These are my notes from the book “The Mom Test”. I read it after having worked in research for a while, and found it a concise guide to getting the most out of user/customer conversations. Much of what we can learn about a person depends on the questions we ask. Stay curious!

Introduction

  • Learning is an exercise in Excavation = mining for what is there but buried. The truth is down there, but is fragile.
  • Questions can bias the respondent.
  • Goals and Questions are tools.
  • Bad customer conversations give you false signals. False signals waste cash and time of the enterprise.
  • Worst thing that can happen to a startup is no one cares if it disappears.

Chapter 1: The Mom Test

  • Don’t ask if your business is a good idea.
  • The world (and your customers) do not owe you the truth about the problem.
  • Interviews done wrong are worse than interviews not done at all - they give you false signals (false positives). Like convincing a drunk they’re sober - not an improvement.
  • Measure of a useful conversation
    • Whether we receive concrete facts about customers’ life and worldviews.
  • We find out what people care about my never mentioning what we’re doing. Talk about them and their lives.
  • People will lie to you if they think that’s what you want to hear.
  • Customers own the problem. We own the solution.

Chapter 2: Avoiding Bad Data

  • Bad data gives false negatives - thinking the idea is dead when it is not, and false positives - thinking the idea is correct when it isn’t.
  • Types of bad data
    • Compliments
    • Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, the future)
    • Ideas
  • Deflect compliments - you want facts and commitments.
    • That’s cool, I love it!
    • How are you dealing with this at the moment?
    • Oh it’s not that big of a deal! We kind of ignore it
  • Symptoms/Signs for poor data
    • In the meeting
      • Thanks!
      • I’m glad you like it
    • Back at the office
      • That meeting went really well
      • We’re getting a lot of positive feedback
      • Everybody I’ve talked to loves the idea
  • Typology of Fluff:
    • Generic claims (I usually, I always, I never)
    • Future tense promises (I would, I will)
    • Hypothetical maybes (I might, I could)
    • Questions that start with “would you ever”
  • Differentiate between complainers and customers.
  • Dig for emotional signals to understand where they’re coming from.

Chapter 3: Asking Important Questions

  • Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.
  • Worst thing one can do is ignore the bad news while searching for some tiny grain of validation to celebrate. You want the truth. Not a gold star.
  • Don’t zoom in too quickly. Their number 1 problem in X (say fitness) could still be an unimportant one.
  • Good idea to ask for major annoyances, costs, or joys.
  • Anchor, and Dig.
  • Filter market risk vs product risk - e.g. Video games are 100% pure product risk.
    • If you have heavy product risk - conversations alone will not be enough to validate your idea.
  • Prepare a list of 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (customer, investor, industry expert, key hire).
    • Know your biggest risk, goal orientation at any given point in time.

Chapter 4: Keeping it Casual

  • Steve Blank’s approach takes 3 separate meetings to “develop” customers.
    1. About the customer and the problem
    2. About your solution
    3. To sell the product (close)
  • The most precious resource in a startup is its founder’s time.
    • Constantly ask if you’re working on the right problem.
  • You want signals of informality. Keeping the conversation “light” while nudging it in a useful direction is the key.
  • Have a clear next step at the end of the conversation.

Chapter 5: Commitment and Advancement

  • Always move the conversation to the next step. By giving them a clear chance to commit or reject you get out of the startup friendzone to find real leads.
  • Symptoms of the startups friendzone (dead leads)
    • Pipeline of zombie leads
    • Product meetings that end with a compliment
    • Product meetings that end with no clear next steps
    • Meetings which “went well”
    • They haven’t given anything of value.
  • Every meeting either succeeds or fails.
    • If you don’t know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless.
  • Commitments can be cash, but they don’t have to be.
  • Three currencies of a conversation: time, reputation risk, and cash.
    • Time Commitments
      • Clear next meetings with known goals
      • Sitting down to give feedback on wireframes
      • Using a trial of the product for a non-trivial period
    • Reputational Risk Commitments
      • Intro to peers or team
      • Intro to a decision maker (boss, spouse, lawyer)
      • Giving a public testimonial or case study
    • Financial commitments
      • Letter of intent (non-legal but gentlemanly agreement to purchase)
      • Pre-order
      • Deposit
  • Signs of bad meetings
    • That’s so cool I love it! > just a compliment, does not signal commitment or interest.
    • Looks great, let me know when it launches > stalling tactic
    • There are a couple of people I can introduce you to when you’re ready > could be better, they might be flexing - get more details and force timelines.
  • Signs of good meetings
    • Cool. What are the next steps? > Caveat - even clear next steps can be a lie. Everything can be a lie.
    • When can we start the trial? > maybe good.
    • Can I buy the prototype? GREAT
    • When can you come back and talk to the rest of the team? > good but for consumer can be murkier since the purchase journey is different.
  • Key takeaways:
    • When someone isn’t too emotional about what you’re doing, they are unlikely to end up being one of the crazy first customers.
    • Whenever you see deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close.
  • In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is a side effect.

