Source

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your …

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save…

www.goodreads.com

Book Highlights

Bad customer conversations aren’t just useless. Worse, they convince you that you’re on the right path. They give you a false positive which 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.

The Mom Test is a set of simple rules for crafting good questions that even your mom can't lie to you about.

collecting a fistful of false positives is like convincing a drunk he’s sober: not an improvement.

Doing it wrong is worse than doing nothing at all. When you know you’re clueless, you tend to be careful. But

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, allow us to improve our business.

Mom was unable to lie to us because we never talked about our idea.

We find out if people care about what we’re doing by never mentioning it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

The point is a bit more subtle than this. Eventually you do need to mention what you’re building and take people’s money for it. However, the big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late.

If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions. Doing this is the easiest (and biggest) improvement you can make to your customer conversations.

Here are 3 simple rules to help you. They are collectively called (drumroll) The Mom Test: The Mom Test: Talk about their life instead of your idea Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future Talk less and listen more

Rule of thumb: Customer conversations are bad by default. It’s your job to fix them.

Rule of thumb: Opinions are worthless.

"Would you buy a product which did X?"

You’re asking for opinions and hypotheticals from overly optimistic people who want to make you happy. The answer to a question like this is almost always “yes”, which makes it worthless.

Let’s fix it: Ask how they currently solve X and how much it costs them to do so.

Rule of thumb: Anything involving the future is an over-optimistic lie.

Rule of thumb: People will lie to you if they think it’s what you want to hear.

Keep your ego off the table

Rule of thumb: People know what their problems are, but they don’t know how to solve those problems.

The value comes from understanding why they want these features. You don’t want to just collect feature requests. You aren’t building the product by committee. But the motivations and constraints behind those requests are critical.

"Why do you bother?" Good question. I love this sort of question. It’s great for getting from the perceived problem to the real one.

Rule of thumb: You're shooting blind until you understand their goals.

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

good stories are meant to “show, not tell”.

"Talk me through the last time that happened."

Whenever possible, you want to be shown, not told by your customers. Learn through their actions instead of their opinions.

Rule of thumb: Watching someone do a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are.

In the abstract, it’s something he would “definitely” pay to solve. Once we got specific, he didn't even care enough to search for a solution (which do exist, incidentally).

Rule of thumb: If they haven't looked for ways of solving

Rule of thumb: If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) yours.

"Would you pay X for a product which did Y?" Bad question. The fact that you’ve added a number doesn’t help. This is bad for the same reasons as the others: people are overly optimistic about what they would do and want to make you happy. Plus, it’s about your idea instead of their life.

Common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value to the customer rather than cost to you. That's true. And you can't quantify the value received without prodding their financial worldview.

Rule of thumb: While it’s rare for someone to tell you precisely what they’ll pay you, they’ll often show you what it’s worth to them.

"How are you dealing with it now?" Good question. Beyond workflow information, this gives you a price anchor. If they’re paying £100/month for a duct-tape workaround, you know which ballpark you're playing in. On the other hand, they may have spent £120,000 this year on agency fees to maintain a site you're replacing. If that's the case, you don't want to be having the £100 conversation.

This knowledge of their purchasing process will eventually turn into a repeatable sales roadmap. "Who

"Who else should I talk to?" Good question. Yes! End every conversation like this. Lining up the first few conversations can be challenging, but if you’re onto something interesting and treating people well, your leads will quickly multiply via intros.

Rule of thumb: People want to help you, but will rarely do so unless you give them an excuse to do so.

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution. Once you’ve taken the leap, you confirm that it’s correct

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

Bad data gives us false negatives (thinking the idea is dead when it’s not) and—more dangerously—false positives (convincing yourself you’re right when you’re not).

There are three types of bad data: Compliments Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future) Ideas

The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid them completely by not mentioning your idea. If they happen anyway, you need to deflect the compliment and get on with the business of gathering facts and commitments.

Most of your meetings will end with a compliment. It feels good. They said they liked it!  Unfortunately, they’re almost certainly lying. Not necessarily intentionally. They might want to be supportive or to protect your feelings. Or your excitement might be rubbing off on them.

That compliment made me suspicious. Let's deflect it and find out whether they're a potential customer or are just trying to get rid of me.

Let's ignore & deflect that compliment to focus on the fact that they’re spending a lot of money to solve this. Two full time staff!? I didn’t know it was worth this much.

Remember though: you don’t need to end up with what you wanted to hear in order to have a good conversation. You just need to get to the truth.

If you pitch and ask for nothing, you dont get any valuable signals. Ask follow up questions

If you pitch and ask for nothing, you dont get any valuable signals. Ask follow up questions

Did you notice that in the conversations above, practically every response contains a sneaky compliment? They are pervasive, constantly trying to trick us into thinking the conversation “went well”.

Ignoring compliments should be easy, but it’s not. We so desperately want to hear them that we are often tricked into registering them as positive data points instead of vacuous fibs. Sometimes it’s easier to spot the symptoms than to notice the original compliment.

Symptoms (in the meeting):  “Thanks!” “I’m glad you like it.”

Symptoms (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.”

If you catch yourself or your teammates saying something like this, try to get specific. Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save him? How would it fit into his life? What else has he tried which failed to solve his problem? If you don’t know, then you’ve got a compliment instead of real data.

Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless.

