Fantastic read, I highly recommend it if you are trying to talk to customers.
The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
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Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#112Best book on early stage startups period. And it's barely 100 pages long. My favorite quote from it: “Someone should definitely make an X!” “Have you looked for an X?” “No, why?” “There are like 10 different kinds of X.” “Well I didn't really need it anyway.” Long story short, that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to…
God, I get that one, unsolicited, All. The. Time. It may be the only kind of unsolicited "idea for a product" I've ever gotten, actually. "You make apps? I have a great app idea that'll make you rich! All of us in [profession] would use it! You see... [explains idea].... It would save me hours every week and no one's done it yet, for some reason!" Me: searches the App Store You mean like any of these first five resul…
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Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#113Although not quite the same, this reminds me of a very simple trick many blind people are taught during training on how to navigate the city: Never ever ask "Is this line 4" if you want to know which tram just arrived. Ask "which line is this?" Simply because the first version will make many people answer "yeah yeah" without even looking. The second version forces them to actually answer your question with something…
Can confirm from around 10 years of customer support experience. Never ask close-ended question (yes/no), but open-ended ones. That is "what is the color of the motherboard" instead of "is the motherboard blue?".
As you and others pointed at out, this is a very general principle. It comes from the fact that close-ended questions sort of puts words in someone's mouth (the trick is sometimes used when you want a poll to yield a specific result).
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#114Naming something "The Mom Test" in the current political environment is a choice.
Why? It is still true. Maybe in the future it won't be, but currently 99.99% of moms in this planet are not tech savvy, whether we like it or not. Remember that moms being born in the 1930s are still out there - not everything written has some hidden political intention. As we move forward, if more women happen to get interested into technology, this might change. But until then, jumping on someone for the sake of political correctness - because there may be a tech-savvy mom somewhere out there that you decided to defend, or because it shouldn't be true in your ideal world - is toxic. And as you see people are downvoting you for being this kind of person.
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#115Heya, author here. Fun to see this. I wrote the book after becoming hugely frustrated as an introverted technical founder trying to "talk to customers" but finding zero books about sales/interviews/etc that spoke to my context. That first company (yc s07) failed just as I started to figure it all out, but the casual approach proved useful (and comfortable) in my future businesses, so I wanted to document it for other…
As an author of the book that's summarized, how do you feel about in-depth summaries of your book in terms of it affecting sales and providing publicity? I've always wondered how authors feel about it.
I always love summaries that are publicly posted (like this one, no matter how detailed), and I only dislike the (relatively rare) ones that are repackaged as "new" books on Amazon and then resold at a profit (it feels bad in general, but especially since I already work pretty hard to make my books as short as possible).
My feeling has always been that if a book can be sufficiently summarized in a blog post, then it should be a blog post ;). And if someone reads the summary and fully "gets it," they probably would have been frustrated by the full book, since they probably already had a lot of the foundational knowledge in place. So it's better if they don't buy it in the first place. And different people will read the summary, want the extra detail, and grab the full book, which is great too.
Even with piracy of the full book (which is currently #1 on google for various fairly guessable searches), I still feel that it ends up coming back to me via word of mouth. Piracy probably hurts "bad" books that are propped up by PR, but it definitely helps books that people find useful, since they end up recommending it to other folks who may pay.
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#116Heya, author here. Fun to see this. I wrote the book after becoming hugely frustrated as an introverted technical founder trying to "talk to customers" but finding zero books about sales/interviews/etc that spoke to my context. That first company (yc s07) failed just as I started to figure it all out, but the casual approach proved useful (and comfortable) in my future businesses, so I wanted to document it for other…
I'm introvert myself (INTP). I share your frustration. Maybe you have some business hints for introverts? AFAIK, the only successful Unicorn created by INTP's is Google, but I cannot have a talk with Google founders, obviously.
I think it depends very much on your goals. For me, after going through YC with my first company and having a difficult four years chasing scale, I realized that I was oriented more toward lifestyle/reliability/freedom, and I've been fairly focused on that for the last 10 years (although it really only took a couple years to achieve once I was clear on my goals, and has been pretty relaxed since then).
