The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

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Summary

How to have conversations with customers that will reveal the truth about their needs or wants. Often customers will misguide you with their feedback for a variety of reasons and tell you what you want to hear. This book explains how to frame your communications and questions so that you learn valuable insight from customers.

Notes and Quotes

This book is about customer conversation - how to learn from them instead of messing it up and being told what you want to hear.

1. The Mom Test

The Mom Test is a set of questions you can ask so you aren’t lied to (even by your mom). 1. Talk about their life instead of your idea 2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of genetics or opinions about the future. 3. Talk less and listen more

If they haven’t looked for ways to solve their problem already, they won’t buy your product.

Ask questions about your customers’ problems, cares, constraints, and goals.

2. Bad Data

3 types of bad data (try to deflect away from these and get back to the mom test): 1. Compliments 2. Fluff (hypotheticals, genetics, the future) 3. Ideas

Compliments

Opinions (compliments) are worthless. You want facts and commitments.

You know you don’t have a compliment if you can answer the following: Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save him? How would it fit into his life? What else has he tried which failed to solve his problem? If you don’t know, then you’ve got a compliment instead of real data.

Fluff

When people use Generics, hyptoyheticals, they usually describe how they want things to be, not how they are. Ask questions to dig into the last time the hypothetical broke/fell apart. Ask how recently that was. Have them walk through the process.

Complainers complain about problems. “Have you tried googling a solution/downloading an app to fix that?” Customers have taken active steps and haven’t yet solved them. Complainers just complain.

Ideas

Ideas are ok as a starting point, but don’t let them drive your todo list in fear of ever growing scope.

Dig into ideas to see if they are “nice but not crucial” vs “the only reason we haven’t bought other products is because of this feature”. Requests should be better understood not obeyed.

Listen More

That’s it. You’ll be tempted to correct something wrong. Or brag about what you’ve already built. But instead ask questions, shut up, and listen.

When you hear a request, 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.

Also dig around any strong emotions response - WHY are they reacting that way?

3. Asking Important Questions

You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you're asking in every conversation. You want to figure out a business-ruining question to get it out of the way now before you do a bunch of wasted work on it.

Zoom out. Understand what a persons problems are, don’t lead them into whether your product is a solution for them. Your product might not even address their main problem. Ask “does this problem actually matter.” - “How seriously do you take your blog?” - “Do you make money from it?” - “Have you tried making more money from it?” - “How much time do you spend on it each week?” - “Do you have any major aspirations for your blog?” - “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?”

There is product risk and customer risk. Asking a customer “do you want to play a super fun game?” will always produce an answer of yes. You then just have to actually deliver an amazing product - that is where the risk is.

Plan on 3 questions to ask in every meeting. Preparing hard questions makes you more likely to ask them.

4. Keeping It Casual

Quick casual chats to learn about problems after usually better than formal meetings. You can ask your most important questions and still get data.

Just be a good conversationalist and you’ll have good impromptu meetings that learn about the customer’s problems.

5. Commitment and Advancement

Once you understand your product and what people want, ask for commitments to ensure they are really on board (and not just providing compliments).

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 purchasing.

Meeting results are binary - they succeed if they end with a commitment to advance to the next step. Anything other than that is a failure (probably compliments but no action).

Asking for commitment at the end of a meeting and not getting it is ok - it every project will move to a next step. If you are scared and don’t ask for commitment, you stay in limbo and have failed.

6. Finding Conversations

The only thing people like talking about more than themselves, is their problems.

If it’s a topic you both care about, find an excuse to talk about it. Your idea never needs to enter the equation and you’ll both enjoy the chat.

Don’t worry about minimizing your failure rate for getting conversations. Focus on getting only a few good conversations.

If needing to ask an opinion for “how am I doing, use this format for your email: 1. You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z. Don’t mention your idea. 2. Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell. 3. Show weakness and give them a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster. 4. Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help. 5. Explicitly ask for help. Check out the book for some examples of these.

7. Choosing Your Customers

You can’t be generic and sell to everyone at first. Pick a customer segment you are most likely to sell to and build and sell for them first.

If you have a generic audience, slice off subsets until you find the one that is most motivated and willing to pay.

8. Running the Process

Don’t be the customer learning bottleneck. Don’t talk to the customer and then delegate to others. Not only do you have a good chance to get it wrong, but it’s the most extreme version of dictatorship “do what I tell you because the customer said so”. Let your people work with the customer so they can then troubleshoot and understand the problems as well.

Avoid bottlenecks with: prepping, reviewing, taking good notes. 1. Prep- what do we want to learn from this customer? 2. Review- review meeting with team to make sure everyone heard the same things. Also do meta review - did we ask the right questions? How can we do better next time? 3. Good notes - use quotes from customers with “. Use symbols to indicate type of note. Things that help are the customers problem, their goal, obstacles, workarounds. - ☇ Pain or problem (symbol is a lightning bolt) - ⨅ Goal or job-to-be-done (symbol is a soccer/football goal) - ☐ Obstacle - ⤴ Workaround - ^ Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain) - ☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria - ＄ Money or budgets or purchasing process - ♀ Mentioned a specific person or company - ☆ Follow-up task

Other Books/ Resources

Steve Blank 4 steps to the Epiphany and The Startip Owners Manual books about Customer Development