The Mom Test

v1.04
@robfitz
August, 2013

The Mom Test: how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everybody is lying to you
by Rob Fitzpatrick
a foundercentric.com book

Contents

Introduction ?
The Mom Test ?
Avoiding bad data ?
Asking important questions ?
Keeping it casual ?
Commitment and advancement ?
Finding conversations ?
Choosing your customers ?
Running the process ?
Conclusion and cheatsheet ?
**

Introduction

Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you’re liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.

I see a lot of teams using a bulldozer and crate of dynamite for their excavation. They are, in one way or another, forcing people to say something nice about their business. They use heavy-handed questions like “do you think it’s a good idea” and shatter their prize.

At the other end of the spectrum, some founders are using a toothbrush to unearth a city, flinching away from digging deep and finding out whether anything of value is actually buried down there.

We want to find the truth of how to make our business succeed. We need to dig forit—and dig deep—but every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person we’re talking to and rendering the whole exercise pointless. It happens more than you’d ever imagine.

The truth is our goal and questions are our tools. But we must learn to wield them. It’s delicate work. And well worth learning. There’s treasure below.
**

Is this book for you?

Hello,
You’ve read about Customer Development or Lean Startup and aren’t sure how to actually go about having your first customer conversation.

You’re a traditional business or sales person aiming to be more effective within a young company which hasn’t yet found its business model.

You mentor, support, or invest in startups and want to help them have more useful
customer conversations.You’ve fallen in love with a new business idea and want to figure out if it has legs before quitting your job.

You’re raising funding and the investors want to see more evidence that you’re solving a real problem.

You find this whole process incredibly awkward and really wish there was an easier way to do it.

You’ve got a vague sense of an opportunity and want to figure out exactly what it is.

You’ve always wanted to build your own company and want to start making real progress today.

This book is for you.

Talking to customers is hard

We know we _ought _to talk to customers. Many of us even _do _talk to customers. But we still end up building stuff nobody buys. Isn’t that exactly what talking to people is meant to prevent?

It turns out almost all of us are doing it wrong. I’ve made these mistakes myself and seen them happen a hundred times over with other founders. Despite the recent explosion of startup knowledge, the process of figuring out what customers want too often unfolds as it did at my first company, Habit.We were building social advertising tech and I was distraught. We’d spent 3 years working our hearts out. We’d nearly run
out of investor money and it didn’t look like we’d be getting more. We’d relocated internationally to be closer to our market and had survived a co-founder being deported. I’d been talking to customers full-time for months. And then, after innumerable days of slog and an exhausted team, I learned I’d been doing it wrong. I may as well not have bothered.

The advice that you ought to be talking to your customers is well-intentioned, but
ultimately a bit unhelpful. It’s like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to“just be cooler.” They forget to mention that it’s hard.

These conversations take time, are easy to screw up and go wrong in a nefarious
way. 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.

This book is a practical how-to. The approach and tools within are gathered from a wide range of communities including Customer Development, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, User Experience, traditional sales and more. It’s based on working with a bunch of founders and from my experiences both failing and succeeding at customer learning, as well as from the support of innumerable peers and mentors.

It’s a casual approach to conversation, based on chipping away the formality and awkwardness of talking to people and taking responsibility for asking good questions.
**

Why another book on talking and selling?

Does your shelf really need another book on selling and talking? And does it need one written by me in particular?

Well… yes. Yes it does.
Here’s why:
Firstly, I’m a techie, not a sales guy. I’m introverted and naturally bad in meetings. Every other sales book I’ve read is written by and for folks who are already pretty good at dealing with people. They know the unspoken rules of the meeting. I fumbled through from scratch. You know that line, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you”? People have actually
said that to me (and I believed them).With much help from peers and advisors, I eventually started figuring it out and we closed deals with companies like Sony and MTV. But I learned that there’s a big gap between textbooks and check books.

Secondly, before we can start doing things correctly, we need to understand how we’re doing them wrong. Through my own projects and my work with new founders, I’ve built up an exhaustive list of how it can go wrong. Throughout the book, I’ll try to help you figure out where you might be messing stuff up in unnoticed ways.

Finally, this is a practical handbook, not a theoretical tome. For example, how do you find people to talk to and set up the meetings? How do you take notes while still being polite and paying attention? It’s all in here.

I can’t teach you how to make your business huge. That’s up to you. But I _can _give you the tools to talk to customers, navigate the noise, and learn what they really want. The saddest thing that can happen to a startup is for nobody to care when it disappears. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.

A note on scope & terminology

This book isn’t a summary or description or re-interpretation of the process of Customer Development. That’s a bigger concept and something Steve Blank has covered comprehensively in 4 Steps to the E.piphany _and _The Startup Owner’s Manual.

This book is specifically about how to properly talk to customers and learn from them. Talking is one of the big aspects of Customer Development, but shouldn’t be confused with the whole process. To keep the distinction clear, I’m going to refer to chatting with people as “customer conversation” (lowercase) instead of “Customer Development” (uppercase). For the most part, I’m assuming you already agree that talking to customers is a good idea. I’m not trying to convince you again, so this book is more “how” than “why”.

