The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone is Lying to You

Introduction

Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you’re 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 it’s 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 it—and dig deep—but every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person we’re talking to and rendering the whole exercise pointless. It happens more than you’d ever imagine.

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

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. Isn’t that exactly what talking to people is meant to prevent?

It turns out almost all of us are doing it wrong. I’ve 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. We’d nearly run out of investor money and it didn’t look like we’d be getting more. We’d relocated internationally to be closer to our market and had survived a co-founder being deported. I’d been talking to customers full-time for months. And then, after innumerable days of slog and an exhausted team, I learned I’d been doing it wrong. I may as well not have bothered.

The advice that you should talk to customers is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. It’s like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to just be cooler. You still have to know how to actually do it.

These conversations take time, are easy to screw up and go wrong in a nefarious way. Bad customer conversations aren’t just useless. Worse, they convince you that you’re on the right path. They give you a false positive that causes you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team. Even when you’re 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. It’s 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.

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

Why another book on talking and selling?

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.

Here’s why:

Firstly, I’m a techie, not a sales guy. I’m 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, Don’t call me, I’ll 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 there’s a big gap between textbooks and check books.

Secondly, before we can start doing things correctly, we need to understand how we’re doing them wrong. Through my own projects and my work with new founders, I’ve built up an exhaustive list of how it can go wrong. Throughout the book, I’ll try to help you see 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? It’s all in here.

I can’t teach you how to make your business huge. That’s 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. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.

A note on scope & terminology

This book isn’t a summary or description or re-interpretation of the process of Customer Development. That’s a bigger concept and something Steve Blank has covered comprehensively in 4 Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s 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, I’m 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. I’m not trying to convince you again, so this book is more how than why.

Let’s get involved.

Chapter 1

The Mom Test

People say you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea. That’s technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn’t 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 it’s a bad question and invites everyone to lie to you at least a little.

It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s 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.

Failing the mom test

Son: Mom, mom, I have an idea for a business — can I run it by you? I am about to expose my ego — please don’t hurt my feelings.

Mom: Of course, dear. You are my only son and I am ready to lie to protect you.

Son: You like your iPad, right? You use it a lot?

Mom: Yes. You led me to this answer, so here you go.

Son: Okay, so would you ever buy an app which was like a cookbook for your iPad? I am optimistically asking a hypothetical question and you know what I want you to say.

Mom: Hmmm. As if I need another cookbook at my age.

Son: And it only costs $40 — that’s cheaper than those hardcovers on your shelf. I’m going to skip that lukewarm signal and tell you more about my great idea.

Mom: Well... Aren’t apps supposed to cost a dollar?

Son: And you can share recipes with your friends, and there’s an iPhone app which is your shopping list. And videos of that celebrity chef you love. Please just say yes. I will not leave you alone until you do.

Mom: "Oh, well yes honey, that sounds amazing. And you’re right, $40 is a good deal. Will it have pictures of the recipes?" I have rationalised the price outside of a real purchase decision, made a non-committal compliment, and offered a feature request to appear engaged.

Son: Yes, definitely. Thanks mom — love you! I have completely mis-interpreted this conversation and taken it as validation.

Mom: Won’t you have some lasagna? I am concerned that you won’t be able to afford food soon. Please eat something.

Our misguided entrepreneur has a few more conversations like this, becomes increasingly convinced he’s right, quits his job, and sinks his savings into the app. Then he wonders why nobody (even his mom) buys it, especially since he had been so rigorous.

Doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing at all. When you know you’re clueless, you tend to be careful. But collecting a fistful of false positives is like convincing a drunk