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

The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and world views. These facts, in turn, help us improve our business.

Dig into interesting and unexpected answers to understand the behaviours and motivations behind them.

” Get specific about examples in the past to get real, concrete data.

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 he’s sober: not an improvement.

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.

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.

before we can start doing things correctly, we need to understand how we’re doing them wrong.

Rule of thumb: Some problems don’t actually matter.