Let’s get involved.
**

CHAPTER ONE: The Mom Test

People say you shouldn’t ask your mom
whether your business is a good idea.
That’s technically true, but it misses the
point. You shouldn’t ask anyone _whether
your business is a good idea. At least not
in those words. Your mom will lie to
you the most (just ‘cuz she loves you),
but it’s a bad question and invites
everyone to lie to you at least a little.
It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to
show us the truth. It’s our responsibility
to find it. We do that by asking good
questions.The Mom Test is a set of simple rules
for crafting good questions that even
your mom can’t lie to you about.
Before we get there, let’s look at two
conversations with mom and see what
we can learn about our business idea:
digital cookbooks for the iPad.Failing the mom test
Son: “Mom, mom, I
have an idea for a
business — can I run it
by you?” _I am about to
expose my ego — please
don’t hurt my feelings.
Mom: “Of course, dear.”
You are my only son and
I am ready to lie to
protect you.
Son: “You like your
iPad, right? You use it a
lot?”Mom: “Yes.” You led me
to this answer, so here
you go.
Son: “Okay, so would
you ever buy an app
which was like a
cookbook for your
iPad?” I am
optimistically asking a
hypothetical question
and you know what I
want you to say.
Mom: “Hmmm.” As if I
need another cookbook
at my age._Son: “And it only costs
$40 — that’s cheaper
than those hardcovers on
your shelf.” _I’m going to
skip that lukewarm
signal and tell you more
about my great idea.
Mom: “Well…” Aren’t
apps supposed to cost a
dollar?
Son: “And you can
share recipes with your
friends, and there’s an
iPhone app which is your
shopping list. And videosof that celebrity chef you
love.” Please just say
“yes.” I will not leave
you alone until you do.
Mom: “Oh, well yes
honey, that sounds
amazing. And you’re
right, $40 is _a good deal.
Will it have pictures of
the recipes?” _I have
rationalised the price
outside of a real
purchase decision, made
a non-committal
compliment, and offered
a feature request to
appear engaged._Son: “Yes, definitely.
Thanks mom — love
you!” _I have completely
mis-interpreted this
conversation and taken
it as validation.
Mom: “Won’t you have
some lasagna?” I am
concerned that you
won’t be able to afford
food soon. Please eat
something.
Our misguided entrepreneur has a few
more conversations like this, becomes
increasingly convinced he’s right, quitshis job, and sinks his savings into the
app. Then he wonders why nobody
(even his mom) buys the app, especially
since he had been so rigorous.
Doing it wrong is worse than doing
nothing at all. When you know you’re
clueless, you tend to be careful. But
collecting a fistful of false positives is
like convincing a drunk he’s sober: not
an improvement.
Let’s fix the conversation and show that
if we do it right, even mom can help us
figure out whether our business is a good
idea.
Passing the mom testSon: “Hey mom, how’s
that new iPad treating
you?”
Mom: “Oh - I love it! I
use it every day.”
Son: “What do you
usually do on it?”
Whoops — we asked a
generic question, so
answer to this probably
won’t be terribly
valuable.
Mom: “Oh, you know.
Read the news, play
sudoku, catch up with myfriends. The usual.”
Son: “What’s the last
thing you did on it?” Get
specific about examples
in the past to get real,
concrete data.
Mom: “You know your
father and I are planning
that trip? I was figuring
out where we could stay.
“ She uses it for both
entertainment and
utility, which didn’t
come up during the
“usually” answer._Son: “Did you use an
app for that?” _A slightly
leading question, but
sometimes we need to
nudge to get to the topic
we’re interested in.
Mom: “No, I just used
Google. I didn’t know
there was an app. What’s
it called?” Younger folks
use the App Store as a
search engine, whereas
your mom waits for a
specific
recommendation. If
that’s true more broadly,
finding a reliablemarketing channel
outside the App Store is
going to be crucial.
Son: “Where did you
find out about the other
ones you use?” Dig into
interesting and
unexpected answers to
understand the
behaviours and
motivations behind
them.
Mom: “The Sunday paper
has a section on the apps
of the week.” You can’t
remember the last timeyou cracked open a
paper, but it sounds like
traditional PR might be
a viable option for
reaching customers like
your mom.
Son: “Makes sense.
Hey, by the way, I saw a
couple new cookbooks
on the shelf — where did
those come from?”
Business ideas usually
have several failure
points. Here it’s both the
medium of an iPad app
and the content of a
cookbook._Mom: “They’re one of
those things you just end
up getting at Christmas. I
think Marcy gave me that
one. Haven’t even
opened it. As if I need
another lasagna recipe at
my age!” _Aha! This
answer is gold dust for 3
reasons: 1. Old people
don’t need another
generic set of recipes. 2.
The gift market may be
strong . 3. Younger cooks
may be a better
customer segment since
they don’t yet know thebasics.
Son: “What’s the last
cookbook you did buy for
yourself?” Attack
generic answers like “I
don’t buy cookbooks” by
asking for specific
examples.
Mom: “Now that you
mention it, I bought a
vegan cookbook about 3
months ago. Your father
is trying to eat healthier
and thought my veggies
could benefit from a
pinch more zazz.” Moregold: experienced chefs
may still buy specialised
or niche cookbooks.
The conversation continues. If it’s going
well, I would raise the topics of whether
she ever thought to look for recipes on
the iPad or for cooking videos on
YouTube.
Overall, your mom can’t remember the
last time she had such an enjoyable
conversation with you. You were so
interested _in her life for once! You thank
her for the lasagna, pet the dog, and head
home. You’ve learned that building an
app and waiting for people to find it on
the App Store probably isn’t a goodplan. But you’ve got some good insight
about your customer segment and a few
promising leads to look into. That was a
useful conversation.
A useful conversation
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.
Our original idea looked like this: old
people like cookbooks and iPads.
Therefore, we will build a cookbook forthe iPad. It’s generic. There are a
thousand possible variations of this
premise.
With an idea this vague, we can’t answer
any of the difficult questions like which
recipes to include or how people will
hear about it. Until we get specific, it
always seems like a good idea.
After just one conversation (with our
mom, of all people), we have a higher
fidelity vision. We now see that there are
at least 2 specific customer segments we
might serve, each of which needs a
slightly different product. We’ve also
identified some major risks to address
before we commit too heavily.1. We could offer niche recipes
(ethnic, diets) which experienced
cooks may not already know. Our
biggest question is how to reach
them when they don’t search for
apps. We have a possible lead with
newspaper and magazine PR.
2. Alternately, we might make generic
recipes for younger cooks who are
easier to reach via the App Store
and who haven’t memorised all
their favourites yet. We haven’t
talked to any, so we have loads of
questions, but one big one is
whether a customer segment whoisn’t already in the habit of buying
expensive cookbooks will pay a
premium for ours.
The first conversation gave us rope to
hang ourselves. The second gave us
actionable insight. Why? What was
different about the second conversation?
Mom was unable to lie to us because we
never talked about our idea.
That’s kind of weird, right? 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:
1. Talk about their life instead of your
idea
2. Ask about specifics in the past
instead of generics or opinions
about the future
3. Talk less and listen more
It’s called The Mom Test because it
leads to questions that even your mom
can’t lie to you about. When you do it
right, they won’t even know you have an
idea. There are some other important
tools and tricks that we’ll introducethroughout the rest of the book. But first,
let’s let’s put The Mom Test to work on
some questions.
_Rule of thumb: _Customer conversations
are bad by default. It’s your job to fix
them.Good
question
/
bad
question
Let’s play a game. Are the following
questions good or bad? Do they pass or
fail The Mom Test? If they fail it, why?
And how could we improve them? Work
your way through the list and then read
on for some discussion.
“Do you think it’s a good
idea?”
“Would you buy a
product which did X?”
“How much would you
pay for X?”
“What would your dream
product do?”“Why do you bother?”
“What are the
implications of that?”
“Talk me through the last
time that happened.”
“Talk me through your
workflow.”
“What else have you
tried?”
“Would you pay X for a
product which did Y?”
“How are you dealing
with it now?”
“Where does the money
come from?”
“Who else should I talk
to?”
“Is there anything else Ishould have asked?””Do you think it’s a good
idea?”
Awful question! Here’s the thing: only
the market can tell if your idea is good.
Everything else is just opinion. Unless
you’re talking to a deep industry expert,
this is self-indulgent noise with a high
risk of false positives.
Let’s fix it: Say you’re building an app
to help construction companies manage
their suppliers. You might ask them to
show you how they currently do it. Talk
about which parts they love and hate.
Ask which other tools and processes
they tried before settling on this one. Are
they actively searching for areplacement? If so, what’s the sticking
point? If not, why not? Where are they
losing money with their current tools? Is
there a budget for better ones? Now, take
all that information and decide for
yourself whether it’s a good idea.
_Rule of thumb: _Opinions are worthless.
“Would you buy a product
which did X?”
Bad question. 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.
And how much time it takes. Ask them to
talk you through what happened the last
time X came up. If they haven’t solved
the problem, ask why not. Have they
tried searching for solutions and found
them wanting? Or do they not even care
enough to have Googled for it?
_Rule of thumb: _Anything involving the
future is an over-optimistic lie.
“How much would you pay
for X?”
Bad question. This is exactly as bad asthe last one, except it’s more likely to
trick you because the number makes it
feel rigorous and truthy.
How to fix it: Just like the others, fix it
by asking about their life _as it already
is. How much does the problem cost
them? How much do they currently pay
to solve it? How big is the budget
they’ve allocated? I hope you’re noticing
a trend here.
Rule of thumb: _People will lie to you if
they think it’s what you want to hear.
“What would your dream
product do?”Sort-of-okay question, but only if you
ask good follow-ups. Otherwise it’s a
bad question. A question like this is like
the “set” before the spike in a volleyball
game: not too helpful on its own, but it
puts you in a good position as long as
you’re ready to exploit it.
Let’s improve it: 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.
_Rule of thumb: _People know what their
problems are, but they don’t know howto solve those problems.
“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.
For example, some founders I knew
were talking to finance guys spending
hours each day sending emails about
their spreadsheets. The finance guys
were asking for better messaging tools
so they could save time. The “why do
you bother” question led to “so we can
be certain that we’re all working off the
latest version.” Aha. The solution ended
up being less like the requestedmessaging tool and more like Dropbox.
A question like “why do you bother”
points toward their motivations. It gives
you the why.
_Rule of thumb: _You’re shooting blind
until you understand their goals.
“What are the implications of
that?”
Good question. This distinguishes
between I-will-pay-to-solve-that
problems and thats-kind-of-annoying-
but-I-can-deal-with-it “problems”. Some
problems have big, costly implications.
Others exist but don’t actually matter. It
behooves you to find out which is which.It also gives you a good pricing signal.
I once had someone keep describing the
workflow we were fixing with
emotionally loaded terms like
“DISASTER”, accompanied by much
yelling and arm waving. But when I
asked him what the implications were,
he sort of shrugged and said “Oh, we
just ended up throwing a bunch of interns
at the problem—it’s actually working
pretty well.”
_Rule of thumb: _Some problems don’t
actually matter.
“Talk me through the last time
that happened.”Good question. Your high school writing
teacher may have told you that good
stories are meant to “show, not tell”.
Whenever possible, you want to be
shown, not told by your customers.
Learn through their actions instead of
their opinions. If you ran a burger joint,
it would be stupid to survey your
customers about whether they prefer
cheeseburgers or hamburgers. Just watch
what they buy (but if you’re trying to
understand _why _they prefer one over the
other, you’ll have to talk to them).
Folks can’t be wishy-washy when
you’re watching them do the task in
question. Get as close to the real actionas you can. Seeing it first hand can
provide unique insight into murky
situations. But if you can’t get in there,
asking them to talk you through the last
time it happened still offers many of the
benefits.
Being walked through their full
workflow answers many questions in
one fell swoop: how do they spend their
days, what tools do they use, and who do
they talk to? What are the constraints of
their day and life? How does your
product fit into that day? Which other
tools, products, software, and tasks does
your product need to integrate with?
_Rule of thumb: _Watching someone do atask will show you where the problems
and inefficiencies really are, not where
the customer thinks they are.
“What else have you tried?”
Good question. What are they using
now? How much does it cost and what
do they love and hate about it? How
much would those fixes be worth and
how big of a pain would it be for them to
switch to a new solution?
I was checking out an idea with a
potential customer and they excitedly
said, “Oh man, that happens all the time.
I would _definitely _pay for something
which solved that problem.”That’s a future-promise statement
without any commitment to back it up, so
I needed to learn whether it was true or
not. I asked, “When’s the last time this
came up?” Turns out, it was pretty
recent. That’s a great sign. To dig further,
I asked, “Can you talk me through how
you tried to fix it?” He looked at me
blankly, so I nudged him further.
“Did you google around for any other
ways to solve it?” He seemed a little bit
like he’d been caught stealing from the
cookie jar and said, “No… I didn’t
really think to. It’s something I’m used to
dealing with, you know?”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).
It’s easy to get someone emotional about
a problem if you lead them there. “Don’t
you _hate _when your shoelaces come
untied while you’re carrying groceries?”
“Yeah, that’s the _worst!” And then I go
off and design my special never-come-
untied laces without realising that if you
actually cared, you would already be
using a double-knot.
Rule of thumb: _If they haven’t looked for
ways of solving it already, they’re notgoing 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.
Let’s fix it: As always, ask about what
they currently do now, not what they
believe they might do in the future.
Common wisdom is that you price your
product in terms of value to the customerrather than cost to you. That’s true. And
you can’t quantify the value received
without prodding their financial
worldview.
Another way to fix it, if you’re far
enough along, is to literally ask for
money. If you have the deposit or pre-
order in hand, you know they were
telling the truth.
“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 knowwhich 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.
Sometimes, both of the above will be
happening simultaneously and you get to
choose how you present yourself. Do
you want to be a replacement for the
web app at a yearly value of £1.2k or for
the agency at 100x that?
_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.”Where does the money come
from?”
Good question. This isn’t something you
would necessarily ask a consumer
(though you might), but in a B2B context
it’s a must-ask. It leads to a conversation
about whose budget the purchase will
come from and who else within their
