recent explosion of startup knowledge, the process of figuring out what customers want too often unfolds as it did at my first company, Habit.

We were building social advertising tech and I was distraught. We'd spent 3 years working our hearts out. Wed nearly run out of investor money and it didnt look like wed be getting more. Wed relocated internationally to be closer to our market and had survived a co-founder being deported. Id been talking to customers full-time for months. And then, after innumerable days of slog and an exhausted team, I learned Id been doing it wrong. I may as well not have bothered.

The advice that you ought to be talking to your customers is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. Its like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to just be cooler. They forget to mention that its hard.

These conversations take time, are easy to screw up and go wrong in a nefarious way. Bad customer conversations arent just useless. Worse, they convince you that youre on the right path. They give you a false positive which causes you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team. Even when youre not actively screwing something up, those pesky customers seem hellbent on lying to you.

This book is a practical how-to. The approach and tools within are gathered from a wide range of communities including Customer Development, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, User Experience, traditional sales and more. Its based on working with a bunch of founders and from my experiences both failing and succeeding at customer learning, as well as from the support of innumerable peers and mentors.

Its a casual approach to conversation, based on chipping away the formality and awkwardness of talking to people and taking responsibility for asking good questions.

Does your shelf really need another book on selling and talking? And does it need one written by me in particular?

Well yes. Yes it does.

Heres why:

Firstly, Im a techie, not a sales guy. Im introverted and naturally bad in meetings. Every other sales book I've read is written by and for folks who are already pretty good at dealing with people. They know the unspoken rules of the meeting. I fumbled through from scratch. You know that line, Dont call me, Ill call you? People have actually said that to me (and I believed them). With much help from peers and advisors, I eventually started figuring it out and we closed deals with companies like Sony and MTV. But I learned that theres a big gap between textbooks and check books.

Secondly, before we can start doing things correctly, we need to understand how were doing them wrong. Through my own projects and my work with new founders, Ive built up an exhaustive list of how it can go wrong. Throughout the book, Ill try to help you figure out where you might be messing stuff up in unnoticed ways.

Finally, this is a practical handbook, not a theoretical tome. For example, how do you find people to talk to and set up the meetings? How do you take notes while still being polite and paying attention? Its all in here.

I cant teach you how to make your business huge. Thats up to you. But I can give you the tools to talk to customers, navigate the noise, and learn what they really want. The saddest thing that can happen to a startup is for nobody to care when it disappears. Were going to make sure that doesnt happen.

A note on scope & terminology

This book isnt a summary or description or re-interpretation of the process of Customer Development. Thats a bigger concept and something Steve Blank has covered comprehensively in 4 Steps to the E.piphany and The Startup Owners Manual.

This book is specifically about how to properly talk to customers and learn from them. Talking is one of the big aspects of Customer Development, but shouldn't be confused with the whole process. To keep the distinction clear, Im going to refer to chatting with people as customer conversation (lowercase) instead of Customer Development (uppercase).

For the most part, I'm assuming you already agree that talking to customers is a good idea. Im not trying to convince you again, so this book is more how than why.

Lets get involved.

People say you shouldnt ask your mom whether your business is a good idea. Thats technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldnt ask anyone whether your business is a good idea. At least not in those words. Your mom will lie to you the most (just cuz she loves you), but its a bad question and invites everyone to lie to you at least a little.

Its not anyone elses responsibility to show us the truth. Its our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.

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

Before we get there, let's look at two conversations with mom and see what we can learn about our business idea: digital cookbooks for the iPad.