Fluff comes in 3 cuddly shapes: Generic claims (“I usually”, "I always", "I never")  Future-tense promises (“I would”, "I will") Hypothetical maybes ("I might", "I could")

The worst type of fluff-inducing question is, “Would you ever?” Of course they might. Someday. That doesn't mean they will. Fluff-inducing questions include: “Do you ever…” “Would you ever…” “What do you usually…” “Do you think you…” “Might you…” “Could you see yourself…”

The worst type of fluff-inducing question is, “Would you ever?” Of course they might. Someday. That doesn't mean they will. Fluff-inducing questions include: “Do you ever…” “Would you ever…” “What do you usually…” “Do you think you…” “Might you…” “Could you see yourself…” You

The worst type of fluff-inducing question is, “Would you ever?” Of course they might. Someday. That doesn't mean they will. Fluff-inducing questions include: “Do you ever…” “Would you ever…” “What do you usually…” “Do you think you…” “Might you…” “Could you see yourself…” You don’t need to avoid these questions 100% of the time. They aren’t exactly toxic. It’s just that the responses are useless. The mistake is in valuing the answers, not asking the questions. In fact, sometimes these questions can even help you transition into more concrete questioning.

Transitioning from a fluffy question to a concrete one: You: “Do you ever X?” A fluff-inducing question. Them: “Oh yeah, all the time.” A fluffy answer which has no value in itself, but which we can anchor from. You: “When’s the last time that happened?” We use the Mom Test and ask for concrete examples in the past. Them: “Two weekends ago.” We’ve successfully anchored the fluff and are ready to get real facts now instead of generics and hypotheticals. You: “Can you talk me through that?” Back to asking good questions.

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.

“Why don’t you download it now?” If someone’s being flaky, put them to a decision. If they don’t care enough to try solving their problem already, they aren’t going to care about your solution.

You: “Why don’t you download it now?” If someone’s being flaky, put them to a decision. If they don’t care enough to try solving their problem already, they aren’t going to care about your solution. Them: “I’ll do it next time.” Not a real problem.

People hv to care a lot to overcome the inertia of not doinvg anything. Look for the people with the deep urgent problem

People hv to care a lot to overcome the inertia of not doinvg anything. E scepticl - Look for the people with the deep urgent problemthey are desperate to solve

Even learning that the person is a non-customer is useful. To get toward this truth, you just need to reject their generic claims, incidental complaints, and fluffy promises. Instead, anchor them toward the life they already lead and the actions they’re already taking.

At some point during a good conversation, the person you’re talking to may “flip” to your side of the table. This is good news. They are excited and see the potential, so they’ll start listing tons of ideas, possibilities and feature requests.

Write them down, but don’t rush to add them to your todo list. Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.

Let’s say you’re mid-conversation when this idea drops: Them: “Are you guys going to be able to sync to Excel? I really think that’s the a killer feature.” What do you do here? The wrong response is to write “sync to Excel” on your todo list and then move on. That’s the fast-lane to feature-creep. Instead, take a moment to dig into the motivations behind the request. You: “What would syncing to Excel allow you to do?” Maybe there’s an easier way I can help you achieve the same thing.  Them: “We’ve got all these legacy reports and we need to go through them every now and then. It would be nice to have everything in one place, you know?” Don’t worry, it’s not a key buying criteria.

Or they might say: Them: “We’ve tried a bunch of these things and it’s always the syncing that kills it.” They’re actively searching for solutions which are all missing a must-have feature — this could be your major differentiator if it’s important enough to the segment and difficult enough for your competitors to emulate.

Or: Them: “We have a decent workaround, as you saw. But it takes nearly a week at the end of each month to pull all the reports together in one place. It’s a big pain and totally stalls our work.” They’ve cobbled together a home-brew solution, know it’s costing them money, and are ideally suited to become an early customer.

At my first company Habit, we were adapting our product to sell to enterprise companies. MTV told me they needed analytics and reports for their campaigns.  I made a big mistake by accepting the feature request and face value and beginning the next meeting with a demo of our shiny new analytics dashboard (custom-built to solve their request, of course). They “ooh’ed” and “ahh’ed” appropriately and I left thinking we’d nailed it. It offered a zillion options and could carve up your data every which way. It was technically and aesthetically lovely.

They started calling every Friday asking me to email over a CSV (data file) of the week’s stats, so we added CSV export to the dashboard. Later, they asked for the report as a PDF instead of an CSV, so we obediently built PDF export. That took longer.

weeks later, they were still calling me every Friday and asking me to export and send over the same stupid analytics report. And every week, I would do so while politely explaining that, you know, we built this awesome self-serve dashboard so they could have their data whenever they wanted. And then, the next Friday, they’d call me.

It turned out we had entirely missed the real reason they’d been excited about our analytics demo. In fact, we'd missed their whole motivation for wanting analytics. The memory of being burned by feature requests was still fresh in my mind when they asked if we could add their logo and colours to the reports. I asked a couple incredulous questions about why in the world they wanted this feature when they didn’t even use the ones I had already built,

So, I finally—and inadvertently—did the smart thing when I asked, “Why do you want this feature? What do branded reports get you that unbranded ones don’t? It’s the same data, right?”

She replied, “Oh yeah, of course. I mean, nobody even reads these. Our clients just like to get something emailed to them at the end of every week and we think they’d be happier if it was a bit fancier, you know?” I knew exactly.

They had asked for analytics. We had jumped to the conclusion that they wanted to better understand their data. But they had really wanted a way to keep their own clients happy. If we had properly understood that, we would have built a totally different (and much simpler) set of features.

When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause. Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature?

You should dig in the same way around emotional signals to understand where they’re coming from. Just like feature requests, any strong emotion is worth exploring. Is someone angry? Dig. Embarrassed? Dig. Overjoyed? Dig!

Questions to dig into feature requests: “Why do you want that?” “What would that let you do?” “How are you coping without it?” “Do you think we should push back the launch add that feature, or is it something we could add later?” How would that fit into your day?

Questions to dig into emotional signals: “Tell me more about that.” “That seems to really bug you — I bet there’s a story here.” “What makes it so awful?” “Why haven’t you been able to fix this already?” “You seem pretty excited about that — it’s a big deal?” “Why so happy?” “Go on.”