company holds the power to torpedo the
deal.
Often, you’ll find yourself talking to
someone other than the budget owner.
Your future pitches will hit unseen snags
unless you learn who else matters and
what they care about. This knowledge oftheir purchasing process will eventually
turn into a repeatable sales roadmap.”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.
If someone doesn’t want to make intros,
that’s cool too. Just leave them be.
You’ve learned that you’re either
screwing up the meeting (probably by
being too formal, pitchy, or clingy) or
they don’t actually care about the
problem you’re solving. Take anything
nice they say with an extra grain of salt.”Is there anything else I should
have asked?”
Good question. Usually, by the end of the
meeting, people understand what you’re
trying to do. Since you don’t know the
industry, they’ll often be sitting there
quietly while you completely miss the
most important point.
Asking this question gives them a chance
to politely “fix” your line of questioning.
And they will!
This question is a bit of a crutch: you’ll
discard it as you get better at asking
good questions and as you get to know
the industry._Rule of thumb: _People want to help you,
but will rarely do so unless you give
them an excuse to do so.Using the mom test
You’ll notice that none of the good
questions were about asking what you
should build. One of the recurring
“criticisms” about talking to customers
is that you’re abdicating your creative
vision and building your product by
committee. Given that people don’t
know what they want, that wouldn’t be a
terribly effective approach. Deciding
what to build is your job.
The questions to ask are about your
customers’ lives: their problems, cares,
constraints, and goals. You humbly and
honestly gather as much informationabout 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 (and refine it) through
Commitment & Advancement, which
we’ll look at in Chapter 5.
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.
Before we move look at ways to confirm
that you’re building the right product to
fit your customers’ lives, we’re going to
look at fixing some of the ways
conversations go wrong.CHAPTER TWO
Avoiding bad data
They say that to bankrupt a fool, give
him information. Practically everyone
I’ve seen talk to customers (including
myself) has been giving themselves bad
information. You probably are too. 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:1. Compliments
2. Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and
the future)
3. Ideas
Sometimes we invite the bad data
ourselves by asking the wrong questions,
but even when you try to follow The
Mom Test, conversations still go off
track. It could happen because you got
excited and started pitching, because you
had to talk about your idea to explain the
reason for the meeting, or because the
conversation is just stuck in hypothetical
la-la-land.These things happen. Once you start to
notice, it’s easy to get back on track by
deflecting compliments, anchoring fluff,
and digging beneath ideas.
Deflect compliments
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.Even if they really _do _like it, that data is
still worthless. For example, venture
capitalists (professional judges of the
future) are wrong far more than right. If
even a VC’s opinion is probably wrong,
what weight could that of some random
guy’s possibly have?
With the exception of industry experts
who have built very similar businesses,
opinions are worthless. You want facts
and commitments, not compliments.
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 geton with the business of gathering facts
and commitments.
Before we look at how to properly
deflect compliments, here’s what
happens when you take them at face
value:
A bad conversation:
You: “…And that’s it.
It’s like X for Y, but
better because of Z.”
_Bam! Totally nailed that
pitch.
Them: “That’s cool.
Love it.” How is thisrelevant to me?
(Compliment)
You: “It’s going to
totally change the way
you work. We’re
predicting cost savings of
35%.” I am so great.
Them: “Sounds terrific.
Keep me in the loop.” I
can’t believe I keep
agreeing to these startup
pitches. (Compliment +
stalling tactic)
You: “Awesome,
thanks.” I’m just likeSteve Jobs. Except more
handsome.
You: (Back at the office)
“That meeting went
really well. They said
they loved it! In fact,
everybody loves it. I
really think we’ve finally
found our big idea.
We’ve found something
people want.” It’s
margarita time!
Your Team: (6 months
later) “Why do we have
zero customers? I thought
you said everybodyloved it?” Wasn’t this
your job?
You: “I don’t know, I
talked to like a thousand
people. I must have
missed one of their
buying criteria. Don’t
worry, I’ll go talk to them
some more and we’ll get
it next time.”
Doooooomed.
Let’s try that again while properly
deflecting the confounding compliments:
A good conversation:You: “…And that’s it.
It’s like X for Y, but
better because of Z.”
Rats, I just slipped into
pitch mode. Let’s try to
recover this and learn
something.
Them: “That’s really
cool. I love it.” How is
this even relevant to me?
(Compliment)
You: “Whoops — really
sorry about that — I got
excited and started
pitching. Listen: you guys
seem to be doing a goodjob in this space — do
you mind if I ask how
you’re dealing with this
stuff at the moment?”
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.
Them: “What? Oh, well,
sure. We’ve got a couple
people who manage the
process just to make sure
we’re all in sync, and
then we use Excel and alot of emails to keep it all
moving. Anyway, I really
like your idea. I’m sure it
will do well.” If you
want facts, here they are,
but your idea still isn’t a
good fit for me and
there’s no way I’m going
to express an interest in
buying (notice the
sneaky compliment at
the end).
You: “I haven’t heard of
anyone solving it quite
like that — that’s
interesting. Can you talk
me through how itactually all fits
together?” 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.
Them: (More delicious
workflow data)
You: “What sort of
difficulties have come up
with that solution?” This
is a bit generic and isn’t
the world’s greatestquestion, but I’m trying
to find an anchor to
learn about workflow
inefficiencies and
bumps. When I find one,
I’ll dig around that
signal with more follow-
ups.
Them: (Even more
workflow and alternate
solution data)
If we’re early in the learning process,
the meeting could end here quite happily.
We have the learning we came for. If we
were slightly later-stage and already had
a product, we might continue by zoomingin and pushing for commitments or sales.
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. Here’s a
good conversation with a solid negative
result.
A good (negative) conversation:
Them: “That’s really
cool. I love it.”
Compliment.
You: “How are you
dealing with this stuff at
the moment?” Deflectthat compliment and get
to the real facts.
Them: “Oh, it’s really
not that big of a deal for
us. We kind of just ignore
it.” The implications of
the problem are non-
existent so I’m not in the
market for a solution.
You can always be happy with a
conversation like the above. You saw
through the false compliment and found
the facts behind the mirage. If the
conversation is going well, I’d try to
have them talk me through their process
anyway so I can try to figure out whetherit’s an industry wide non-problem or
something specific to their particular
situation.
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.”All of these are warning signs. 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.
Anchor fluffFluff 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”)
When someone starts talking about what
they “always” or “usually” or “never” or
“would” do, they are giving you generic
and hypothetical fluff. Follow The Mom
Test and bring them back to specifics in
the past. Ask when it last happened, forthem to talk you through it, how they
solved it, and what else they tried.
The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I
would definitely buy that.”
It just sounds so _concrete. As a founder,
you desperately want to believe it’s
money in the bank. But folks are wildly
optimistic about what they would do in
the future. They’re always more
positive, excited, and willing to pay in
the imagined future than they are once it
arrives.
The first startup I worked at fell for the
“I would definitely buy that” trap and
subsequently lost about 10 millionbucks. They mistook fluffy future
promises and excited compliments for
commitment, wrongly believed they had
proven themselves right, and wildly
over-invested.
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-inducingquestion.
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 realfacts now instead of
generics and
hypotheticals.
You: “Can you talk me
through that?” Back to
asking good questions.
To use a more tangible example, let’s
say you’re designing some sort of inbox
management tool:
A good conversation, anchoring
generic fluff:
Them: “I’m an ‘Inbox 0’
zealot. It’s totally
changed my life.” Ageneric (e.g. fluffy)
claim.
You: “Haha, nice. I’m an
‘Inbox 0’ failure. What’s
your inbox at right now?”
Let’s get specific to see
if this fluff holds up.
Them: “Looks like about
ten that have come in
since this morning.”
Facts!
You: “Okay wow, so
you are on top of things. I
have like 200 right now.
When’s the last time ittotally fell apart for
you?” He’s still claiming
to be on top of his email,
so I’m going to look for
concrete examples where
he wasn’t.
Them: “Ug, 3 weeks
ago. I was travelling and
the internet at the hotel
totally didn’t work. It
took me like 10 days to
get back on track.”
You: “Can you talk me
through how you handled
it?” Successfully
anchored — now we’retalking about what
actually happens instead
of what “usually”
happens.
In this case, we took the generic claim,
“My inbox is always under control” and
added the important caveat: “Except
when it’s not, in which case it’s a total
nightmare to recover from.” 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.
Let’s say you’re building a mobile
loyalty app to help stores give deals and
discounts to their most loyal customersand you hear the guy in line in front of
you complaining:
A bad conversation (pitching and
accepting fluff):
Them: “Which idiot
decided it was a good
idea to make me carry
around a thousand cafe
loyalty cards?”
You: “Whoa! Hey! I’m
building a mobile app to
help stores give out
discounts to their most
loyal customers so you’d
never need to carry papercards again. Do you think
you would use something
like that?” This is pretty
much as bad of a
question as you can find.
You’ve revealed your ego
and asked a “would you
ever” question. You’re
begging for a false
positive.
Them: “Heck yes, it’s
about time! I would
definitely use that.”
Fluffy hypothetical
future promise!
By switching into pitch mode, we justwasted a perfectly good opportunity for
learning and instead got a fistful of fluff.
Let’s try again.
A good conversation:
Them: “What idiot
decided it was a good
idea to make me carry
around a thousand cafe
loyalty cards?”
You: “It’s crazy, right?
My wallet is like two
feet thick. Hey — have
you ever tried any of
those loyalty apps for
your phone?” Anchor topast behaviours.
Them: “Those exist?”
Perhaps my rage is
misplaced…
You: “Yeah, I’m sure
you’ve seen the little
signs for that one in the
campus cafe.”
Them: “Oh yeah, I
remember that. I’m
always kind of in a rush.”
This is a nice bit of
customer insight about
their state of mind and
circumstances whenyou’re trying to
advertise to them.
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.
You can’t help but laugh when you hearthis one. “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 solve the petty
annoyances of their day.
Beyond rousting some poor soul’s
consumeristic hypocrisy, anchoring the
fluff can also yield useful signals:
You: “…Have you evertried any of those loyalty
apps for your phone?”
Them: “Yeah, I
downloaded a couple of
them. You need a
different one for every
chain. I don’t want a
hundred apps clogging up
my phone any more than I
want a bunch of cards in
my wallet.”
So he’s an actively searching potential
user, but we’d need to get critical mass
with the stores he goes to before he’ll be
happy. Maybe we could take over a
small university town first. Or he mightsay:
Them: “I looked into it,
but you only end up
getting like a 10%
discount. That seems less
like a loyalty reward and
more like a cheap way
for them to collect a
bunch of data about me.”
So he was on the fence, but needs better
perks. Maybe we could find a way to
force merchants into deeper discounts
like Groupon was able to do. He also
has privacy concerns. Or he could
respond with:Them: “Have you ever
actually tried using that
app? It’s abysmal. It takes
me longer to find the
stupid button than to buy
my coffee.”
So all we need to do (for this particular
user) is to out-execute and simplify. We
could try to be the Instagram to their
flickr.
The list goes on. There are tons of useful
responses you can get. 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.
Dig beneath ideas
Entrepreneurs are always drowning in
ideas. We have too many ideas, not too
few. Still, folks adore giving us more. 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 addthem 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’sthe 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 yourcompetitors 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 earlycustomer.
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 aestheticallylovely.
Unfortunately, 90% of what we had built
was irrelevant. We just didn’t know that
yet.
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.
Salt was rubbed in the wound when,
weeks later, they were still _calling me
every Friday and asking me to export
and send over the same stupid analyticsreport. 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 whyin the world they wanted this feature
when they didn’t even use the ones I had
already built, like an exasperated Dad at
Christmas: “But you don’t even play
with the toys I bought for your birthday!”
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.
Consider how much easier our lives
would have been if we’d understood the
motivation behind the request. Instead of
enabling the exploration and export of
all campaign data, we could have just
always exported the few high-level
numbers a big brand manager would be
interested in. And instead of a self-serve
dashboard, we could set up a littlescheduler to send it to them every
Friday. In fact, we didn’t even need to
build a dashboard _at all. And instead of
coding up a layout and branding system
for the reports, we could have had an
intern hand-build them each week. All
wasted because I didn’t ask the right
question. I sure wish I had those 3
months back!
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?
Dig.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!
I once overheard a founder interviewing
someone at a cafe table next to me. The
founder mentioned a problem and the
guy responded, “Yeah, that’s pretty much
the worst part of my day.” The founder
jotted something down in his notebook,
and then moved on to the next question.
What!? It’s the worst part of his day and
you’re not going to figure out why?
That’s insane. You’ve got to 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.
Stop seeking approval
As we’ve seen, compliments are
dangerous and sneaky. So if we can nip
them in the bud before they bloom, so
much the better. The main source of
compliment-creation is seeking
approval, either intentionally or
inadvertently.
Doing it intentionally is fishing for
compliments. You aren’t looking forcontradictory information. You’ve
already made up your mind, but need
someone’s blessing take the leap.
Symptoms of Fishing For
Compliments:
“I’m
thinking
of
starting
a
business… so, do you think it will
work?”
“I had an awesome idea for an app
— do you like it?”
Accidental approval-seeking is what I
call “The Pathos Problem.” It happenswhen 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 youthink?”
“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.Some famous entrepreneurs don’t suffer
the effects of The Pathos Problem, but
you should ignore their advice since it’s
not reproducible if you aren’t them.
Guys like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman,
and Gordon Ramsey are all notorious for
actively seeking negative feedback. It
evidently works for them. But nobody is
worried about hurting Elon, Reid, or
