Notes on The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Several fellow founders recommended to me the book The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick. It's all about how to run customer conversations the right way, and it really opened my eyes to many things I could improve and many pitfalls that are so easy to make. It also reminded me of some of the lessons in Dale Carnegie's classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, such as asking questions about the other person and focusing on them instead of you/your ideas. I also loved the lessons about keeping conversations casual and serendipitous and finding secret learning opportunities.

i highly recommend it for any founder who needs to talk to customers and verify if what they're building is what people actually want or need. My main notes and takeaways on the book are below.

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​Intro
Customer discovery questions sometimes too heavy handed
Every question can bias

1 mom test
Don’t ask anyone if they think your business is a good idea
Invites people to lie to you
Need to craft good questions even your mom can’t lie to you about
Wrong questions
Do you think this is a good idea
Would you use it
Feature requests 
How to do it right
How’s x going
What do you do with y normally
What’s the last thing you do to n x
Did you use an app for that
How did you find out about the other apps you have
Figure out marketing channels
I saw you got new y. Where did those come from?
What’s the last one you did buy for yourself
Dig for counter examples 
Useful conversation
Gives you concrete facts about customer life
Subject unable to lie because we never mentioned our idea
Talk about their life instead of your idea
How they handle the problem today
Ask about specifics in past instead of generics or future
Talk less and listen more
Every customer convo is bad by default and it’s your job to fix it with good questions
Ask how they manage the process now, watch them, ask what parts they love and hate and why
Are they actively searching for new products and how. If not why not
How are they losing money with current approach
Do they have budget for better tools or are they indifferent and is it not that important to them
Opinions worthless; would you buy a product that did x too hypothetical
Bad question: how much would you pay for this (too hypothetical and non-committal)
Not great: what would your dream product do
Value comes from understanding why they want those features
Need to ask follow ups
Ask why are they even doing this process to push back on customer need and dig deeper
what are the implications of that, how much does that matter
Distinguish between “I will pay you to solve that” problems and “that’s kind of annoying” problems
Talk me through the last time that happened
Have customers show not tell
How spend day, what tools they use
Question: what else have you tried
Lack of any action or research or attempts is a bad sign
Would you pay x for product that did y
Bad question because about your idea than about their life
Can be fixed by asking them to pay you now
How are you dealing with it now
Good question
Good question: where does the money come from
Which budget 
If they don’t want to talk about money then they might not care enough about the issue
Good question: who else should I talk to
If someone doesn’t want to give intros, then you probably screwed up the meeting or customer doesn’t care about the problem
Is there anything else I should’ve asked you or that you think is important
You can’t tell customer what problems they have. Customer can’t tell you what solution to build. 

2 avoiding bad data
Three types of bad data
Compliments
Fluff (hypotheticals, vagueness)
Feature requests or ideas
Deflecting compliments
Instead gather facts and commitments
Sorry I must have slipped into pitch mode. You guys are really good at this stuff. How are you dealing with this already? How did you do that last time?
Can you tell me more about how you’re doing that and the steps you run through?
Oh wow two full time staff, that must seem important to you, why do you bother?
Fluff
Generic statements (always/never)
Future tense promise with no commitment (would/will)
Maybe (might/could)
Bring back to specifics in the past
Bad questions
Would you ever
Could you ever
How do you usually 
Do you ever
Might you
Can start with fluffy question then transition to real fact question
People like to complain about problems but then when you ask if they ever searched for or tried a solution they say no and that tells you it’s not an actual problem they care about
Digging beneath the ideas
Don’t just add ideas to to do list
Ask for motivation behind the idea
Best thing to hear is if they cobbled together a workaround
Why do you want that
What will that let you do
What are you doing without that
Do you think we should delay the launch to get that in or can we add it in v2
How would that fit into your day 
What makes that so awful
Why haven’t you been able to fix this already
You seem pretty excited about that. Why is it a big deal?
Ideas and feature requests should be understood but not obeyed
Avoiding approval seeking
Pathos problem: Don’t expose your ego or explain your intent or idea
Focus on other person’s life and past
If you mention your idea, people will try to make you feel better
Cut off and interrupt pitches if you slip into pitch mode
Talk less

3 asking important questions 
Ask at least one question that could competely destroy your currently imagined business or which you’re terrified of asking
Love bad news; you want the truth not the gold star 
Lukewarm response means person doesn’t care at all; ask about the source of their indifference 
More info content in a meh than a wow
Look before you zoom in: if they don’t even care about the problem, don’t zoom in with follow up questions 
Some ideas have higher product risk than market risk
Prepare list of 3 big learning goals before going into customer convos
Forces you to not ask biasing questions and to ask the uncomfortable ones and hold yourself accountable 

4 keeping it casual 
Serendipitous learning at chance encounters instead of formally scheduled meetings on calendar 
Go to industry meetup and just hang and ask casual questions
Early chats very short (5 min)

5 commitment and advancement
Cut through false positives in sales demos by asking for commitments
Advancement is moving to next stage of process
Failing to push for advancement creates zombie leads
Get out of startup friend zone
Give customer Clear chance to commit or reject
Commitment is when customer serious and gives you something of value
Advancement is clear progress toward purchase goal
Every meeting either succeeds or fails; delay tactics are failures
Failures
Asking for opinion on product
Failing to ask for clear next steps towards purchase
Commitment shows customer cares
Currencies of commitments (compliments worthless)
Time
Next meeting on cal with clear goals
Product walkthrough 
Use trial for non-trivial time plus training workshop for non-trivial time 
Ask for something they’ll only give you if they care
Reputation
Intros to decision makers
Writing testimonial about product or problem
Agreeing to be customer reference by name on website
Agreement to do pilot project
Money
LOI
Preorder
Deposit
Purchase
Paid trial
Add friction to free trial to make sure they’re committed

6 finding conversations
Going to them
Cold calls
Cold emails
Don’t be formal
Go to conferences and be volunteer 
Bringing them to you 
Landing pages
Organize meetups
Speaking and teaching
Blogging
Running workshops
Throw parties for customers
Creating warm intros
Industry advisors
University professors
Framing meeting request
Vision
Framing
Weakness/Vulnerability/thing you don’t know, reveal weakness
Putting prospect on Pedestal
Ask
Sample emails in book
Calls worse than in person
Mental framing: looking for industry customer advisors
Keep talking to people until not learning anything new or have specific hour target per week talking to customers

7 choosing your customers
Startups don’t starve, they drown
Mixed feedback from too many types of customers
Customer slicing
If not getting consistent answers then not specific enough on customer segment
Consider motivations of groups
Find those who are reachable, profitable, rewarding/enjoyable 
Need separate convos for multi sided marketplaces

8 running the process
Don’t just have business team do customer convos
Share learning with entire team
Take and share notes
Prepare, review, take good notes
Being teammate to meeting to take notes and learn
Review raw quotes and emotions from meetings with team and not just conclusions
Batch important quotes into weekly meetings instead of discussing right after each meeting or sending full recordings
How to write it down
Write down exact quotes in question marks
Write down emotions
Emotional state, background on life context
Little icons for Obstacles, goals, pain
Purchase process
Specific names of people to talk to
Where to write it down
Index cards for customer quotes
Put notes in spreadsheet with columns for each type of note
Don’t take notes on laptop
Never look at screen while talking to customer
Tell customer that taking notes
Notes useless if don’t look at them or share with team
Don’t talk more than customer
Weekly prep and review meetings for customer learnings

Conclusion and cheat sheet
Talk about their life not your idea
Ask about specifics about past
Dig beneath emotions
Don’t be formal
Deflect compliments
Commitment and advancement
Ask scary questions