These nudges don’t need to be complicated. People love talking about their opinions and emotions. Digging into a signal is basically just giving them permission to do a brain dump.  Rule of thumb: Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.

Accidental approval-seeking is what I call “The Pathos Problem.” It happens when you expose your ego, leading people to feel they ought to protect you by saying nice things.

This comes up when you tell someone about an idea you obviously care about (which is pretty much always, since otherwise you wouldn’t be asking). Even if you give folks permission to be honest and ask for criticism, they’re still going to pull their punches.

Symptoms of The Pathos Problem: “So here’s that top-secret project I quit my job for... what do you think?” “I can take it — be honest and tell me what you really think!”

To deal with The Pathos Problem, keep the conversation focused on the other person and ask about specific, concrete cases and examples. Once someone detects that your ego is on the line, they’ll give you fluffy mis-truths and extra compliments.

Disregard that data and use The Mom Test to re-focus on the person, their life, and their goals. People rarely lie about specific stuff that’s already happened, regardless of your ego.

Rule of thumb: If you’ve mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.

Being pitchy is the dark side of the “seeking approval” coin. Instead of inviting compliments by being vulnerable, you’re demanding them by being annoying.

If you slip into pitch mode, just apologise. You’re excited about your idea. That’s good! Otherwise you wouldn’t have taken this crazy leap in the first place. But suddenly, you find yourself five minutes into an enthusiastic monologue while the other person nods politely. That’s bad. Once you start talking about your idea, they stop talking about their problems. Cut yourself off and say something like: “Whoops—I just slipped into pitch mode. I’m really sorry about that—I get excited about these things. Can we jump back to what you were just saying? You were telling me that…"

If they say they really want to hear about what you’re working on, promise that you’ll tell them at the end of the meeting or loop them in for an early demo, and that you just want to talk a bit more about their stuff before biasing them with your idea.

Rule of thumb: Anyone will say your idea is great if you’re annoying enough about it.

Alternately, they’ll raise a topic you have a really good answer to. For example, they’ll mention how important security is, and you’ll want to cut in and tell them you’ve thought about all that already. This is also a mistake. In both cases, the listener was about to give you a privileged glimpse into their mental model of the world. Losing that learning is a shame. You’ll have the chance to fill them in later. Plus, it’s annoying to people if they start trying to help you and you cut them off to correct them. Rule of thumb: The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.

In addition to ensuring that you aren’t asking trivialities, you also need to look for the world-rocking scary questions you’re shrinking from. The best way to find them is to run thought experiments. Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces.

You can tell it’s an important question when the answer to it could completely change (or disprove) your business. If you get an unexpected answer to a question and it doesn’t affect what you’re doing, it wasn’t a terribly important question.

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

Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.

One of the reasons we avoid important question is because asking them is scary. It can bring us the upsetting realisation that our favourite idea is fundamentally flawed. Or that the major client is never going to buy. Although it seems unfortunate, this we need to learn to love bad news. It’s solid learning and is getting us closer to the truth.

Some of the most informative (and thus best) responses you can get are along the lines of, “Umm, I’m not so sure about that” and "That's pretty neat." Both are lukewarm responses which tell you they don’t care. In this context, “best” means learning, not selling.

But if you’re trying to decide whether to invest your time and money in developing, building and promoting that gadget, then lukewarm is a terrific response. It gives you a crystal clear signal that this person does not care. It’s perfectly reliable information you can take to the bank.

The classic error in response to a lukewarm signal is to “up your game” and pitch them until they say something nice. Unless they’re holding a check, the only thing to gain from “convincing” them are false positives. You’re not here to collect compliments; you’re trying to learn the truth. Their lukewarm response already gave you that.

Rule of thumb: There’s more reliable information in a “meh” than a “Wow!” You can’t build a business on a lukewarm response.

Another way we miss the important questions is by instead spending our time on ultimately unimportant details. This can happen when we get stuck in the details before understanding the big picture. Most people have lots of problems which they don’t actually care enough about to fix, but which they’ll happily tell you the details of if you ask them.

You: “How often do you go to the gym?” This sort of demographic data doesn’t give you any new insight, but can still be useful at the start of a conversation to figure out what sort of person you’re talking to so you can ask relevant follow-ups. Them: “Not really ever.” Well, looks like we’re done here then! You: “What would you say your biggest problem with going to the gym is?” This is where the conversation goes horribly wrong. Instead of figuring out whether staying fit is actually a real problem, we’re prematurely zooming in on it. Any response we get is going to be dangerously misleading.

The reason this conversation is so very bad is because, if you aren’t paying attention, it seems like it went well.

The premature zoom is a real problem because it leads to data which seems like validation, but is actually worthless. In other words, it’s a big source of false positives.

Fpcusing too quicky pn the details before figuring out if the broader probem is something they care about

However, we don’t always need to start the conversation from the square one of do-they-care-at-all. Sometimes we know the problem exists as a top priority and we can safely zoom in immediately.

figure out whether I’m a customer or just a complainer.

You: “That Google Reader thing is a mess. What are you doing about it?” Now that you’ve let me raise the topic, you know it’s on my mind and can more safely zoom in to talk about that specifically. As before, try to figure out what I’m already spending time and money on. Me: “Nothing, really. I don’t know what to do. But it sucks.” I’m not appearing terribly motivated, but the fact that I don’t know what to do could give you hope.

You: “Have you looked into what your options are?” Continue anchoring and digging. Me: “No, I just caught the drama on Hacker News.” I knew the reader-pocalypse was coming and didn’t even search around to properly understand the implications and my options. This just isn’t a big deal for me, despite how “annoyed” I claim to be.