Gordon’s feelings. You and I must be
more circumspect.
In short, remember that compliments are
worthless and people’s approval doesn’t
make your business better. Keep your
idea and your ego out of the
conversation until you’re ready to askfor commitments.
_Rule of thumb: _If you’ve mentioned your
idea, people will try to protect your
feelings.
Cut off pitches
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. It’s when you hold
someone hostage and won’t let them
leave until they’ve said they like your
idea. Normally, compliments are well-
intentioned. In this case, they’re justtrying to get you out of their office.
“Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” is
generally a good quality for a founder to
have. But when it creeps into a
conversation that’s meant to be about
learning, it works against you.
Symptoms:
“No no, I don’t think you get it…”
“Yes, but it also does this!”
If you slip into pitch mode, just
apologise. You’re excited about youridea. 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.
Talk less
You can’t learn anything useful unless
you’re willing to spend a few minutesshutting up (even if you have something
really smart to say).
After you introduce your idea (either
intentionally or accidentally), they’re
going to begin a sentence with something
like “So it’s similar to…” or “I like it
but…” It’s tempting to interrupt and
“fix” their understanding about how it’s
totally different and actually _does _do that
thing they want.
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.CHAPTER THREE
Asking important
questions
Once we know about The Mom Test and
start trying to ask non-biasing questions,
sometimes we over-compensate and ask
completely trivial ones. Asking someone
how old they are isn’t biasing, but it also
doesn’t move your business forward.
You have to apply The Mom Test to the
questions which matter. Otherwise
you’re just spinning your wheels.
In addition to ensuring that you aren’t
asking trivialities, you also need to lookfor 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, youshould be asking a question which has
the potential to completely destroy your
currently imagined business.
One of my companies had some legal
ambiguities around content ownership. It
was okay in theory, but lacked strong
precedents. I was always a bit nervous
we would get “found out.” Their execs
were excited, their creatives were
thrilled. We had even brought the
stubborn tech team around to our side.
But in all my early customer
conversations, I never asked to talk to
their lawyers. For whatever reason, that
was an important question which I
shrunk from, and not asking it cost us at
least half a million bucks.There’s no easy solution to making
yourself face and ask these questions. I
once heard the general life advice that,
for unpleasant tasks, you should imagine
what you would have someone else do if
you were delegating it. Then do that.
And remember, you’re allowed to ask
about money. You’re a startup. It’s okay.
_Rule of thumb: _You should be terrified
of at least one of the questions you’re
asking in every conversation.
Love bad newsOne 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.
If you’ve only got one shot, then bad
news is bad news. If your bungee jump
doesn’t work, that’s bad. If you’ve sunk
your retirement savings into opening a
cafe and it doesn’t work, that’s bad. If
you hustle together $50k to start your
business and spend all $50k on your first
idea only to see it fail, that’s bad.On the other hand, if you have $50k and
spend $5k to learn you’re running down
a dead end, that’s awesome. You can use
the rest to find a viable path to your
goal.
Similarly, if you have an exciting idea
for a new product and go talk to a couple
customers who don’t actually care about
it, then that’s a great result. You just
saved yourself however much time and
money it would have cost to try building
and selling it.
We go through the futile process of
asking for opinions and fish for
compliments because we craveapproval. We want to believe that the
support and sign-off of someone we
respect means our venture will succeed.
But really, that person’s opinion doesn’t
matter. They have no idea if the business
is going to work. Only the market
knows.
You’re searching for the truth, not trying
to be right. And you want to do it as
quickly and cheaply as possible.
Learning that your beliefs are wrong is
frustrating, but it’s progress. It’s bringing
you ever closer to the truth of a real
problem and a good market.
The worst thing you can do is ignore the
bad news while searching for some tinygrain of validation to celebrate. You
want the truth, not a gold star.
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. If you’re a sales guy going
door to door selling gadgets and
someone doesn’t care, then that is a bad
result: you’re not getting paid. But if
you’re trying to decide whether to invest
your time and money in developing,
building and promoting that gadget, thenlukewarm 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.
If they’re still engaged in the
conversation, it’s worth asking a couple
follow-up questions to understand thenature of their apathy. Is the “problem”
not actually that big of a deal? Are they
fundamentally different from your ideal
customers? Do they not care about the
specific implementation? Are they worn
out and skeptical from hearing too many
pitches, like cafe owners in the aftermath
of Groupon? Are they just plain tired
today?
After that, say a big thanks and leave
them to their day. They’ve probably
helped you more than the guy who said
he loved it.
_Rule of thumb: _There’s more reliable
information in a “meh” than a “Wow!”
You can’t build a business on alukewarm response.
Look before you zoom
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.
Before you have solid evidence that
you’re fixing a meaningful problem foryour customer segment, you can really
mess yourself up by zooming in too
quickly.
A (really, really) bad conversation:
You: “Hello. Thanks for
taking the time. We’re
building phone and tablet
apps to help people stay
in shape and just wanted
to understand how you
stay fit.” _This isn’t a
terrible opening, but I’d
generally avoid
mentioning the idea
immediately since it
gives them a good ideaof which answers you’re
hoping to hear.
Them: “Okay.” I never
exercise, so this should
be quick.
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._Them: “I guess the time
it takes to get there. I’m
always kind of busy, you
know?” _Wait, who says I
have a problem with
going to the gym? I
thought I just told you I
don’t care about the
gym! But if I had to
choose one, I guess I’d
go with convenience.
Not that I’ve done a
pushup in 5 years.
Pushups are pretty
convenient.
You: “Perfect. That’sgreat. And could you rank
these 4 in terms of which
is most important to you
in a fitness program:
convenience,
personalisation, novelty,
or cost?” Note that we’re
still assuming we’re
talking to a person who
actually cares about
getting in shape.
Questions like this don’t
actually tell you if the
person cares about any
of it at all.
Them: “Probably
convenience, then cost,then personalisation, then
novelty.” Since you
asked, I’ll answer.
Hypothetically speaking,
of course.
You: “Okay. Awesome.
Thanks so much. We’re
working on an app to
help you exercise in the
convenience of your own
home. I think it’s going to
be a great fit for what you
care about.” Totally
missing the point and
mis-interpreting the
conversation as
validation. Now fishingfor compliments.
Them: “Cool. I’d love to
try it when it launches.”
Half-hearted
compliment plus non-
committal stalling
tactic.
You: “Great — I’ll send
over one of our beta keys
so you can check it out.”
We got a user!
Them: “Thanks.” I am
literally never going to
type that in._The reason this conversation is so very
bad is because, if you aren’t paying
attention, it seems like it went well. If
you focus the conversation too quickly
on one problem area, you can think
you’ve validated a “top” problem when
you haven’t. You just led them there.
If you ask me what my biggest problem
with staying fit is, I’ll probably tell you
it’s the time cost of going to the gym. But
then, if you build me a workout-at-home
app, I’m going to ignore it. Even though
commute time is the _biggest _problem
with getting in shape, the whole area of
fitness just isn’t something I care about
enough to act on. My #1 fitness problem
is still an unimportant one.Let’s start the conversation again and fix
it when it starts to go off track:
A good conversation:
You: “How often do you
go to the gym?”
Them: “Um. Not really
ever.” _Looks like we’re
done here.
You: “Why not?”
Instead of taking for
granted that staying fit
is one of their top
priorities, let’s dig intothe motivations.
Them: “I don’t know, it’s
just not something I’m
that worried about, you
know?” Not trying to fix
this, so unlikely to buy
or use an app.
You: “When’s the last
time you did try? Have
you ever joined a gym or
taken up jogging or
anything?” Let’s anchor
the generic just to make
sure…
Them: “Oh yeah, I usedto be into sports in high
school. It just hasn’t been
a big deal since I settled
down. Running around
after the kids gives me all
the cardio I need!”
You: “Haha, gotcha.
Thanks for the time!”
This was a pleasant
conversation and we
learned what we came
for, so we can abandon
ship and leave him to his
day.
The premature zoom is a real problem
because it leads to data which seemslike validation, but is actually worthless.
In other words, it’s a big source of false
positives.
Let’s re-run the same conversation, but
instead of immediately zooming in on
exercise, we’ll start more generic, since
we aren’t sure that fitness is a must-
solve problem:
A good conversation:
You: “What are your big
goals and focuses right
now?” Products which
solve problems on this
list are infinitely more
likely to get bought. Wemight alternately ask for
major annoyances,
costs, or joys.
Them: “The big one is
finalising that promotion
at work. And we just
bought our first house, so
I’ve got to get that all
fixed up and ready to go.
Exciting times. And I
want to find a bit more
time for the missus, you
know? Things have been
pretty busy lately.” Work,
house, and marriage.
Not looking good for us!_You: “You’re buying a
new house and expect to
be _less _busy?”
Them: “Can’t blame a
guy for hoping.”
You: “Is getting
healthier on that list?” _We
probably already know
the answer, but it doesn’t
hurt to ask leading
questions when you’re
about to abort the
conversation anyway. If
they come back with a
positive, just be a little
extra careful in makingsure they aren’t lying.
Them: “I’m actually
feeling pretty good at the
moment.” Not a
customer.
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.
For example, let’s say we help drive
qualified leads to small business
websites. We know that marketing is
always a top 3 problem for small
businesses, so we can focus on it andstart the conversation by zooming in with
a question like:
You: What are your big
problems with
marketing? We can
immediately zoom in on
the problem if we are
100% certain it’s a
must-solve problem
which people are ready
to pay for.
Versus:
You: What are your big
problems right now? If
we aren’t sure it’s amust-solve problem, we
start more generic to see
if they care at all about
the problem category, in
which case they’ll
mention it.
Now imagine you’ve built the
aforementioned marketing tool for small
businesses and realise it could also be
used to help bloggers get more attention.
You’re wondering if you have another
strong customer segment. However,
since blogs have a harder time
monetising traffic than small businesses,
we can’t necessarily assume that they’re
also going to happily pay for traffic.For example, I have a blog which I quite
like (but which I don’t take seriously as
a business). If you’re talking to me and
you ask, “Hey Rob, what are your top
problems with marketing _your blog?”
Then you’ve just prematurely zoomed on
a non-problem.
I’m going to tell you some sort of answer
which sounds legit but is actually
misleading. I might say that my
keywords are all kind of generic, so it’s
hard to attract the right people. Or that I
walk a fine line between writing
beginner and advanced articles, so it’s
tough to attract the right people.
Whatever. Problems exist with my blog
marketing, but the whole space just isn’tsomething I’m too fussed about. I write
because it’s fun, not because it’s how I
pay my rent.
To have a useful conversation, you need
to zoom back out to ask about my blog in
general, rather than marketing my blog.
A good conversation:
You: “Hey Rob, what
are the top problems with
your blog?”
Me: “I’m pissed that
Google Reader is
disappearing — I feel
that I’m going to lose likehalf my followers. And
this book is consuming
all of my interest in
writing, so I haven’t
really posted in months.
And Wordpress seems so
slow these days.” _Of the
topics here, one of them
(Google Reader and
audience size) is related
to marketing, so you can
anchor on that and
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 todo 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 claimto be.
You: “Are you going to
make a serious effort to
build your audience back
up?” You are digging
into the audience size
signal, since it’s relevant
to your space. It’s a
fluff-inviting question
(hypothetical future-
tense), so you should be
skeptical of the answer,
but it’s hard to see a
better way to get at the
information you want
from here. Not every
question can be perfect,sadly.
Me: “Probably just keep
on writing when I have
something to say. It’s
more of a hobby than a
business, really.”
At this point, you might be suspicious
about how much I actually care about my
blog. 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.
“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’retrying to fix or improve right now?”
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?
When you fall into a premature zoom,
you can waste a ton of time figuring out
the minutia of a trivial problem. Even if
you learn everything there is to know
about that particular problem, you stillhaven’t got a business.
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.
Look at the elephant
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 completelyoverloaded, 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 isboth 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 mywork 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 workaround, but
at least it’s high value.
You: “What’s wrong
with the agent? And why
do you still work with
him?” Dig.
Them: “I’m one of the
lowest-paid people they
work with, so I get
ignored a lot. Butsometimes he brings in
deals, so whatever. It’s
free money.” Good
information on his
motivations and goals.
At this point, let’s say I’m confident that
getting gigs is important to him. I also
know what it’s worth and how he’s
currently accomplishing it. So I zoom in
to introduce the problem I’m solving and
the way I want to approach it.
You: “I’m building a
marketplace to cut out the
agents and connect event
organisers directly with
speakers. It should helpyou get more gigs and
keep the agent fees. How
would that fit into your
speaking life?”
Them: “Man, that’s
awesome. If you could
get me more more gigs —
or better paid ones — I’d
happily drop my agent
and pay you 20% of the
boost. I know a bunch of
other people who would
love to as well.” This is
the important bit — is it
good?
So what’s the result? Beyond beingexcited, we got some concrete data
about how valuable this could be to him.
Plus, it involved a commitment to be one
of our early users. It sure seems _good.
But what did he actually tell us? He said
that _if _we can get him more gigs, _then
he’ll pay a cut. Well, obviously. Who
doesn’t want free money? His needs are
clear: he wants to make more money by
speaking. If we can send him work, he’ll
share some of it with us. This was never
really in doubt.
The key phrase of “if you could get me
more gigs” is basically shifting the
burden from the customer to your
product. Even though you’ve found apain, your success is dependent on a
bunch of other factors, such as your
ability to grow a healthy supply of
paying gigs which are a good fit for him.
Will you be able to do that? It remains to
be seen.
This situation is easier to spot in the
online advertising industry. Imagine
running customer conversations with an
advertiser to try to understand their
pains so you can convince them to
advertise on your site. They’d sort of
look at you blankly and say, “Listen, if
