Notes and Takeaways from The Mom Test
Source: Amazon
When I read it: June 2019
Why I read it: The Mom Test was recommended by several trusted friends to help me validate my business ideas. While the book focuses on business idea validation, the concepts discussed can be used to help validate any idea you have.
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My notes
About Rob Fitzpatrick
Rob Fitzpatrick is an entrepreneur and author. His book, The Mom Test (2013), emerged from his frustrations at trying to figure out how to do effective sales and customer development as an introvert.
What is customer development?
Customer development is a way to validate your ideas through conversations with potential customers. Customer development is hard.
What is a customer interview?
A customer interview is one of the simplest ways to do customer development.
Customer interviews are hard because people tend to lie to you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. And when people lie to you, they mislead you. And you form poor conclusions about your ideas.
Everyone lies, but family and friends lie the most. And no one is worse than your mom.
Ask the right questions.
Getting to the truth is all about asking the right questions.
You should not ask anyone whether your business is a good idea. That’s a bad question. This applies to any idea.
Don’t mention your idea. If you avoid mentioning your idea, you’ll be forced to start asking better questions.
Instead, ask questions about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. Gather as much information about them as you can.
Questions are your key tool.
Good questions lead to good conversations, which lead to concrete facts that help you validate and iterate your idea.
Get people talking about themselves and their problems. Then shut up.
The only thing people love talking about more than themselves is their problems.
By taking an interest in someone’s problems, you’re already more interesting than 99% of people.
When someone volunteers to brain dump, shut up and let them.
What is the Mom Test?
The Mom Test is a way to structure your idea validation conversations (i.e., “customer development interviews”) in a way that generates truths instead of lies. (If you can do this the right way, you should even be able to interview your Mom without allowing her to lie to you!)
To pass the Mom Test, you must:
Talk about the person’s life instead of your idea. The key to idea validation is talking to people to learn about them, their lives, and their motivations.
Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future. The past is more useful than the future! People are overly optimistic about what they will do in the future, which leads to lies.
Talk less and listen more. The more you talk, the more you bias the person you’re interviewing.
Three types of misleading responses.
According to Rob Fitzpatrick in The Mom Test, you should beware of three common types of misleading data when trying to validate your idea through customer interviews. The three types of misleading data are compliments, fluff, and ideas. These often take the form of generic claims (e.g., “I usually”, “I always”, “I never”), future-tense promises (“I would”, “I will”), and hypothetical maybes (“I might”, “I could”). While this data is not necessarily bad, it’s not useful for idea validation. The key is to avoid making the mistake of valuing these answers.
How to handle misleading responses.
When bad data starts creeping into your customer conversations, Rob Fitzpatrick recommends getting back on track with the following strategies.
First, deflect compliments. If you get a compliment, pivot to understanding the “why” behind the compliment.
Second, anchor fluff. Use fluff answers to transition to more concrete questioning and anchor them back to specifics in the past.
Third, dig into ideas. When people make requests, it provides an opportunity to dig into their motivations. Find out why they are making the request or suggestion.
Avoid the desire to talk about your idea.
When you talk about your idea, the other person stops talking about themselves.
If you catch yourself, say something like: “Oops—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 saying? You were telling me that…”
If they push you to tell more about your idea, defer it to the end of the meeting by saying something like: “I promise I’ll tell you more in a bit, but I don’t want to bias you with my idea.”
Preparing for a good idea validation conversation
Pre-plan the three most important things you want to learn from any given type of person. Pre-planning your big questions makes it much easier to ask good follow-up questions. Don’t be afraid to update the list as you learn and your questions change.
The less formal you can make the conversation, the better. Once you get used to this, you can start having these interviews with no formality at all, and the people you are talking to won’t even realize they’re being interviewed. For example, at a conference, you could have 10-20 of these conversations in just a few hours.
How long should interviews be?
You can usually get what you came for in 10-15 minutes, but people love telling stories about themselves. If you’re looking to learn about an industry from an expert, you may need an hour or more.
Conversations grow longer as you move from the early broad questions toward more specific ones.
Once you have a product and the meetings take on a more sales-oriented feel, you’ll probably schedule 30-minute blocks.
Don’t “hard sell,” but do seek commitment to some next step during customer conversations.
Design each meeting so that it succeeds or fails based on your receiving a commitment from the person you are meeting with. A meeting has succeeded when it ends with a commitment to advance to the next step.
A commitment requires a person to give something up that they value, such as time, reputation, or money. Commitment is important. It shows us whether people care about what we’re doing. The more they give up, the more we can trust them.
At the end of each conversation, give people a chance to advance by committing to or rejecting some next step. Examples of potential next steps include follow-up conversations, newsletter subscriptions, free trials, beta programs, or purchases.
How to find and have customer interviews.
There are several ways to generate customer interviews. You may need to start by reaching out cold, but the goal of cold conversations should be to get warm introductions to other people.
When you start cold outreach, remember that you only need one “yes” to get going. If you manage your interview right, that one yes will lead to a warm intro or three.
Reach out to people and tell them you are “doing research” and would love to ask them some questions. If you’re willing, add that you’re happy to share the results of your research if they’re interested.
Try creating as many warm introductions as possible. Talk to industry advisors, universities, and investors to get intros. For example, professors are a goldmine for warm intros because they are easy to get in touch with and know a lot of people. (They post their emails online, and you can often wander into their office during the day). Cash in favors with people you’ve helped in the past who may know people you’d like to interview.
Immerse yourself into communities that attack the types of people you want to interview. This can lead to a load of conversations with the right people.
You can create a website landing page with your value proposition and market it online. Once people convert on the landing page, reach out to them for deeper learning.
Look for opportunities to teach what you know. Teaching is undervalued as both a learning and selling tool. Teaching allows you to refine your message and meet people. Teach at conferences, workshops, meetups, and through online videos or by offering free consulting.
Write about your industry online. If you have a blog audience, lining up conversations can be trivial. You just write a post about it and ask people to get in touch. Even if you have no existing audience, blogging can still be a good exercise to organize your thoughts.
Don’t just copy what someone else is doing. Consider your situation and get clever. For example, you could organize a semi-monthly “knowledge exchange” on a relevant emerging trend.
How to ask for and frame a customer interview.
Show vulnerability and give the other person a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem you’re looking for answers to. Make it clear you won’t waste their time. Explicitly ask for help. Be transparent.
Start with focus and avoid generics.
If you start too generic, everything is watered down. Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone. Customer segmentation is your friend. Get specific about your ideal potential customer so you can filter out noise.
(Personal example: At LegUp Health, I will focus initially only on people who are: 1) Utah residents; 2) knowledgeable and passionate about the personal healthcare space; 3) work full time; 4) do not have access to job-based health insurance, 5) willing to invest time in my free beta program and online community; and 6) willing to make me the broker on their health insurance policy.)
How many meetings should you have?
It’s not about “how many” meetings. It’s about having enough meetings for you to understand your customers. You’ll know you can reduce the meetings (or change the format) once you start being able to predict what the person you are interviewing will say next.
Don’t be a bottleneck for learning on your team.
Learning must be shared with the entire team promptly and accurately.
Avoid bottlenecks by prepping together as a team and taking good notes you share with everyone afterward. Write down exact quotes and record the interview when possible. Then, synthesize the key takeaways as a team.