“Does-this-problem-matter” questions: “How seriously do you take your blog?”  “Do you make money from it?” “Have you tried making more money from it?” “How much time do you spend on it each week?” “Do you have any major aspirations for your blog?” “Which tools and services do you use for it?” “What are you already doing to improve this?” “What are the 3 big things you’re trying to fix or improve right now?”

When it’s not clear whether a problem is a must-solve-right-now (e.g. you’re selling a painkiller) or a nice-to-have (you’re selling a vitamin), you can get some clarity by asking cost/value questions like the following.

Some of these questions are generic, but give us signals that we can anchor on and dig around. The bulk of them are about finding out whether the person we’re talking to is taking this space seriously. Are they spending money or making money? Is it in their top 3? Are they actively looking for solutions?

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.

Lastly, sometimes we comfort ourselves by asking questions which don’t actually de-risk the business or resolve those critical, big, scary, lurking questions. We ignore the elephant in the room. Let’s say we suspect that teachers from the poorest schools are completely overloaded, and that our tools would save them time so they could better educate their students. We go talk to them and confirm that yes, they are completely overloaded. We then spend weeks with them, figuring out exactly what their dream tool would do. Unfortunately, we've missed the elephant, which is that the poorest schools may not have the budgets available to pay us what we need. We're liable to spend a huge amount of time exploring a real and urgent problem, only to hop into the deadpool due to our customer's budgeting issues.  Successful startups tend to depend on multiple failure points. In this case it is both the needs of the teachers and the ability of the schools to pay us. If any of these conditions doesn't exist, we have to significantly overhaul our idea. It's tempting to obsess over the most interesting of several failure points and ignore the others. It's a great way to miss important questions. Beyond the risks of our customers and market, we also have challenges with our own product. Overlooking the product risks is just as deadly as overlooking the goals and constraints of our customers. Take the following conversation with a professional public speaker. Is it full of good data or bad data? An ambiguous conversation: Them: “…I get paid 2 or 3 grand per talk. Sometimes more if it’s corporate work.” Some good pricing and value signals. You: “Where do you get your gigs? Do you have an agent?” Trying to understand the alternatives. Them: “Yeah. He kind of sucks though. Most of my work comes through people who just know me from my blog or have seen my other talks.” Hardly a must-solve problem since he has a reliable

Lastly, sometimes we comfort ourselves by asking questions which don’t actually de-risk the business or resolve those critical, big, scary, lurking questions. We ignore the elephant in the room. Let’s say we suspect that teachers from the poorest schools are completely overloaded, and that our tools would save them time so they could better educate their students. We go talk to them and confirm that yes, they are completely overloaded. We then spend weeks with them, figuring out exactly what their dream tool would do. Unfortunately, we've missed the elephant, which is that the poorest schools may not have the budgets available to pay us what we need. We're liable to spend a huge amount of time exploring a real and urgent problem, only to hop into the deadpool due to our customer's budgeting issues.  Successful startups tend to depend on multiple failure points. In this case it is both the needs of the teachers and the ability of the schools to pay us. If any of these conditions doesn't exist, we have to significantly overhaul our idea. It's tempting to obsess over the most interesting of several failure points and ignore the others. It's a great way to miss important questions. Beyond the risks of our customers and market, we also have challenges with our own product. Overlooking the product risks is just as deadly as overlooking the goals and constraints of our customers. Take the following conversation with a professional public speaker. Is it full of good data or bad data? An ambiguous conversation: Them: “…I get paid 2 or 3 grand per talk. Sometimes more if it’s corporate work.” Some good pricing and value signals. You: “Where do you get your gigs? Do you have an agent?” Trying to understand the alternatives. Them: “Yeah. He kind of sucks though. Most of my work comes through people who just know me from my blog or have seen my other talks.” Hardly a must-solve problem since he has a reliable

Lastly, sometimes we comfort ourselves by asking questions which don’t actually de-risk the business or resolve those critical, big, scary, lurking questions. We ignore the elephant in the room. Let’s say we suspect that teachers from the poorest schools are completely overloaded, and that our tools would save them time so they could better educate their students. We go talk to them and confirm that yes, they are completely overloaded. We then spend weeks with them, figuring out exactly what their dream tool would do. Unfortunately, we've missed the elephant, which is that the poorest schools may not have the budgets available to pay us what we need. We're liable to spend a huge amount of time exploring a real and urgent problem, only to hop into the deadpool due to our customer's budgeting issues.

Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Will they keep using it? Market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay? Are there enough of them?

I’ve also seen this strike several of the recent companies who want to use mobile/realtime deals to drive foot traffic to bars and clubs. They run customer conversations with bar owners who confirm that: yes, they would like more customers on the slow nights; and yes, they would pay you if you could send customers on demand. The founders take this as strong validation (“They have the problem and committed to pay!”) without recognising that the vast majority of the risk is in the product, not the market. Bars will pay, but only if you can amass a huge audience of consumers. Then the founders talk to consumers and ask if they would use an app which always pointed them to booming parties with cheap booze. Again, obviously yes. But that doesn’t tell us whether we can actually get to that critical mass of users.

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.

Always pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person.

Don’t stress too much about choosing the “right” important questions. They will change. Just choose the 3 questions which seem murkiest or most important right now. Doing so will give you firmer footing and a better sense of direction for your next 3.

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.

You might get answers 1-3 from customer A, answer 4 from customer B, answers 5-7 from customer C. There’s overlap and repetition, but you don’t need to repeat the full set of questions with every participant. Don’t feel obliged to repeat questions you already have reliable data on. Pick up where you left off and keep filling in the picture.

Knowing your list allows you to take better advantage of serendipitous encounters. Instead of running into that dream customer and asking to exchange business cards so you can “grab a coffee” (exactly like everyone else), you can just pop off your most important question. And that goes a long way toward Keeping it Casual.

Rule of thumb: You always need a list of your 3 big questions.