you can get enough page views, we’ll
pay you for them.” In fact, it’s such a
well established would-pay-to-solve-
problem that you don’t even need to talkto them to set it up. You just plug in an
ad network and you’re done.
Similarly with affiliate commissions. If
you sell a company’s products, you get a
cut. That’s just how it works. You don’t
need to explore or validate or
understand their problems. The risk
resides in your ability to get lots of
traffic and sell lots of products. If you
can, they’ll pay you.
In all of these examples, the risk is in
your product, not in the market or the
customer. The customer will pay if your
product gets big enough.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?
You don’t want to overlook one or the
other. I met a founder who had wasted 3
months on worthless customer
conversations. He wanted to start a
company building gadgets to track the
fertility of farm animals, ultimately
boosting birthrates and thus revenue.
When he talked to farmers, he asked
questions like, “Would you switch
trackers if something cheaper and moreeffective was available?” That’s the
same as asking someone whether they
would like more money. The answer is
always “Yes.” The farmers responded
along the lines of, “If you can build what
you say you can build, I’ll equip my
whole herd.” The problem is, he
couldn’t build it. The risk was in the
product.
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 couldsend 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.
Video games are pure product risk. What
sort of question could you ask to
validate your game idea? “Do you likehaving fun?” “Would you like to have
even more _fun?” Practically 100% of the
risk is in the product and almost none is
in the customer. You know people buy
games. If yours is good and you can find
a way to make them notice it, they’ll buy
it. You don’t need to rediscover people’s
desire to play video games.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t talk
to anyone if you’re building something
with product risk. In the case of the farm
fertility monitor, it’s good to know that
the farmer isn’t opposed to switching
tech once he’s already got something
installed, for example. For the
nightclubs, it’s good to know that they’re
at least theoretically willing to pay forpromotion. It would be tragic to succeed
at the hard work of creating the
technology or community only to learn
nobody will pay for it.
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.Prepare your list of 3
Always pre-plan the 3 most important
things you want to learn from any given
type of person.
Pre-planning your big questions makes it
a lot easier to ask questions which pass
The Mom Test and aren’t biasing. It also
makes it easier to face the questions that
hurt. If we go through an unplanned
conversation, we tend to focus on trivial
stuff which keeps the conversation
comfortable. Instead, decide what to ask
with your team in a calm environment.
Your 3 questions will be different foreach type of person you’re talking to. If
you have multiple types of customers or
partners, have a list for each.
Don’t stress too much about choosing the
“right” important questions. They will
change. Just choose 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.
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 feelobliged 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.CHAPTER FOUR
Keeping it casual
We know that zooming prematurely and
introducing your idea too early creates
biases and can get you stuck on a local
maximum. In his original book on
Customer Development, _4 Steps to the
E.piphany, Steve Blank solves this by
recommending 3 separate meetings: the
first about the customer and their
problem; the second about your solution;
and the third to sell a product. By
splitting the meetings, you avoid the
premature zoom and biasing them with
your ideas.In practice, however, I’ve found it both
difficult and inefficient to set them up.
The time cost of a 1-hour meeting is
more like 4 hours once you factor in the
calendar dance, commuting, and
reviewing. It’s also a big time
commitment to ask from the customer
before you’re in a position to show them
anything in return.
In the early days, asking for the first
conversation was simply impossible for
me. I wasn’t credible enough, so nobody
wanted to take a meeting just to talk to
me about their day. Steve recommends
starting with friendly first contacts.
Definitely do that if you have them.
Thanks to The Mom Test, the fact thatthey’re friends won’t bias your data, so
long as you ask good questions. In my
case though, I was entering a new
industry with high walls (brand
advertising) and no friendly first
contacts.
As my credibility built after a couple
years in the industry, I found I was now
able to get meetings without any real
“reason”. The 3-meeting structure was
finally viable! But once I started doing
it, it felt like a bad use of my time. The
most precious resource a startup has is
its founders’ time and attention. You
have to put yourself where you matter
most, and I wasn’t finding early
customer meetings to be that place. Iwished I could get the learning without
all the overhead.
If the solution isn’t a 3-meeting series,
then what is it? You may have noticed a
trend throughout the conversation
examples we’ve seen so far: keeping it
casual.
Let’s say I’m trying to build tools to help
public speakers get more speaking gigs
and I bump into one at a conference. I’m
not going to try to set up a meeting.
Instead, I’m just going to immediately
transition into my most important
question: “Hey, I’m curious—how did
you end up getting this gig?” As a side
bonus, we’re also now having aninteresting conversation and I’m far
more likely to be remembered and get a
meeting later.
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 onedoesn’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
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 onformal meetings can cause us to
overlook perfectly good chances for
serendipitous learning.
Imagine that you’re in a crowded cafe,
tapping away at your keyboard, when
your dream boy/girl sits down next to
you. They’re wearing a charming hat and
give you a friendly nod before cracking
open a dog-eared old novel which just
totally completes the mood. You slam
down a quick espresso to psych yourself
up and fumble through some sort of
awkward monologue about how they
seem like a really nice person and this is
kind of weird because you don’t even
know each other but maybe they want to
go get a coffee sometime? Like, adifferent coffee? At a different place?
We know this is a silly situation. After
all, the purpose of a date is to talk to
each other and see if you get along.
Therefore, for all intents and purposes,
you were already on a date. And then
you messed it up by trying to over-
formalise it when you could have just
chatted a bit and skipped that whole first
date completely.
We’re going to pull exactly the same
trick on our early customer
conversations. 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 weretalking about our idea.
I was considering a product idea to
make office managers more efficient. I
played with the possibilities on Friday,
figured out the big questions over the
weekend, and then went to an industry
event on Monday. A handful of office
managers were there and without any of
them realising we’d “had a meeting”, I’d
learned that the big problem was really
about debt collection rather than
efficiency. I got there by just being
interested and chatting with them over a
beer: “X seems really annoying, how do
you deal with it?” “Is Y as bad as it
seems?” “You guys did a great job with
Z… Where did you get that from?”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.
Symptoms of formality:
“So, first off, thanks for agreeing to
this interview. I just have a few
questions for you and then I’ll let
you get back to your day…”
“On a scale of 1 to 5, how much
would you say you…”Learning from customers doesn’t mean
you have to be wearing a suit and
drinking boardroom coffee. 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.How long are meetings?
Early conversations are very fast. The
chats grow longer as you move from the
early broad questions (“Is this a real
problem?”) toward more specific
product and industry issues (“Which
other software do we have to integrate
with to close the sale?”).
It only takes 5 minutes to learn whether a
problem exists and is important.
Learning how someone currently
achieves a certain goal or solves a
problem is also quick.
Soon you’ll find yourself askingquestions which are answered with long
stories explaining their workflow, how
they spend their time, or what else
they’ve tried. You can usually get what
you came for in 10-15 minutes, but
people love telling stories about
themselves, so you can keep this
conversation going indefinitely if it’s
valuable for you and interesting for
them.
At the longer extreme, learning the
details of an industry takes an hour or
more. Thankfully, those are easier
conversations to manage since the other
person (usually some sort of industry
expert) can go into a monologue once
you point them in the right direction.The duration of formal B2B meetings
(the kind you schedule) is determined
more by the arbitrary calendar block
than by what you actually want to learn.
Of course, you’ve liable to burn 15
minutes just to get a cup of tea and say
hello.
Once you have a product and the
meetings take on a more sales-oriented
feel, you’ll want to start carving out
clear blocks of 30+ minutes. You might
lose 5 minutes due to miscellaneous
tardiness, spend 5 minutes saying hello,
5 minutes asking questions to understand
their goals/problems/budget, 10 minutes
to show/describe the product, and thelast 5 minutes figuring out next steps and
advancement. That’s your half hour.
The potential speed of the early
conversations one of the big reasons I
like keeping it casual and skipping the
meeting. Scheduling and going to a
meeting has a lot of overhead for a 10
minute chat. Even explaining that you’re
starting a company and would love to
ask a couple questions can take 5 or 10
minutes. You’ll make progress a lot
faster if you’re able to leave your idea
out of it for as long as possible.
Putting it togetherEven within a more formal meeting, you
still might want to keep it casual if
you’re hoping to get non-biased
feedback.
I once had a product idea to help busy
investors to manage their dealflow. I
knew they got hundreds of applications
per month and figured it must be a
spreadsheet nightmare. I lined up a
couple meetings to ask about the
industry. I showed up to the first meeting
and, while making smalltalk, said
something like “I was thinking, you guys
must get a ton of leads, right?” The guy
laughed and said, yeah, it was crazy.
“How in the world do you deal with all
of that?” He sort of shrugged and pointedat a cluster of about a dozen sticky notes
on the wall.
Each held a name and a phone number.
“Our analysts kill most of them before
they ever reach us, and then we throw
out a bunch more. We only end up with
about 10 apiece that are serious
contenders. We just call every couple
weeks to see how it’s going.” Well that
doesn’t sound so bad, I said. “Yeah, it
works pretty well,” he replied.
“Anyway, what did you want to talk
about?”
They don’t have the problem. That’s
successful learning. We disproved our
idea before the guy even realised wewere talking about it. It took 5 minutes,
avoided biases, and didn’t feed us any
bad data in the form of compliments,
fluff, or ideas. Instead, we got concrete
facts about our customers which are
directly relevant to our core business
questions.
Of course, it took me a 2-hour commute
to get to those 5 minutes. It can’t be
perfect every time.
In the aforementioned case, we proved
ourselves wrong. Sometimes, however,
it goes in the opposite direction and
everything we learn from customers
makes us even more excited. In that case,
we stand atop all that we’ve learned andtake the visionary leap of coming up
with a specific product and business to
make our customers’ lives better. And
then we ask them to commit to it.
_Rule of thumb: _Give as little
information as possible about your idea
while still nudging the discussion in a
useful direction.CHAPTER FIVE
Commitment and
advancement
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 tothe next stage is called “advancement”.
It’s like pushing a customer into the next
step of your real-world acquisition
funnel. They’ll either move forward or
make it clear that they’re not a customer.
Both are good results for your learning.
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 outof 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
complimentEnding product meetings with no
clear next steps
Meetings which “went well”
They haven’t given up anything of
value
As I use them in a customer learning
context, 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).
As such, they are functionally equivalent
for our purposes and I’m going to blur
them into one concept for the following
sections.
_Rule of thumb: “Customers” who keep
being friendly but aren’t ever going tobuy are a particularly dangerous source
of mixed signals.
Meetings succeed or fail
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. While we might spot something as
blatant as “Let’s talk again after the
holidays… Don’t call me, I’ll call you,”
we accept the more subtle versions
every day.
A meeting has succeeded when it endswith 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:
1. You’re asking for their opinion
about your idea (e.g. fishing for
compliments)
2. You’re not asking for a clear
commitment or next stepsYou know how to deal with compliments
by now: deflect, ignore, and get back to
business. 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. But not
asking certainly is. This can happen
because you avoid the scary question or
because you haven’t figured out what thenext steps should be.
Commitment is important. It tells us
whether people are actually telling the
truth. The more they give us, the more
we can trust what they say.
Rule of thumb: _If you don’t know what
happens next after a product or sales
meeting, the meeting was pointless.
The currencies of
conversation
Commitment can be cash, but doesn’t
have to be. Think of it in terms of
currency—what are they giving up foryou? A compliment costs them nothing,
so it’s worth nothing and carries no data.
The major currencies are time,
reputation risk, and cash.
A time commitment could include:
Clear next meeting with known
goals
Sitting down to give feedback on
wireframes
Using a trial themselves for a non-
trivial period
Reputation risk commitments might be:Intro to peers or team
Intro to a decision maker (boss,
spouse, lawyer)
Giving a public testimonial or case
study
Financial commitments are easier to
imagine and include:
Letter of intent (non-legal but
gentlemanly agreement to purchase)
Pre-orderDeposit
Sometimes, strong commitments
combine multiple currencies, such as
someone agreeing to run a paid trial with
their whole team, thus risking their time,
money, and reputation.
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.
Good meeting / bad meeting
Game time again. We just had a meeting.
But how did it go? Were they good
meetings or bad meetings? Why? And if
they’re bad, what can we do to fix them?
Have a think about the meetings listed
below and then turn the page for further
discussion.
“That’s so cool. I love
it!”
“Looks great. Let meknow when it launches.”
“There are a couple
people I can intro you to
when you’re ready.”
“What are the next
steps?”
“I would definitely buy
that.”
“When can we start the
trial?”
“Can I buy the
prototype?”
“When can you come
back to talk to the rest of
the team?””That’s so cool. I love it!”
Bad meeting. Pure, unadulterated
compliment. This may make you feel
good, but there is precisely zero data
here. But at least you won’t hurt yourself
on this one since it’s so obviously fluff.
To fix it, deflect the compliment and get
back to business.
“Looks great. Let me know
when it launches.”
Bad meeting. A compliment plus a
stalling tactic is the classic way to end a
pitch for something you’re never goingto buy. This comes in a lot of flavours,
but they’re all basically a polite way to
say, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
The big error you can make here is to
mistake this compliment-stall for a pre-
order (“He said he’ll buy it when it
launches!”). To fix it, I’d look for a
commitment I could ask for today.
