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

Willpower is a finite resource. The way to overcome difficult situations isn’t to power through, but rather to change your circumstances to require less willpower. Changing the context of the meeting to “looking for advisors” is the equivalent of throwing out all your chocolate when you start a diet. You change the environment to naturally facilita

To fix it, look for a commitment you can ask for today. If you are very early stage, you might ask for an introduction to his boss or tech team or the budget-holder so you can “make sure you fully understand their needs.” The point is just to find something to ask for that they are going to think twice about giving you.

Your 3 questions will be different for each type of person you’re talking to. If you have multiple types of customers or partners, have a list for each. Don’t stress too much about choosing the “right” important questions. They will change. Just choose whatever seems murkiest or most important right now.

Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (e.g. customers, investors, industry experts, key hires, etc). Update the list as your questions change.

What all this does mean is that if you’ve got heavy product risk (as opposed to pure market risk), then you’re not going to be able to prove as much of your business through conversations alone. The conversations give you a starting point, but you’ll have to start building product earlier and with less certainty than if you had pure market risk.

Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Customer/market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them?

Startups tend to have multiple failure points (e.g. the problems of the teachers and the ability of the schools to pay us). If any of these conditions doesn't exist, we must overhaul our idea. It’s tempting to obsess over the most interesting of several failure points and ignore the others. And then we miss important questions.

Zooming in too quickly on a super-specific problem before you understand the rest of the customers life can irreparably confuse your learnings.

Rule of thumb: Start broad and don't zoom in until you’ve found a strong signal, both with your whole business and with every conversation.