When you strip all the formality from the process, you end up with no meetings, no interview questions, and a much easier time. The conversations become so fast and lightweight that you can go to a industry meet-up and leave with a dozen customer conversations under your belt, each of which provided as much value as a formal meeting.

The structure of separate problem/solution/sales conversations is critical for avoiding bias, but it’s important to realise that the first one doesn’t actually need to be a meeting.

Rule of thumb: Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.

The Meeting Anti-Pattern is the tendency to relegate every opportunity for customer conversation into a calendar block. Beyond being a bad use of your time and setting expectations that you’re going to show them a product, over-reliance on formal meetings can cause us to overlook perfectly good chances for serendipitous learning.

We’re going to strip the pomp and circumstance and reduce it from a meeting to a chat. If we do it right, they won’t

We’re going to strip the pomp and circumstance and reduce it from a meeting to a chat. If we do it right, they won’t even know we were talking about our idea.

Being too formal is a crutch we use to deal with an admittedly ambiguous and awkward situation. Instead of leaving wiggle room for the unexpected, everything becomes a process.

Asking the right questions is fast and touches on topics people find quite interesting. You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meetings until you have something concrete to show.

Asking the right questions is fast and touches on topics people find quite interesting. You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meetings until you have something concrete to show. At

Asking the right questions is fast and touches on topics people find quite interesting. You can talk anywhere and save yourself the formal meetings until you have something concrete to show. At their best, these conversations are a pleasure for both parties. You’re probably the first person in a long time to be truly interested in the petty annoyances of their day.

Rule of thumb: If it feels like they’re doing you a favour by talking to you, it’s probably too formal.

Even within a more formal meeting, you still might want to keep it casual if you’re hoping to get non-biased feedback.

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

Once we've learned the key facts about our industry and customers, it’s time to zoom in again and start revealing our idea and showing some product. The bad news is that this invites nefarious compliments. The good news is that since we have the beginnings of a product, we're now in a position to cut through the false positives by asking for commitments.

In sales, moving a sales relationship to the next stage is called "advancement". It's like pushing a customer into the next step of your real-world acquisition funnel.

When you fail to push for advancement, you end up with zombie leads: potential customers (or investors) who keep taking meetings with you and saying nice things, but who never seem to cut a check. It's like your startup has been friend-zoned. Thankfully, you caused it, and that means you can fix it. It's a consequence of being clingy and fearing rejection. By giving them a clear chance to either commit or reject us, we get out of the friend-zone and can identify the real leads.

As always, you’re not trying to convince every person to like what you’re doing. When you’ve got the information you came for (even if it’s that they don’t care), you can leave. But at some point, you do need to put them to a decision in order to get it.

Symptoms: A pipeline of zombie leads Ending product meetings with a compliment Ending product meetings with no clear next steps Meetings which "went well" They haven't given up anything of value

commitment and advancement are separate concepts which overlap quite a lot and tend to appear together. Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as time, reputation, or money.  Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer to a sale.

Commitment and advancement often arrive hand-in-hand. For example, to move to the next step (advancement), you might need an introduction to your contact’s boss (reputation commitment).

Rule of thumb: “Customers” who keep being friendly but aren’t ever going to buy are a particularly dangerous source of mixed signals.

It took me years to learn that there’s no such thing as a meeting which just "went well". Every meeting either succeeds or fails. You've lost the meeting when you leave with a compliment or a stalling tactic.

A meeting has succeeded when it ends with a commitment to advance to the next step. But you have to force this resolution or the meetings drift along in la-la-land while performing their ancient duty: wasting everyone’s time.

If you leave with worthless wishy washiness, I'd bet you're falling for one or both of the following traps: You're asking for their opinion about your idea (e.g. fishing for compliments) You're not asking for a clear commitment or next steps

Commitments are similarly easy to master, once we know what we’re looking for. When we leave without a commitment, sometimes it’s because we asked and got rejected. That’s sad, but it happens. Not everyone is going to convert and at least you now know where you stand. You have a strong negative data point.

The real failure is listed above as #2: not even asking. I never consider rejection to be a real failure.

This can happen because you avoid the scary question or because you haven’t figured out what the next steps should be.

Rule of thumb: If you don’t know what happens next after a product or sales meeting, the meeting was pointless.

Commitment can be cash, but doesn’t have to be. Think of it in terms of currency—what are they giving up for you? A compliment costs them nothing, so it’s worth nothing and carries no data. The major currencies are time, reputation risk, and cash.

Ask for something that they will hesitateto giveyou or only give you if they care

time commitment

Just like compliments aren’t data when you’re trying to learn about a problem, they also aren’t progress when you’re trying to validate a product. Hearing a compliment can still be useful though—it’s a warning flag that the person you’re talking to is trying to get rid of you. Rule of thumb: The more they’re giving up, the more seriously you can take their kind words.

"There are a couple people I can introduce you to when you're ready."

The problem is that the promise is so generic that it’s a worthless signal.  To fix it, try to convert fuzzy promises into something more concrete. The more specific it is, the more seriously you can take it. For example: who does he want to introduce you to and what does “ready” mean? And why can’t he make the intro now? This isn’t about being pushy. You don’t have manifest destiny over his rolodex. But you do need to distinguish between legitimate offers and polite gesturing. Knowing what “ready” means can also give you a better sense of what your short-term goals should be.

Of course, even clear next steps can be a lie. Everything can be a lie. But with next steps in your pocket, you've got a fighting chance.

But don't be annoying. You aren't trying to strong-arm folks into handing over their wallet. You are trying to cut through some of the polite rejections and find out if they're actually going to become a partner/investor/customer.

The goal is just to put them to a decision so you can learn whether you've found a must-have product and a real customer.

Rule of thumb: It’s not a real lead until you’ve given them a concrete chance to reject you.