If I was very early stage, I might ask for
an introduction to his boss or tech team
or the budget-holder so I can make sure I
fully understand their needs.
If I was slightly further through
development, I might push him to agree
to be one of our alpha users and to roll itout to some subset of their team and be a
case study for launch. If I’ve hit on a real
problem, he’ll jump at the chance to start
making progress today and get early
access.”There are a couple people I
can introduce you to when
you’re ready.”
Nearly a good meeting, but right now it’s
bad. There’s some data here, but
probably not as much as you initially
hope. On the bright side, at least you
know he doesn’t think you’re completely
nuts or he wouldn’t have even made the
fluffy offer (unless he’s just name
dropping). 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 morespecific 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.
“What are the next steps?”
Good meeting. A classic good meeting
conclusion. To succeed, a meeting
doesn’t need to end with a check in your
pocket. It just needs to advance to thenext step, whatever that is.
It’s worth noting that you need to know
your next steps to benefit from this. If
you have to say, “Let me have a think
about that and get back to you,” then
you’ve ruined a perfectly good meeting.
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.”I would definitely buy that.”
Bad meeting. Danger! There’s
admittedly some signal here, but the
false positive danger is off the charts.
This is the mis-interpreted answer which
sunk the first startup I worked at to the
tune of ten million bucks.
To fix it, you need to shift from fuzzy
future promises into concrete current
commitments. For example, you could
ask for a letter of intent, a pre-purchase
or deposit, or intros to other decision
makers and team members. Kickstarter
is so wonderful because it forces
customers who say they would buy it to
actually pull out a credit card andcommit.
“When can we start the trial?”
Maybe a good meeting. Unlike “when
does it launch,” which is usually a stall,
“When can we start” is a step forward.
Setting up new software and training
staff to use it is a big deal for most
businesses. Even a “free” trial can cost
them serious money. However, in some
cases, “trying” software costs nothing,
especially for individuals. For example,
I’ve “tried” countless CRM (contact
management) apps. It takes ten seconds
to log in, look around, and never think
about it again.As always, think in terms of currency.
What are they giving up to try it out? If
your trial is too “cheap” to try, you can
try to increase the cost of it. For
example, you could ask to write a case
study about them after they’ve spent 2
weeks using it. Or you could get them to
promise to try using it with their team for
at least a week. If you’ve got a more
developed product, you can take their
credit card and just charge them nothing
if they cancel within 30 days. The more
they are giving up for you, the more
seriously you can take their validation.”Can I buy the prototype?”
Great meeting. The best meeting
conclusion I’ve seen is the rarely-heard
but always appreciated, “Can I buy the
prototype?”
A product designer was once showing
me a brilliant smartphone tripod he was
designing. He demo’d the 3D-printed
prototype unit for me and I immediately
asked him how much it would cost to
buy the prototype. He laughed and said
he’d gone through about a dozen
prototypes already because people kept
buying them. That’s a good sign.
“When can you come back totalk to the rest of the team?”
Good meeting. Bingo! If you are selling
anything to companies, you’re going to
have to talk to multiple people. If they
won’t introduce you, then it’s a sure bet
you’re at a dead end.
Enterprise sales is tedious, but one of
the perks is that you can get really
accurate signals like this one quite early
in the process. Building consumer
products is a lot murkier since the
customer conversation process doesn’t
mimic the purchase process.
How to fix a bad meetingThe worst meetings are the wishy-washy
ones that you leave with neither
rejection nor advancement. You are in
no-man’s-land and you won’t learn
anything until you fix the meeting by
forcing a next step (or rejection).
A lost meeting can often be saved by just
pushing for a commitment at the end
while you’re being brushed off with a
compliment.
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.If they aren’t excited, then good news:
you got the information you came for.
Assimilate it, decide if it matters enough
to change your strategy, and then keep on
keeping on. 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.
Don’t pitch blind
Even once you’ve moved on to moreproduct-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.
Startup sales meetings too often go like
this:
You: “We do X. Want to
buy it?”
Them: “No thanks.”Those rejections aren’t helpful. 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 life of your
company and during a single meeting.
Crazy customers and your
first saleIt’s pretty weird that anybody buys
anything from young startups. In all
likelihood, before the year is up, you’re
going to either go out of business,
abandon the product, or sell the
company. And even if you stay the
course, there’s no guarantee you can
actually do what you say you can do.
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.
Keep an eye out for the people who get
emotional about what you’re doing.
There is a significant differencebetween: “Yeah, that’s a problem” and
“THAT IS THE WORST PART OF MY
LIFE AND I WILLPAY YOU RIGHT
NOW TO FIX IT.”
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 solutionThey’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.
In the consumer space, it’s the fan who
wants your product to succeed so badly
that they’ll front you the money as a pre-
order when all you’ve got is a duct-tape
prototype. They’re the one who will tell
all their friends to chip in as well.
They’re the person reading your blog
and searching for workarounds.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.
In summary, after you’ve learned thefacts of your industry and customers and
designed the solution, you start pushing
for advancement and commitments to
separate dead leads from real customers.
_Rule of thumb: _In early stage sales, the
real goal is learning. Revenue is just a
side-effect.CHAPTER SIX
Finding
conversations
Now that you know how to ask good
questions and fix bad meetings, you
know enough to have good customer
conversations. Take this opportunity to
go flex your conversational muscles and
talk to some people.
If you’re scratching your own itch with
this business, you likely already know
your customers. Great! Go talk to them.
Now that you’re armed with The Mom
Test, they won’t be able to lie to youeven though they know you.
But if you don’t already know folks,
where do these conversations and
meetings come from?Going to them
Drumming up good conversations from
cold leads is hard. It’s doable and
sometimes you have no choice, but it’s
far from ideal.
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.
Cold callsWhat does it mean if you reach out to
100 people and 98 of them hang up on
you? Well, nothing, except that people
don’t like getting cold calls. No surprise
there. More importantly, it means you’ve
now got 2 conversations in play. 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.
Beyond hard hustle, you should also stay
open to serendipity. There are lots ofways you can get lucky when you’re in
the mood for it.
Seizing serendipity
I was mulling over the idea of building
tools for professional speakers and
found myself at a friend-of-a-friend’s
engagement party. I heard someone
across the room say “my talk in Tokyo
next week” and made a beeline over to
her. She left the party thinking I was a
nice guy who was super interested in her
career and I left with a bunch of useful
customer insight and a commitment to
use the prototype at her next talk.
If it sounds weird to unexpectedlyinterview 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.
Find a good excuseI was chatting to an aspiring
entrepreneur in a cafe. Among other
things, his product helped cafe owners
educate potential customers on the
origins and backstory of their beans. He
had been hitting the pavement for the
past 2 weeks and getting turned away
from cafe after cafe. He wanted to talk to
me about his customer interview
process. Ten minutes into the
conversation, I cut in: “Who have you
talked to so far?” “Nobody—I don’t
know the owners and the staff won’t
help me.” “Have you talked to this
cafe?” “No, I don’t know them.” A
waitress walked by and I flagged her
down. “Excuse me, can I speak to the
owner?” “Umm.” “Don’t worry, it’snothing bad. This coffee is amazing and I
wanted to ask him about the story behind
the beans.” The owner wasn’t around,
but with a good excuse in hand, we were
soon chatting with the manager. And the
manager, in turn, gave us the owner’s
contact details and said he’d be in on
Tuesday.
You’ve go the ultimate excuse if you
have a PhD student on your founding
team. “Hello, I’m doing my PhD
research on the problems around X, it
would be a huge help if I could ask you a
couple questions for my dissertation.”
_Rule of thumb: _If it’s a topic you both
care about, find an excuse to talk aboutit. Your idea never needs to enter the
equation and you’ll both enjoy the chat.
Immerse yourself in where
they are
I wanted to build tools for public
speakers and conference organisers. I
knew a few at the lower and middle
tiers, but none of the big names who
charge $5-50k per talk, who I thought
might be a good customer segment for
obvious reasons. I hit the conference
circuit and gave free talks everywhere I
could.
Permanently on the road, everywhere I
went was an opportunity to meet newspeakers, do favours for event
organisers, and learn what they care
about. By immersing myself in the
community I met a load of people and
soon had all the connections and
conversations I could handle (I
ultimately decided that big speakers and
big conferences were a bad customer
segment and walked away—not every
conversation has to end in finding out
your idea is awesome).
Landing pages
Joel Gascoigne did a classic “landing
page” test with his startup Buffer,
describing the value proposition and
collecting emails. But contrary topopular 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.
I’m skeptical of the quantitative
validation of landing page metrics. But
they are certainly a great way to collect
emails of qualified leads for you to
reach out to and strike up a conversation
with.
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 thoseusers.
This is starting to bring the customers to
you instead of going to them, but still
involves sending a mostly cold email.
Next we’ll look at how to run with this
principle to make our lives even easier.
Bringing them to you
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 vastsums 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?
Organise meetups
For marginally more effort than attending
an event, you can organise your own and
benefit from being the centre of
attention.
Want to figure out the problems HR
professionals have? Organise an event
called “HR professionals happy hour”.People will assume you’re credible just
because you happen to be the person
who sent the invite emails or introduced
the speaker. You’ll have an easy time
chatting to them about their problems.
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.
Speaking & teaching
Teaching is under-valued as both a
learning and selling tool. Let’s say you’remaking better project management
software. In that case, you probably have
both expertise and a strongly held
opinion about how things could be
better. That’s the magic combination for
being an effective teacher.
Spend the time to teach. You’ll find
chances at conferences, workshops,
through online videos, blogging, or
doing free consulting or office hours.
You’ll refine your message, get in touch
with a room full of potential customers
who take you seriously, and will learn
which parts of your offering resonate
(before you’ve even built it). Then
simply chat up the attendees who aremost keen.
Industry blogging
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.
Even when I had no audience, I still
found blogging to be helpful. When I sent
cold emails from my blog email address,
folks would often meet with me because
they had checked my domain, seen myindustry 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.
Get clever
I once heard a brilliant hack from a guy
who wanted to sell to top-tier
universities like Stanford and Harvard.
But first he needed to understand their
problems (difficult) and be taken
seriously by the decision makers (even
more difficult).His solution was to organise a semi-
monthly “knowledge exchange” call
between the department heads of 3 top
universities to discuss the challenges
around his topic of choice. Furthermore,
it was set up as a conference call where
any other universities could dial in and
listen to the best practices of the big 3.
By simply organising the call and
playing host, he immediately absorbed
all the credibility of the top universities
and got direct phone access to a pile of
great leads.
Every business is different. Don’t just
copy what someone else is doing.
Consider your own situation, and thenget clever.
Creating warm intros
Warm intros are the goal. Conversations
are infinitely easier when you get an
intro through a mutual friend that
establishes your credibility and reason
for being there.
7 degrees of bacon
The world is a relatively small place.
Everyone knows someone. We just have
to remember to ask.
I was talking to a team of recent
graduates who needed to reachMcKinsey style consultants. They were
pulling their hair out. We were in a
coworking space full of other young
entrepreneurs, so I just stood on a chair
and yelled, “Excuse me! Does anyone
here know anyone who works at
McKinsey? Can we talk to you for a
second? We’ll buy you a beer — you
could really help us out!” They bought 3
beers, had 3 quick chats, and left with a
diary full of intros.
This is even easier for consumer
products. Not everyone knows folks at
McKinsey, but everybody does know,
for example, a recent mom or amateur
athlete or theatre enthusiast.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.
Industry advisors
I relied heavily on advisors in my first
company. We didn’t know the industry
and nobody took us seriously. Our 5
advisors each had around a half percent
of equity and basically just made
credible intros. I met with each once per
month, so I ended up getting a fresh
batch of intros weekly without it being a
huge time burden for any of them.
On a bit of a tangent, you’d be surprisedby 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.
Universities
I’m jealous of founders who are still in
(or recently out of) university.
Professors are a goldmine for intros.
They get their grant funding from high-
level industry folks they’re on good
terms with. And since they’re investingin research, those industry folks are self-
selected to be excited about new
projects.
Professors are easy to get in touch with
if you don’t know them yet. They post
their emails and you can just wander into
their office.
Investors
Top-tier investors are awesome for B2B
intros. Beyond their own rolodex and
company portfolio, they can usually pull
off cold intros to practically any
industry. Investors can also help you
close higher-tier advisors and directors
than you’d be able to wrangle on yourown.
Who has bought in to your idea already?
Who could they connect you to?
Cash in favours
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 maketheir 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.
I wouldn’t make a habit of doing stuff
like this since it’s a bit annoying and can
burn bridges, but sometimes you’re
backed into a corner and need to get
started somehow.
Asking for and framing themeeting
Sometimes a proper meeting can’t be
avoided. For example, you might want
the full hour or need to talk to someone
senior outside of your peer or
networking group. But since you don’t
necessarily have anything to sell, it’s
unclear what the meeting is _for. In those
cases, the right explanation and framing
can do wonders.
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.
Symptoms:
“Um. So….”
“How’s it going?”
There are a lot of bad ways to frame the
meeting, both when first asking for it and
once it begins.