So with that caveat out of the way, my top-of-mind career advice for entrepreneurial introverts is:
1 // Learning how to talk to (and listen to) people is probably the highest-leverage career skill you'll ever learn, even if you only go from "terrible" to "functional." There's a tremendous amount of discomfort while learning it, but that discomfort is temporary. I'll never "like" talking to strangers, and I'll always need to manage my energy levels, context, and recovery time. That being said, the ability to do so when useful to my career (like custdev or sales or fundraising) or life (like making friends in a new city or negotiating with an angry plumber) has been transformational. The pain is temporary and the benefit is profound.
2 // Journal each morning. Braindump your frustrations/goals/fears onto paper. Your brain likely works differently from most "successful" people, which means that the common advice won't fully resonate with you, and you'll need to chart more of your own path. This requires thinking, and for a lot of introverts, writing is the clearest way to think (but if you're different, use what works for you). Similarly, run every piece of advice you hear (well, the compelling bits anyway) through a personality filter, normalize it for personality/context, and then decide whether it's likely to be right you. Common example: "Go to that conference and meet some customers!" Maybe that works for other people, but it has a 0% chance of working for me. But there's a valuable core concept to that advice (go engage with new customers) that can perhaps be adjusted to a context I'm comfortable in.
3 // Cultivate relationships with strong potential cofounders long before you need them. You'll never be as quick on the draw in conversation as others, so you need the important relationships built ahead of time. For potential cofounders (the most important network available), the way to do that is by collaborating on small, time-constrained side projects. Allows both parties to evaluate what each other bring to table outside of an "urgent" situation, and without relying on quick talking.
4 // Don't let anyone press you into "right now" negotiations or decisions. Use live conversations to gather data, and then use your time alone to process it and come to a decision about next steps. Repeat if necessary. Nobody will give you this time by default, but nobody will deny it to you once you ask (and if they do, you probably shouldn't work with them anyway).
There's probably more, that's just top of mind, but it's what feels important to my brain right now.
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#117Best book on early stage startups period. And it's barely 100 pages long. My favorite quote from it: “Someone should definitely make an X!” “Have you looked for an X?” “No, why?” “There are like 10 different kinds of X.” “Well I didn't really need it anyway.” Long story short, that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to…
God, I get that one, unsolicited, All. The. Time. It may be the only kind of unsolicited "idea for a product" I've ever gotten, actually. "You make apps? I have a great app idea that'll make you rich! All of us in [profession] would use it! You see... [explains idea].... It would save me hours every week and no one's done it yet, for some reason!" Me: searches the App Store You mean like any of these first five resul…
So true. My experience is that those people have "one weird requirement" that is unique to them that other tools don't include so instead of getting 90% of the the performance benefit, they'd rather complain and not change that one step. What they really want is for you to automate their exact current process. I had a friend of a friend pitch me something like that and they had the whole "and you can sell it to everyone in our industry". There were upset when I pointed out that no one else in that industry has their specific process and requirements. They just wanted it for free.
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might like Traction [1] by DuckDuckGo's founder. It has a similar no nonsense feel to it, but a broader scope of all around growth. I liked it so much I built an app [2] around the framework from in the book (with Gabriel's permission). 1 - https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu... 2 - https://www.wax.run
Traction is in my top 5 of non-fiction books. [2] looks interesting
Thanks! If you want to give it a try, I'd like to get your feedback on the onboarding flow (it's still very new). Let me know, I'm mike@wax.run
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The risk hbeckpdx fears is: 1. Someone hasn't read the book and only glanced at the title. 2. That someone assumes the book says "test things on your mom, because there's nobody less tech-savvy than an older woman, yo momma so dumb she thinks a hamburger menu is something you get at McDonalds" 3. That someone, hoping to be an ally in the fight against gender and age discrimination in tech, takes offence at what they…
Call it the 'dad test' then. Or even the 'sibling test' - because they're probably not technology experts. It literally means 'regular person test'...
Honestly, neither "mom test", "dad test", or "regular person test" gives me any idea whatsoever what this might be about.
Re: The Mom Test – How to talk to customers
#120Heya, author here. Fun to see this. I wrote the book after becoming hugely frustrated as an introverted technical founder trying to "talk to customers" but finding zero books about sales/interviews/etc that spoke to my context. That first company (yc s07) failed just as I started to figure it all out, but the casual approach proved useful (and comfortable) in my future businesses, so I wanted to document it for other…
Thank you for this. I did have one question about the Mom Test. How do you actually do solution validation? I get that you talk about the problem, but at what point do you actually get feedback if the solution that you want to build (or have built) is going to be a solution for the customer?