Even once you've moved on to more product-focused sales meetings, you still want to start with some open-ended learning to get your bearings. You may know what the market cares about, but figuring out what’s unique about this particular person feels. It will make the rest of the conversation much smoother, increases your chances of closing the deal, and also gives you ongoing learning even after you've got a product.

Hard pitching gives binary feedback: you either nailed it or you didn't. That's okay when you're making fine adjustments (tweak this feature) but bad for bigger questions (does anybody care at all about what I'm doing).

Ask learning questions which pass The Mom Test. Then confirm by selling it. This happens over both the

Ask learning questions which pass The Mom Test. Then confirm by selling it. This happens over both the life of your company and during a single meeting.

First customers are crazy. Crazy in a good way. They really, really want what you’re making. They want it so badly that they’re willing to be the crazy person who tries it first.

Steve Blank calls them earlyvangelists (early evangelists). In the enterprise software world, they are the people who: Have the problem Know they have the problem Have the budget to solve the problem Have already cobbled together their own makeshift solution

They’re the company who will commit way before it makes rational sense to do so. It’s the guy who will give you cash right now from his discretionary budget to run a trial. Or who will fight for you against his boss and lawyers when they’re saying the tech is unproven.

We’ve got 2 takeaways. Firstly, when someone isn’t that emotional about what you’re doing, it’s pretty unlikely that they’re going to end up being one of the people who is crazy enough to be your first customer. Keep them on the list, but don’t count on them to write the first check.

Secondly, whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and turn into your first sale.

Rule of thumb: In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is just a side-effect.

The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them. You hustle together the first one or two from wherever you can, and then, if you treat people’s time respectfully and are genuinely trying to solve their problem, those cold conversations start turning into warm intros. The snowball is rolling.

Unless your plan is to sell your app via cold calls, the rejection rate is irrelevant.

I know one team who successfully used cold LinkedIn messages to reach C-level execs of several major UK retailers. They were ignored by practically every exec in the country, but you only need one to say “yes” to start the intro train.

If it sounds weird to unexpectedly interview people, then that's only the case because you're thinking of it as an interview instead of a conversation.

The only thing people love talking about more than themselves is their problems. By taking an interest in the problems and minutia of their day, you’re already being more interesting than 99% of the people they’ve ever met. Rule of thumb: If it’s not a formal meeting, you don’t need to make excuses about why you’re there or even mention that you’re starting a business. Just have a good conversation.

Just ask them about their life

Rule of thumb: If it’s a topic you both care about, find an excuse to talk about it. Your idea never needs to enter the equation and you’ll both enjoy the chat.

Joel Gascoigne did a classic "landing page" test with his startup Buffer, describing the value proposition and collecting emails. But contrary to popular understanding, it wasn't the metrics or conversion rate which convinced him to move forward. Instead, it was the conversations which resulted from emailing every single person who signed up and saying hello.

Paul Graham recommends a generic launch for the same purposes. Get your product out there, see who seems to like it most, and then reach out to those users.

This is starting to bring the customers to you instead of going to them, but still involves sending a mostly cold email.

When you are finding ways to sneak into customer conversations, you're always on the back foot. You made the approach, so they are suspicious and trying to figure out if you're wasting their time. Instead, we can look for ways to separate ourselves from the crowd so they can find us.

Beyond saving you vast sums of time and frustration, 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

Beyond saving you vast sums of time and frustration, 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?

For marginally more effort than attending an event, you can organise your own and benefit from being the centre of attention.

Nobody ever follows this recommendation, but it’s the first thing I would do if I got moved a new industry or geography. It’s literally the most unfair trick I know for rapid customer learning. As a bonus, it also instantly bootstraps your industry credibility.

If you have a reasonably sized and relevant blog audience, lining up conversations is a total non-issue. You just write a post about it and ask people to get in touch. Of course, not everyone has a relevant audience. That’s one big reason to start blogging to your customers today.

When I sent cold emails from my blog email address, folks would often meet with me because they had checked my domain, seen my industry blog, and figured I was an interesting person to talk

When I sent cold emails from my blog email address, folks would often meet with me because they had checked my domain, seen my industry blog, and figured I was an interesting person to talk to. In other words, the traffic and audience were irrelevant. Blogging about an industry is also a good exercise to get your thoughts in a row. It makes you a better customer conversationalist.

Rule of thumb: Kevin Bacon’s 7 degrees of separation applies to customer conversations. You can find anyone you need if you ask for it a couple times.

On a bit of a tangent, you'd be surprised by the quality of the folks you can get to join your advisory board. The first conversation with a good advisor looks similar to the first conversation with a flagship customer: you get along and are talking about a space you both care about. You can sometimes poach killer advisors from your early customer conversations.

Remember all those people who brushed you off by saying, “Sounds great, keep me in the loop and let me know how I can help.”  Now’s the time to call in those favours. Yes, they might not have actually meant it, but who cares? Reply back to that ancient email and tell them you’re ready for an intro to that guy they know. Use the format in the next section to make their lives easy and reassure them that you aren't going to waste anybody's time.

You’ll get ignored a lot, but again, who cares? You aren’t trying to minimise your failure rate; you’re trying to get a few conversations going. The person you’re being introduced to won’t know the backstory anyway, so it’s a clean start from there.

If you don’t know why you’re there, it becomes a sales meeting by default, which is bad for 3 reasons. First, the customer closes up about some important topics like pricing. Second, attention shifts to you instead of them. And finally, it’s going to be the worst sales meeting ever because you aren’t ready.

I don't want to be interviewed; I want to talk and help!

The framing format I like has 5 key elements. You're an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z. Don't mention your idea. Frame expectations by mentioning what stage you're at and, if it's true, that you don't have anything to sell. Show weakness and give them a chance to help by mentioning your specific problem that you're looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you're not a time waster. Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help. Ask for help.

Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

People like to help entrepreneurs. But they also hate wasting their time. An opening like this tells them that you know what you need and that they'll be able to make a real difference.

Once the meeting starts, you have to grab the reins or it's liable to turn into them drilling you on your idea, which is exactly what you don't want. To do this, I basically repeat what I said in the email and then immediately drop into the first question. If someone else made the introduction, I'll use them as a voice of authority:

Hey Tim, thanks so much for taking the time.  As I mentioned in the email, we're trying to make it easier for universities to spin out student businesses (vision) and aren't exactly sure how it all works yet (framing & weakness).  I think Tom made this intro (authority) because you have pretty unique insight into what's going on behind the curtain and could really help us get pointed in the right direction (pedestal)… (introductions continue) I was looking at your spinout portfolio and it's pretty impressive, especially company X. How did they get from your classroom to where they are now? (grab the reins and ask good questions) These

It’s worth noting that this is how I set up meetings from warm intros. The main goal is to clarify what I need and how they can help. Cold approaches are a totally different beast and are much more of a gamble. Again, the point of cold calls is to stop having them. Find a clever ways to generate warm intros and tell those people how they can help. You’ll have a much easier time.

The same is decidedly not true on the phone or Skype. People try to squeeze calls in between other activities, wondering how quickly they can “finish with business” and hang up. Folks on the phone are super annoyed when you “just want to chat”. So you need to make the whole thing more formal, which is one of the exact mistakes we’re trying to avoid! Phone calls end up sounding more like scripted interviews than natural conversations, because they are. It’s a constraint of the medium.

Setting up a call feels like less overhead in the short-term, but that’s because you aren’t yet able to see all the time-saving and business-saving benefits of in-person relationships with your customers.

That being said, some other great people in the field like and recommend phone calls. Use whatever works. But I will say that you should start in person.

In terms of mindset, don't go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power. Instead, go in search of industry and customer advisors. You are just trying to find helpful, knowledgable people who are excited about your idea.

The UX community (who knows their customer conversation!) says you should keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information.

Rule of thumb: Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.

When you have a fuzzy sense of who you’re serving, you end up talking to a lot of different types of people, which leads to confusing signals and three 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 incredibly mixed feedback and can’t make sense of it

Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone.

In reality, our customer segment was just too broad. We were trying to serve everyone simultaneously. We said “yes” to every request. Every debate over a new feature could be won by claiming, “Well, those guys would love it.” The reverse argument could be made to prevent any feature’s removal.

The big trouble was that we could prove ourselves neither right nor wrong. We could never say that a new idea had really worked or totally failed. We were paying attention to so many customer segments that there was pretty much always someone it worked for. But making a so-so product for a bunch of audiences isn’t quite the same as making an incredible product for one.

Getting specific about who your ideal customers are allows you to filter out all the noise which comes from everyone else. In our case, we eventually noticed unusually strong signals from creative agencies who wanted to be edgy. We cut a bunch of features and were finally able to get a sense of what was working and what wasn’t.

Their customer segment was incredibly broad, but in a sneaky way. Imagine I tell you my customer segment is “students”. Okay, you say, with a picture of an American undergraduate university student in your head. Maybe it’s a male student. He sits down in the lecture hall, cracks open his mac (adding to the sea of glowing apples the professor’s view has recently become), and fires up reddit to help him survive the next ninety minutes. So I’ve built a product for students, and feedback starts coming in. But it’s not what I expect. One user needs to add formal citations. Another wants practice questions. A third needs it to run on the iPad. A fourth needs eighty pupils to be able to use it on the same computer. The next needs to use the app through an intermittent internet connection. We’re looking at this list of requirements and our soul feels like it’s being forced through a colander. This will literally take us years to build. Where do we start? It turns out that “students” is a broader segment than we initially expected. The first is a PhD student. The second is an ambitious youngling at a prep school. The third is a homeschooling parent who wants to use it with her kid. The fourth is a rural village in the Indian rice belt where all the local kids are self-educating through the one village computer.

The founders I mentioned were having the same experience, but for “sales organisations” instead of “students”.

There are countless different kinds of sales organisations with fundamentally different needs and workflows and tools and goals. But from the outside, they all look like companies who do sales. Even if you narrow it down with a demographic constraint, as these guys did (sales organisations with 25-250 salespeople), you’re still facing unfathomable diversity. They 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. It was as if they were exploring two dozen business ideas simultaneously.

When the feedback is all over the map, it’s really hard to extract value. Once you get specific, you can learn.

Rule of thumb: If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t yet have a specific enough customer segment.

Start with a broad segment and ask: Within this group, which type of this person would want it most? Would everyone within this group buy/use it, or only some of them? Why do they want it? (e.g. What is their problem or goal) Does everyone in the group have that motivation or only some of them? What additional motivations are there? Which other types of people have these motivations?

Next we’re going to look at our groups’ behaviours and figure out where to find them. What are these people already doing to achieve their goal or survive their problem? Where can we find our demographic groups? Where can we find people doing the above workaround behaviours?

Once you start binking of goas, roblems, worldviews, you can gp beyond demographics to fnd a uniying thrrad among people who seem dissimilar pm the outside

Once you start binking of goas, roblems, worldviews, you can gp beyond demographics to fnd a uniying thrrad among people who seem dissimilar pm the outside, but are held together by why they want your product

Are any of these groups un-findable? If so, go back up the list and slice them into finer pieces until you know where to find them.

Now that we have a bunch of who-where pairs, we can decide who to start with based on who seems most: Profitable Easy to reach Rewarding for us to build a business around

Last point is important. You need to care about wht they care about

Don't just talk to the most senior or important people you can find. You want to talk to people who are representative of your customers, not ones who sound impressive on your status report.