Questions like, “Can I interview you” or”Thanks for agreeing to this interview”
both set set off alarm bells that this
meeting is going to be super boring. I
don’t want to be interviewed; I want to
talk and help!
The common, “Can I get your opinion on
what we’re doing?” sets expectations of
neediness and that you want
compliments or approval.
No expectations at all are set by, “Do
you have time for a quick
coffee/lunch/chat/meeting?” which
suggests you’re liable to waste my time.
The framing format I like has 5 key
elements.1. 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.
2. Frame expectations by mentioning
what stage you’re at and, if it’s true,
that you don’t have anything to sell.
3. 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.
4. Put them on a pedestal by showing
how much they, in particular, canhelp.
5. Ask for help.
Or, in shorter form: Vision / Framing /
Weakness / Pedestal / Ask
The mnemonic is “Very Few Wizards
Properly Ask [for help].” Here’s what it
might look like before you have a
product:
Hey Pete,
I’m trying to make desk &
office rental less of a
pain for new businesses(vision). We’re just
starting out and don’t
have anything to sell, but
want to make sure we’re
building something that
actually helps (framing).
I’ve only ever come at it
from the tenant’s side and
I’m having a hard time
understanding how it all
works from the landlord’s
perspective (weakness).
You’ve been renting out
desks for a while and
could really help me cut
through the fog
(pedestal).Do you have time in the
next couple weeks to
meet up for a chat? (ask)
Sometimes the 5 parts will be combined
into just one or two sentences, or they
can be in a different order. For example,
the next email sounded a little too pitchy
and I was worried he would delete it as
sales spam before getting through the
first two sentences. As such, I moved my
admission of weakness as early as I
could get it:
Hey Scott, I run a startup
trying to make
advertising more playfuland ultimately effective
(vision).
We’re having a load of
trouble figuring out how
all the pieces of the
industry fit together and
where we can best fit
into it (weakness). You
know more about this
industry than anyone and
could really save us from
a ton of mistakes
(pedestal).
We’re funded and have a
couple products out
already, but this is in noway a sales meeting —
we’re just moving into a
new area and could
really use some of your
expertise (framing).
Can you spare a bit of
time in the next week to
help point us in the right
direction over a coffee?
(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 conversations are easy to screw
up. As such, you need to be the one in
control. You set the agenda, you keep it
on topic, and you propose next steps.
Don’t be a jerk about it, but do have a
plan for the meeting and be assertive
about keeping it on track.
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 howthey 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.To commute or to call
One of the solutions to the time cost of
these conversations is to move them onto
Skype or phone calls. In most situations,
I don’t think the added volume is worth
the information you lose by not being in
the room. I get confused enough by what
people are telling me in person. Losing
access to their face and body language
feels like shooting myself in the foot.
More subtly, calls damage the delicate
power dynamic of these conversations.
When someone is having a coffee with
you, there’s the potential to chat as
friends. You can just shoot the breezeabout the industry for a bit. You can keep
it casual. They’re enjoying the
conversation
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 aconstraint of the medium.
Plus, nobody becomes friends over the
phone, which means you aren’t going to
get the warm intros and future meetings
you need. 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. It’s
too easy to use surveys or phone calls as
an excuse to skip the awkwardness ofmeeting in person rather than as a
considered trade-off.The advisory flip
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.
With that mindset switch, you’ll know
why you’re there. And instead of it being
a customer-learning-but-I-really-want-
to-do-sales meeting, it’s a let-me-find-
out-if-you-are-a-good-advisor-by-
asking-lots-of-questions meeting.Willpower is a finite resource. The way
to overcome difficult situations isn’t to
power through, but rather to change your
circumstances to require less willpower.
Changing the context of the meeting to
“looking for advisors” is the equivalent
of throwing out all your chocolate when
you start a diet. You change the
environment to naturally facilitate your
goals.
You don’t need to explicitly tell them
you’re looking for advisors. In fact, I
wouldn’t unless you already quite like
them and it happens to come up in
conversation. It’s really about orienting
your state of mind to give you a helpfulinternal narrative and consistent front.
Somewhat counterintuitively, the sales-
advisor switch also puts you firmly in
control of the meeting, since you’re now
evaluating _them. Even if the topics of
discussion are basically the same, you
(and they) will notice the difference.How many meetings
Every meeting has an opportunity cost.
While you’re sitting in a bus on your
way there, you aren’t writing code or
generating leads or drinking wine.
If you’re running a sales-driven business
(especially enterprise sales), the
opportunity cost of early conversations
is low since many of them will become
sales leads. You’re doubling up on
learning and dealflow.
The UX community (who knows their
customer conversation!) says you should
keep talking to people until you stophearing new information.
In my experience, that could take as few
as 3-5 conversations if you have a
relatively simple industry and a focused
customer segment. If you’ve run more
than 10 conversations and are still
getting results that are all over the map,
then I’d guess that your customer
segment is too fuzzy and could stand to
be tightened up.
This isn’t about having a thousand
meetings. It’s about quickly learning
what you need, and then getting back to
building your business. You should be
able to answer almost any customer
question and move onto new ones withina week.
Rule of thumb: _Keep having
conversations until you stop hearing new
stuff.CHAPTER SEVEN
Choosing your
customers
They say that startups don’t starve, they
drown. You never have too few options,
too few leads, or too few ideas. You
have too many. You get overwhelmed.
You do a little bit of everything.
When it comes to avoiding drowning and
making faster progress, good customer
segmentation is your best friend.
SegmentationWhen we look at the big successes, they
seem to serve the whole world. Google
lets anyone find anything. Paypal helps
anyone send money anywhere. Evernote
backs up all the writing of everybody.
But they didn’t start there. If you start too
generic, everything is watered down.
Your marketing message is generic. You
suffer feature creep. Google helped PhD
students find obscure bits of code. EBay
helped collectors buy and sell Pez
dispensers. Evernote helped moms save
and share recipes.
When you have a fuzzy sense of who
you’re serving, you end up talking to a
lot of different types of people, whichleads to confusing signals and three
problems:
1. You get overwhelmed by options
and don’t know where to start
2. You aren’t moving forward but
can’t prove yourself wrong
1. You receive incredibly mixed
feedback and can’t make sense of it
Babies or body builders?I talked to a woman who had developed
a very cool powdered condiment. It was
sweet (like a cinnamon brown sugar),
but had all the nutrition of a
multivitamin. In fact, it was an all-
natural superfood — you could eat
nothing but that powder and survive
indefinitely.
She said that it had countless uses: you
could sprinkle it on your breakfast or
mix it in with your protein shake. Moms
could trick their kids into being healthy.
Restaurants could leave it on the tables
as a healthy sugar alternative. However,
she was running in circles because the
bodybuilders wanted one thing, the
restaurants wanted another, and themoms needed a third. Making one of
them happy always disappointed the
others. She didn’t know how to start.
Before we can serve _everyone, we have
to serve someone. By thinking about
who would be most likely to buy, she
realised it was moms with young kids
who are currently shopping at health
food stores. She also knew where to find
them: in the health food stores! But the
stores were an important partner and she
didn’t know what they would want.
She decided to kill two birds with one
stone by going into only the small,
independent health food stores (slice that
segment!) and asking them to place a fewbottles of her condiment beside the
breakfast foods. It’s a great way to cut
through opinions by asking for a
commitment (some shelf space) and she
would come back in a week to ask them
about their experiences. If the stores
were happy and the product sold, she
could begin finding ways to talk to their
customers (and her end consumers),
perhaps via an in-store tasting.
By getting specific, she was able to cut
through the noise, stop drowning, and
start making progress.
Big brands or mom & pop?
I was once thrilled that my customersegment was “advertisers”. Everyone
advertises somehow, so naturally this
was very exciting. Our market was
practically infinite! I talked to mom-and-
pop shops, e-tailers, big brands, creative
agencies, SMEs, music labels and more.
Everyone I talked to had different needs,
constraints, problems, and desires.
Everything we did ended up sort of
working. Everything was somewhat
promising. Some people were talking
about paying us $10,000/month while
others scoffed at the idea of paying $10.
Every feature was more or less well-
received. But if we tried to cut any of
those middling features, we would get an
uproar. It was always someone’sfavourite part.
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. Butmaking 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.
But what does it mean!?
I recently spoke to a couple founders
who have been working hard on theircustomer conversations. They were
doing a great job of ensuring they use
every sales meeting as an opportunity to
learn. They’re asking good questions
which pass The Mom Test and are
pushing for advancement and
commitment whenever it’s relevant. And
yet, they have no idea what is going on
and aren’t sure how to move the
business to the next level. They don’t
know which features to build and which
to cut. They don’t know how to improve
their marketing language. Why aren’t
customer conversations helping them?
To make matters worse, the feedback
they’re getting is absurdly inconsistent.
If they run twenty conversations, theyend up with twenty different must-have
features and twenty separate must-solve
problems. The more people they talk to,
the more confused they get. What’s going
on here?
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. Thefirst 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 fifth is in Africa, running
the app off a shaky cellphone
connection. All are “students”.
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 alllook 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.
In these cases, talking to an industry
expert can be hugely informative to
provide you with a taxonomy of theindustry. That will give you a better
starting point for choosing where to
begin. If you don’t have access to this
high-level view, you still want to take
your best guess and get specific. The
next section on Customer Slicing will
show you one way to approach it. Over
time, your understanding of the industry
will improve and you can adjust your
mental categories as needed. 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.Customer slicing
If you’ve already got a product and
users, you can explore your way to a
good segment by seeing who likes it and
focusing on that group. The other
approach is to just make a best-guess. In
both cases, you’re ending up with a
specific idea of who you’re serving so
you can really make the features and
language resonate for them.
You’ll want even more specific
segmentation for your conversations than
for your whole business. Going out and
talking to people is that it takes time. Ifyou talk to five people who each have
different goals, you’re going to get
mixed signals which don’t give you the
confidence you need to move forward.
This drilling down into ever more
specific groups is called Customer
Slicing. You take a segment and then
keep slicing off better and better sub-
sets of it until you’ve got a tangible
sense of who you can go talk to and
where you can find them. 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?
We now have a two groups of segments:
the first is a collection of quite specific
demographic groups and the second is a
series of motivations. When we look atthem, some will be more generic than
others. Go back through the generic ones
and keep slicing. Just repeat the
questions above. Within that sub-group,
who wants it most? 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 doingthe above workaround behaviours?
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. A customer segment isn’t very
useful if there’s no way you can get in
touch!
Now that we have a bunch of who-
where pairs, we can decide who to start
with based on who seems most:
1. Profitable
2. Easy to reach3. Rewarding for us to build a
business around
For example, if we were thinking about
building an app to help students become
more confident speakers, we might
decide the best-case-students are
graduating students nervous about their
first big job interview. They are
motivated not to screw up their big day.
Other folks with those motivations might
be first-time TV/radio guests, someone
giving a wedding speech, or new authors
who are about to go on book tour.
Additional motivations (beyond coping
with nervousness about a particularevent) might be to improve at a valuable
long-term skill or to fix some of the
quirks of being a non-native speaker.
That gives us some additional
demographics, such as young
professionals who have to talk a lot,
such as teachers and salespeople. Or
foreign exchange students who are about
to graduate. Or non-native speaking PhD
students who have an upcoming
conference talk.
As we get specific, it becomes easier to
imagine where to find these groups.
Instead of the generic “students” (I guess
I’ll walk around campus?), we can
easily find non-native speaking PhD
students through the admissions office orthe department advisors. We know
exactly who to look for and won’t waste
our time talking to a bunch of irrelevant
folks. Or we can find people online. We
might reach new authors by searching
Amazon’s upcoming release list and then
reaching out to them on Twitter.
Now that we’ve got some focused
demographics, we also want to look at
existing behaviours. A lot of people are
terrified of speaking and just ignore it.
They probably aren’t going to be our
customer. Others talk to a therapist about
their anxiety in general, while others try
to improve speaking in particular by
googling for tips, reading books, or
going to workshops and meetups likeToastmasters. There are more existing
solutions (e.g. new salespeople might
get on-the-job training), but you get the
idea.
Once we know a group’s existing
behaviours, it’s incredibly easy to get in
touch with them. Nervous wedding
speakers might be Googling for
examples of great wedding speeches. We
could advertise on those search terms
and offer a bit of re-assurance and
support in exchange for a quick chat. If
someone is listening to a podcast about
speaking skills, we could sponsor it or
propose to the host that they run a “call
in to talk about your speaking fears and
solutions” live event.If this was my business, I would
probably shift my preferred customer
segment from “students” to “people
scared of public speaking who are trying
to get better.” I would start by going to a
Toastmasters meetup since I could have
a dozen conversations over the course of
the evening by Keeping it Casual. That
one evening would give me a great
starting point for understanding the
motivations, worldview, and needs of a
large group of totally ideal customers
who are already spending time and
money to try to get better.
On the other hand, if you were attacking
the same vision and happened to be asecret bibliophile, you might choose to
start by tracking down some authors who
are about to go on book tour.
You needn’t be planning and theorising
