Overview
Offers practical advice for entrepreneurs on how to gather honest, valuable feedback from potential customers. The book emphasizes that instead of asking people if they like your idea—which often leads to polite but unreliable responses—entrepreneurs should focus on understanding customers' actual problems, past behaviors, and needs. By asking about real experiences and specific challenges rather than hypothetical scenarios, this approach minimizes biased feedback and helps validate ideas more effectively.
Notes
A big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late
Talk about people and their lives to see if your idea fits in don’t talk about your idea
Mom Test
Talk about their life instead of your idea
Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
Talk less and listen more
Rule of thumb: Customer conversations are bad by default. It's your job to fix them.
Rule of thumb: Opinions are worthless.
Rule of thumb: Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.
Rule of thumb: You're shooting blind until you understand their goals.
Rule of thumb: Some problems don't actually matter.
Rule of thumb: Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are.
Rule of thumb: If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) your
Good questions
Where is the money coming from? For b2b customers
How are you dealing with it now?
What else have you tried
What are the implications of that
Talk me through the last time that happened
Why do you bother
Who else should I talk to?
Is there anything else I should have asked?
Three types of bad data
1. Compliments
2. Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future)
3. Ideas
Remember you don't need to end up with what you wanted to hear in order to have a good conversation. You just need to get to the truth.
Here's a good conversation with a solid negative result:
"That meeting went really well."
"We're getting a lot of positive feedback."
"Everybody I've talked to loves the idea."
All of these are warning signs. If you catch yourself or your teammates saying something like this, try to get specific. 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.
Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool's gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless.
Fluff comes in 3 cuddly shapes:
Generic claims (*I usually", "I always", "I never")
Future-tense promises ("I would", "I will"
Hypothetical maybes ("I might", "I could")
Questions to dig into feature requests:
"Why do you want that?"
"What would that let you do?"
"How are you coping without it?"
"Do you think we should push back the launch add that feature, or is it something we could add later?"
Questions to dig into emotional signals:
"Tell me more about that."
"That seems to really bug you — I bet there's a story here."
"What makes it so awful?"
"Why haven't you been able to fix this already?"
"You seem pretty excited about that — it's a big deal?"
"Why so happy?"
"Go on."
Rule of thumb: Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.
Rule of thumb: If you've mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.
Rule of thumb: The more you're talking, the worse you're doing.
In addition to ensuring that you aren't asking trivialities, you also need to look for the world-rocking scary questions you're shrinking from. The best way to find them is to run thought experiments, Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces.
There's no easy solution to making yourself face and ask these questions. I once heard the general life advice that, for unpleasant tasks, you should imagine what you would have someone else do if you were delegating it.
Then do that.
If you have a lot of product risk with your product you’ll have to start building product earlier and with less certainty than if you had pure market risk
Prepare your list of 3
Always pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person.
Rule of thumb: If it feels like they're doing you a favour by talking to you, it's probably too formal.
Rule of thumb: If you don't know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless.
Time Commitment
Clear next meeting with known goals
Sitting down to give feedback on wireframes
Using a trial themselves for a non-trivial period
Reputation Commitment
Intro to peers or team
Intro to a decision maker (boss, spouse, lawyer)
Giving a public testimonial or case study
Financial Commitment
Letter of intent (non-legal but gentlemanly agreement to purchase)
Pre-order
Deposit
Rule of thumb: It's not a real lead until you ve given them a concrete chance to reject you.
Rule of thumb: Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stull.
Rule of thumb: If you aren't finding consistent problems and goals, you don't yet have a specific enough customer segment.
Signs you are going through the motion of a meeting:
You're talking more than they are
They are complimenting you or your idea
You told them about your idea and don't know what's happening next
You don't have notes
You haven't looked through your notes with your team
You got an unexpected answer and it didn't change your idea
You weren't scared of any of the questions you asked
You aren't sure which big question you're trying to answer by doing this
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