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

These guys weren’t having 20 conversations with their customers. They were having one conversation each with 20 different types of customers. That’s why the feedback was so inconsistent.

Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.

If there isn’t a clear physical or digital location at which you can find your customer segment, then it’s probably still too broad.

Give as little information as possible about your idea while still nudging the discussion in a useful direction.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

Rule of thumb: People stop lying when you ask them for money.

With the exception of industry experts who have built very similar businesses, opinions are worthless. You want facts and commitments, not compliments.

The reason Kickstarter is so wonderful is because it forces customers who say they would buy it to actually pull out a credit card and commit.

"What are the implications of that?" Good question. This distinguishes between I-will-pay-to-solve-that problems and thats-kind-of-annoying-but-I-can-deal-with-it “problems”. Some problems have big, costly implications. Others exist but don’t actually matter.