Chapter 6: Finding Conversations

  • Drumming up conversations from cold leads is hard.
  • The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them.
  • Cold calling
    • Rejection rate is irrelevant.
    • You only need one yes to get you started.
    • Beyond hard hustle, you need to be open to serendipity.
  • Bringing them to you: bringing people to you also makes them take you more seriously and want to help you more. How can you plant a flag your customers can see? What can you offer them that will make them want to talk to you?
    • The best leads are inbound.
  • Ways to find conversations
    • Going to them
    • Cold calls
    • Seizing serendipity
    • Finding a good excuse
    • Immerse yourself in where they are
    • Landing pages (bringing them to you)
    • Organize meetups
      • Rapid way to build credibility in an industry
    • Speaking and Teaching
    • Industry blogging
  • Warm intros are the goal.
  • Kevin Bacon - the seven degrees of separation.
  • Types of people to reach out to
    • Industry Advisors
    • Universities
    • Investors (Top tier investors are awesome for B2B intros)
  • Email Template
    • Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask
    • Very Few Wizards Properly Ask for help!
  • You set the agenda, framing, and tone.
  • Spend energy finding clever ways to generate warm intros instead. You want to be the type of company that gets inbound from customers and investors.
  • You get more data from in person meetings.
  • Don’t go into the conversations looking for customers - it creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power.
  • The way to overcome difficult situations isn’t to power through, but rather to change your circumstances to require less willpower.
  • Keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information - i.e. strive for thematic saturation.

Chapter 7: Choosing Your Customers

  • Incredibly important to segment customers and prioritize.

Startups typically don’t starve, they drown. You never have too few ideas, leads, or options, you have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything. When it comes to getting above water and ,making faster progress, good customer segmentation is your best friend.

  • If your startup is too generic - everything gets watered down.
  • Talking to multiple segments in the same problem space has the following problems:
    • You get overwhelmed by options and don’t know where to start
    • You aren’t moving forward but can’t prove yourself wrong
    • You receive mixed feedback and can’t make sense of it
  • E.g. all in one nutrition pill - for babies or for bodybuilders?
  • Avoid dealing with unfalsifiable hypotheses.
  • Getting specific about your customers allows you to filter out all the noise which comes from everyone else
  • Know the difference between 20 conversations with your customers vs 1 conversation with 20 customers.
    • Can spot this when receiving inconsistent feedback.
    • In this case, experts are usually super helpful. They provide a taxonomy of the industry.
  • If customer feedback is all over the map, you cant extract value. Once you get specific, you can learn.
  • Learning will go faster if we choose respondents on the following criteria:
    • Reachability - who can we get to easily?
    • Profitable - who has money?
    • Personally rewarding - for us as well as for them.
  • Good customer segments are who-where pairs
  • Common traps you’re talking to the wrong people
    • You have too broad of a segment and are talking to everyone
    • You have multiple customer segments and missed some of them
    • You are selling to businesses with a complicated buying process and have overlooked some of the stakeholders
  • You want to talk to people who are representative of your customers, not the ones who sound impressive on your status report.

Chapter 8: Running the Process

  • Even if you do everything right, you can get bad results if you have bad process wrapped around your conversations.
  • Telling the team “what I learned” is functionally equivalent to telling them “what you’ll do”
    • Problem managerially
    • But also a problem because it’s easy to misinterpret what the customer has said
  • Learning bottlenecks can come from two ends
    • Founder in touch with customers can do a bad job of sharing it
    • Product teams can refuse to engage with the customers and what they say
  • Symptoms of a learning bottleneck
    • You just worry about the product. I’ll handle the customers.
    • Because the customers told me so!
    • I don’t have time to talk to people - I need to be coding!
  • Avoiding bottlenecks is a three step process:
    • 1. Prepping
    • 2. Reviewing
    • 3. Taking good notes
  • It’s easier to guide the conversation and keep conversation on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that need constant updating.
  • If questions can be answered with some quick desk research - do it.
  • Sit down with the founding team when you prep. If you leave part of the company out of prep, then you end up missing their concerns in the customer conversations.
  • DO the diligence on the internet, linkedin, and the company website
  • IF you don’t know what you’re trying to learn - you shouldn’t bother having the conversation.
  • Always takes notes + code your qualitative data
  • Reviewing
    • After a conversation, share notes with the team.
    • Talk through key quotes and main takeaways from the conversation + any probem you ran into.
    • Which questions worked and which did not? How can we do better next time?
    • You have to actively practice to get better - a valuable skill for the team.
    • For remote teams: there’s an open chat window of customer conversations to learn from and track.
  • Meetings - usually 2 people - one to lead the interview the other to take notes.
  • Focus on understanding the process and getting better
  • The importance of taking notes
    • Make knowledge searchable
    • Makes it harder to lie to yourself
    • Can return to notes when looking for new direction
  • Coding data
    • any strong emotion is worth writing down.
      • 😀excited
      • 🙁 angry
      • 😐embrassed
    • Their life
      • ▶️ pain or problem
      • 🥅 goal
      • 🛑 obstacle
      • ⛑️ workaround etc
  • Can use different emojis/codes -but it’s important to code the data.
  • Pains an obstacles carry more weight when someone is embarrassed or angry about them.
  • Money signals are also key:
    • ✅feature request or purchasing criteria
    • $ money or budgets or purchasing proess
    • 👻 specific person or company
    • ⭐follow up task
  • Take customer notes so that they are:
    • Able to be sorted, mixed, and rearranged
    • Able to be combined with the notes to the rest of your team
    • Permanent and retrievable
    • Not mixed in with other random noise like to do lists and ideas.