A common anti-pattern is for the business guy to go to all the meetings and subsequently tell the rest of the team what they should do. Bad idea. Telling the rest of the team “What I learned” is functionally equivalent to telling them “What you’ll do.” Therefore, owning the customer conversations creates a de-facto dictator with “The customer said so” as the ultimate trump card.

A common anti-pattern is for the business guy to go to all the meetings and subsequently tell the rest of the team what they should do. Bad idea. Telling the rest of the team “What I learned” is functionally equivalent to telling them “What you’ll do.” Therefore, owning the customer conversations creates a de-facto dictator with “The customer said so” as the ultimate trump card.  But

A common anti-pattern is for the business guy to go to all the meetings and subsequently tell the rest of the team what they should do. Bad idea. Telling the rest of the team “What I learned” is functionally equivalent to telling them “What you’ll do.” Therefore, owning the customer conversations creates a de-facto dictator with “The customer said so” as the ultimate trump card.  But as we’ve seen, it’s easy to misinterpret what the customer said. When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoid creating (or being) the bottleneck. To do that, the customer and learning has to be shared with the entire founding team, promptly and faithfully. That relies on good notes plus a bit of pre- and post-meeting work.

Avoiding bottlenecks has three parts: prepping, reviewing, and taking good notes.

Your most important preparation work is to ensure you know your current list of 3 big questions.

Figure them out with your team and make a point to face the scary questions.

It’s easier to guide the conversation and stay on track if you have an existing set of beliefs that you’re updating. Spend up to an hour writing down your best guesses about what the person you’re about to talk to cares about and wants. You’ll probably be wrong, but it’s easier to keep the discussion on track and hit important points if you’ve created a skeleton. If you have an appropriately focused segment, then you’ll only rarely need to do this.

The first is asking, “If this company fails, what is most likely to have killed it?”

Prep questions to unearth hidden risks: If this company were to fail, why would it have happened? What would have to be true for this to be a huge success?

These aren’t long, involved strategy discussions. Your gut reaction is enough. You don’t need to be too rigorous. All you’re really trying to figure out is: “What do we want to learn from these guys?”

Rule of thumb: If you don’t know what you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t bother having the conversation.

The goal is to ensure the learning is now on paper and in everyone’s head instead of just in yours. Talk through the key quotes and main takeaways of the conversation, as well as any problems you ran into.

Capture the emotions. Tale them along the journey - not just the conclusion

I also like to talk about the meta-level of the conversation itself: which questions worked and which didn’t? How can we do better next time? Were there any important signals or questions we missed? This stuff is more craft than science: you have to actively practice it to get better. It’s a valuable skill for your team to have, so it’s worth spending a bit of time improving.

Meetings go best when you've got two people at them. One person can focus on taking notes and the other can focus on talking.

As the second person, sometimes you'll notice the lead asking bad questions or missing a signal they should be digging into. Just jump in and fix them.

Taking good notes is the best way to keep your team (and investors and advisors) in the loop. Plus, notes make it harder to lie to yourself.

When possible, write down exact quotes. Wrap them in quotation marks so you know it's verbatim. You can later use them in your marketing language, fundraising decks, and to resolve arguments with skeptical teammates. Other times the exact quote isn't relevant and you just write down the big idea.

If it’s totally inappropriate to take notes during the chat, just have the conversation and then immediately retreat to a corner to write down what was said. This is how I usually handle customer conversations at the pub or conferences.

Regardless of the medium, the most important thing is that the notes are lightweight enough that you'll actually review them yourself and with your team.  Rule of thumb: Notes are useless if you don't look at them.

In either case, add symbols to your notes as context and shorthand. I use 12 main symbols and make up more in the field as I need them.

:) :( :| ☇ ⨅ ☐ ⤴ ^ ☑＄♀☆

You want to take your customer notes so that they are: Able to be sorted, mixed, and re-arranged Able to be combined with the notes of the rest of your team Permanent and retrievable Not mixed in with other random noise like todo lists and ideas

Signs you’re just going through the motions: You’re talking more than they are They are complimenting you or your idea You told them about your idea and don’t know what’s happening next 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 which big question you’re trying to answer by doing this

The goal of this process is twofold. Firstly, to make sure you're spending your time well by attacking the questions which really matter and using the whole founding team’s brains. Secondly, to spread any new learning through your team as quickly and completely as possible.

Having a process is valuable, but don’t get stuck in it. Sometimes you can just pick up the phone and hack through the knot.

The Mom Test: Talk about their life instead of your idea Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future Talk less and listen more

Cheatsheet

For enterprise includes insight into their budget process

facts and commitments

Results of a good meeting: Facts — concrete, specific facts about what they do and why they do it (as opposed to the bad data of compliments, fluff, and opinions) Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as meaningful amounts of time, reputational risk, or money.  Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer to a sale.

Writing it down — signal symbols: :) Excited :( Angry :| Embarrassed ☇ Pain or problem (symbol is a lightning bolt) ⨅ Goal or job-to-be-done (symbol is a soccer/football goal) ☐ Obstacle ⤴ Workaround ^ Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain) ☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria ＄ Money or budgets or purchasing process ♀ Mentioned a specific person or company ☆ Follow-up task

Signs you aren’t pushing for commitment and advancement: A pipeline of zombie leads Ending product meetings with a compliment Ending product meetings with no clear next steps Meetings which "went well" They haven't given up anything of value

The big prep question: “What do we want to learn from these guys?”

Beyond the obvious influence from Steve Blank and Eric Ries, a big thanks to some other writers who have directly helped this book with their work: Amy Hoy on worldviews, Brant Cooper on segmentation, Richard Rumelt and Lafley/Martin on strategy, Neil Rackham on sales, and Derek Sivers on remembering that businesses are meant to make you happy.