The Process

  • Warnings signs you’re just going through the motions
    • You’re talking more than they are
    • They are complementing you or your idea
    • You told them about your idea and don’t have next steps
    • 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 what you’re trying to learn in this conversation
  • Before a batch of conversations
    • Choose a focused, findeable segment
    • With your team, decide 3 big learning goals
    • If relevant, deicide on ideal next steps and commitments
    • If conversations are the right tool, figure out who to talk to
    • Create a series of best guesses about what the person cares about
    • If a question can be answered via desk research, do that first
  • During the conversation
    • Frame the conversation
    • Keep it casual
    • Ask good questions
    • Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath signals
    • Take good notes
    • If relevant, press for commitment and next steps
  • After a batch of conversations
    • With your team, review your notes and key customer quotes
    • If relevant, transfer notes into permanent storage
    • Update your beliefs and plan
    • Decide on the next 3 big questions

Goal of The Process

  1. Ensure you’re spending time well by attacking the questions which matter, and making use of the brains of the whole founding team.
  2. To spread new learning to your team as quickly and completely as possible.

Remember not to worry too much, eternity will forgive.

Note on Speed

  • Don’t spend a week prepping for meetings. Spend an hour and then go talk to people. Anything more is stalling.
  • Don’t spend months doing full time customer conversations before beginning to move on a product. Spend a week, maybe two. Get your bearings and then give them something to commit to.

Hacking It

The Gordian Knot - In ancient times it was prophesied that whoever undid the convoluted Gordian Knot would rule the land. Coming across the knot, Alexander drew his sword with a single stroke, cutting it in half. The knot was undone and he became “the Great”.

There’s no “right way”. There’s the way that works and the way that doesn’t.

Asking for the meeting:

  • Vision - sentence on how we’re making the world better
  • Framing - where you’re at and what you’re looking for
  • Weakness - where you’re stuck and how you can be helped
  • Pedestal - show that they in particular can provide that help
  • Ask - ask for help
  • What do we want to learn from these guys?

Bad Good
Do you think X is a good idea? NA. Wrong question.
Would you buy a product which did X? How do you currently solve for X? How much does it cost you to do so?
Can you walk me through how you solved it the last time X came up?
Have you tried searching for solutions?
If the problem is unsolved - why?
How much would you pay for X?
Would you pay X for a product that did Y? 		How much does this problem cost you?
How do you currently pay to solve it?
How big is your budget?
What would your dream product do? Meh. Can get more specific features.
What are the implications of that?
Filter “I will pay $ to solve this” from “I’ll do it myself”
Why do you bother? (points to motivations)
What are the implications of that?
Filter “I will pay $ to solve this” from “I’ll do it myself”
Talk me through the last time that happened
Evokes stories - show not tell.
What else have you tried?
How are you dealing with it now?
Where does the money come from? (B2B)
Pitches will hit a snag if we don’t know where the capital flows come from, and what those people care about? Important for building a repeatable sales roadmap.
Buyer =! Customer in B2B
Who else should I talk to?
Always multiply leads via intros.
Does this problem matter? > gets to values

How seriously do you take X?

Do you make money from x?

Have you tried making this faster/better/cheaper?

How much time do you spend on it each week?

Do you have any major aspirations for X?

What are you doing to improve this?

What are the 3 big things you’re trying to fix or improve right now?

Customer Segmentation Questions

Within this group, which type of person would want it the most?

Would everyone in this group buy or use it? Or only some?

Why does the subset want it? What is their specific problem?

Does everyone in the group have the same motivation or only some?

What additional motivations are there?

Which other types of people have these motivations?