all day about this stuff — use it to
quickly get to a specific, best-possible
customer so you can go grab a few of
them and move the business forward.
Since you’ll spend a lot of time talking
to your customers, it’s worth choosing
someone who is both accessible and fun
for you to be around. This stuff is hard
work and can be a real grind if you’re
cynical about the people or the industry
you’re trying to understand and serve.As we mentioned, you can broaden your
segment back out later. Make your life
easy for now by choosing someone who
is specific and who also and meets the
three big criteria of being reachable,
profitable, and personally rewarding.
_Rule of thumb: _Good customer segments
are a who-where pair. If you don’t know
where to go to find your customers, keep
slicing your segment into smaller pieces
until you do.
Talking to the wrong people
You can’t get the data you need if you’re
talking to the wrong people. There are 3ways to end up fall into this clearly
unhelpful trap.
1. You have too-broad of a segment
and are talking to everyone
2. You
have
multiple
customer
segments and missed some of them
1. You are selling to businesses with a
complicated buying process and
have overlooked some of the
stakeholdersWe’ve already talked about #1. If you
talk to everyone, many of them are
inevitably going to be the wrong people.
You can miss segments and overlook
buyers in lots of ways. The first
important step is to know they exist.
Sometimes it’s obvious. If you are a
multi-sided marketplace, you obviously
have multiple customer segments.
Other times, it’s sneakier. If you’re
building an app for kids, need to “sell”
to both them and their parents. If you’re
building something for public schools,
you could potentially be affected by the
concerns of the teachers, the students, the
administration, the parent-teacherassociation, and the tax payers.
You’ll also need to worry about multiple
groups if you rely on an important
partner, whether for manufacturing,
distribution, or promotion. If your
business relies on a certain partner,
you’d better understand their goals and
constraints just as well as you
understand your customers’.
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. When I
was building interactive advertising
products, I spent lots of time talking toguys in suits and very little (well, none)
talking to the teenagers we were
assuming would enjoy using our
products. Telling my board that I had
successfully talked to ten children that
week just didn’t seem like the most
important thing I could be doing. In
retrospect, it clearly was.CHAPTER EIGHT
Running the process
Even if you do everything else right, you
can get bad results if you don’t have the
right process wrapped around your
conversations. If you just show up to
meetings and hope for the best, you
aren’t making a good use of anyone’s
time. You need to do a little bit of work
before and after to extract full value.
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” isfunctionally 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.
The most extreme way to bottleneck is to
go to the meetings alone and take crappy
notes which you don’t review with your
team. At that point, your head has
become the ultimate repository of
customer truth and everyone just has to
do what you say.
In my case, I bottlenecked so hard that
our CTO quit while saying, “We’re
never going to succeed if you keep
changing what we’re doing.” In my
defence, the stuff I’d learned was true (at
least, I think it was). But it didn’t matter
anyway since I hadn’t properly
communicated it to the rest of the team.Symptoms of a learning bottleneck:
“You just worry about the product.
I’ll learn what we need to know.”
“Because the customers told me
so!”
“I don’t have time to talk to people
— I need to be coding!”
Avoiding bottlenecks has three parts:
prepping, reviewing, and taking good
notes.Prepping
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.
If you’ve already learned the facts of
your customer and industry, then you
should also know what commitment and
next steps you are going to push for at
the end of the meeting.
It’s easier to guide the conversation and
stay on track if you have an existing set
of beliefs that you’re updating. Spend upto 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.
While prepping, if you come across a
question which could be answered with
desk research, take a moment to do it.
You want to move past the obvious stuff
and spend your conversations finding
answers the internet can’t give you.
Similarly, if you’re about to meet with abusiness, do your basic due diligence on
LinkedIn and the company website. It
takes 5 minutes and will save you from
borking the conversation and looking
like an idiot.
Sit down with your whole founding team
when you prep. You want both business
and product to be represented. If you
leave part of the company out of the
prep, then you end up missing their
concerns in the customer conversations.
Some founders react with hostility to the
whole idea. They’ll say something along
the lines of, “We need to be building the
gosh derned product, not fuffing around
talking to people.” On the surface, itappears to be a refusal to face the reality
that there might be something wrong with
the product’s foundations. But having
seen it in several teams now, I think it’s
actually the desire for speed, where
speed is measured by building features
instead of by de-risking and validating
the business.
Beyond asking a grumpy cofounder to
“humour me”, there are 2 questions to
help tease out hidden product risks. The
first is asking, “If this company fails,
what is most likely to have killed it?” If
we had asked that about my very first
product (a user-generated cartoon
community), we would have answered
that either nobody wants to createcartoons or that their cartoons will be so
bad that nobody wants to watch them.
This gives us a good starting point to
begin exploring with a combination of
technical and conversational tools.
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?
The second question is a flipped versionof the first, from Lafley/Martin’s strategy
book. “What would have to be true for
this to be a huge success?” In this case, I
might have answered that we need lots
of hilarious cartoons plus scaling
revenue from brand advertisers.
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?”In fact, if you’re tight for time, asking
this question is the only prep you really
need.
_Rule of thumb: _If you don’t know what
you’re trying to learn, you shouldn’t
bother having the conversation.Reviewing
After a conversation, just review your
notes with your team and update your
beliefs and 3 big questions as
appropriate.
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.
I also like to talk about the meta-level of
the conversation itself: which questions
worked and which didn’t? How can wedo 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.
Just like prepping, reviewing is so
simple that it sounds like a non-step. It’s
tempting to skip it. Don’t! The review is
important. Disseminate learnings to your
team as quickly and as directly as
possible, using notes and exact quotes
wherever you can. It keeps you in sync,
leads to better decisions, prevents
arguments, and allows your whole team
to benefit from the learning you’veworked so hard to acquire.
Who should show up
Everyone on the team who is making big
decisions (including tech decisions)
needs to go to at least some of the
meetings. The tech guys don’t need to go
to most of the meetings, but you’ll all
learn a ton from hearing customer
reactions first-hand occasionally. You’ll
also be able to help each other catch and
fix your conversation mistakes and
biases.
Meetings go best when you’ve got two
people at them. One person can focus ontaking 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.
Don’t send more than two people unless
it’s group-on-group or you’ve got a
particularly good reason to do so. Three
folks interviewing someone can be a
little overwhelming.
Going in solo is fine once you get good
at taking concise notes. The main
problem of running solo is that it’s
harder to catch yourself and recover
once you start going off-track asking badquestions or missing the point.
If you’re shy and have no cofounder to
take the lead, call in a favour with a
friend to come to your first couple
conversations with you. You can just
play the role of the note-taker until
you’re comfortable. If there’s no
workaround and you have to bite the
bullet, remember that confidence is
domain-specific. Instead of suffering
through, focus on getting better and
understanding the process. It will get
less scary as you improve.
You can’t outsource or hire someone to
do customer learning. There are
exceptional team dynamics where itworks, but generally speaking, the
founders need to be in the meetings
themselves. When a hired gun brings you
bad news (“This problem isn’t real and
nobody cares about what we’re doing”),
properly assimilating it is difficult.
More insidiously, if the signal is
lukewarm, it’s tempting for a hire to
gloss over it. Hiring out your learning is
a guaranteed way to get bad signals.
Until you’ve got a working business
model and a repeatable sales or
marketing process, the founders need to
be in the meetings themselves.
On the bright side, even though you have
to be in the room to process the learning,you don’t necessarily have to be the one
setting up or leading the meetings. You
can hire people to help as long as you’re
there with them, listening.How to write it down
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. And when,
months later, you decide to adjust the
business’s direction, you’ll be able to
return to your notes instead of having to
go do a whole new set of interviews.
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.
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 probably won’t
exactly copy mine, so don’t worry about
memorising them. You’ll build your own
go-to list as you have more
conversations.
:) :( :| ☇ ☐ ⤴ ^ ☑＄♀☆
Emotions
:) Excited
:( Angry:| Embarrassed
Someone saying “that’s a problem”
should be interpreted totally differently
depending on whether they are neutral or
outraged. Any strong emotion is worth
writing down. For example, depending
on your industry, you might also choose
to make symbols for lust or laughter.
Capture the big emotions and remember
to dig into them when they come up.
Their life
☇ 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)
These five “life” symbols are your bread
and butter. Combine them with emotion
symbols where appropriate. Pains and
obstacles carry a lot more weight when
someone is embarrassed or angry about
them.
Obstacles are preventing a customer
from solving their problems even though
they want to. They’re important because
you’ll probably also have to deal with
them. For example, a lot of corporate
folks would love to use cloud servicesand hate their current options, but can’t
use anything else because their
company’s IT policy is an obstacle.
Their workaround might be to use their
personal phone as a secondary computer
or by doing certain work at home. Also
worth noting.
Specifics
☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria
＄ Money or budgets or purchasing
process
♀ Mentioned a specific person or
company
☆ Follow-up task
As we discussed, feature requestsusually get ignored, but they’re a good
signal to capture and explore. Must-have
purchasing criteria are obviously more
important. Money signals are also key.
Write down specific names and
companies. If it’s someone they know,
ask for an intro at the end of the
conversation. If it’s a competitor or
alternate solution, write it down to
research it later.
Put a big star on items to follow-up on
after the meeting, especially next steps
you promised as a condition of their
advancement/commitment.
Where to write it downYou 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
In practice, I’ve found that taking notes
in my primary notebook is practically
useless. Over the course of several
months’sprawl, you set aninsurmountable search and retrieval task
for yourself. If you won’t look at your
notes, they aren’t much good.
If you do end up taking notes in non-
ideal places, you just need to spend a
little extra post-meeting time moving
them over into your permanent format.
Otherwise you’ll be kicking yourself
when you remember that amazing quote
someone gave you which you can’t quite
remember well enough to convince those
skeptical investors.
What is a better note-taking medium?
Google Docs spreadsheets and Evernote
are both great for team sharing, search,and retrieval. Spreadsheets are
wonderfully sortable if you write your
key signals in their own column. The
downside is that it comes across as rude
to take notes directly on a computer
during a meeting, so you add a bit of
mandatory post-meeting work to transfer
your notes. I always found this a bit
annoying, but it’s way better than losing
your learning in an off-topic notebook.
A dedicated notebook is fine, if you can
remember to carry it with you and use it.
For a while, I would use my regular
notebook for my customer notes and then
just tear out every page which wasn’t
from an interview so it was easier to
find them later. Hardly the most elegant.My favourite medium is index cards.
Post-it notes also work. I carry around
blank cards and take notes on them, with
one quote or learning per card (along
with a signal icon, of course). After the
meeting I jot down the date and name of
the person on each card. It takes a
couple minutes, but it’s faster than
moving over all your notes. When we
review, we lay the cards out on the table
and sort through them. Cards are great
because of the random access and
sorting. If you learn that the problem
you’re solving doesn’t really matter, you
can just pull out all the cards marked
with a lightning bolt and find yourself a
new problem that’s already beenconfirmed.
When I first started, I would make audio
recordings, but that suffered from the
same problem as notebooks. I’d end up
with a ton of content and no real way to
sort it or find the bit I wanted, so I ended
up ignoring the recordings.
If you _do _want to use audio, you’ll find
people are surprisingly willing to be
recorded. Put your phone on the table as
you sit down and say, “Hey, is it cool if I
record this, because I’m always
paranoid I’ll miss something important
in my notes. It won’t get shared with
anyone or posted anywhere.” Almost
everyone says yes, but it does blow yourcover if you’re trying to Keep it Casual.
If you embrace Keeping it Casual, you’ll
find customer conversations appearing
out of nowhere and catching you by
surprise. Just go with it. I’ve got notes
written on paper plates from a pizza
party, on beer mats from the pub, and on
newspapers from the cafe. You’ll want to
transfer them over to your main storage
system once you get back to the office,
but it’s better to capture what’s said on
something weird than to try to remember
all the important bits.
If it’s totally inappropriate to take notes
during the chat, just have the
conversation and then immediatelyretreat 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.
The process
Talking to customers is a tool, not anobligation. If it’s not going to help or you
don’t want to do it for whatever reason,
just skip it. I’m sure you’ve been on the
receiving end of a half-assed survey sent
out by some new startup to tick the box
marked “learn from customers” on their
startup todo list. There are better ways
to waste your time.
Without figuring out what actually
matters to your company and how to deal
with it effectively, you’re just going
through the motions.
When it comes to conversations, it looks
like this:
Signs you’re just going through themotions:
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 doingthis
The persistent presence of any of these
problems suggests that you’re doing
something wrong and wasting your time.
Here are the steps I go through to keep
on track. Feel free to ignore or tweak as
needed given your situation and
company. It’s as light-weight as I’ve
been able to get it and should reduce
rather than increase the amount of time
you need to spend on conversations.
The process before a batch of
conversations:If you haven’t yet, choose a
focused, findable segment
With your team, decide your big 3
learning goals
If relevant, decide 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 could be answered via
desk research, do that first
During the conversation:Frame the conversation
Keep it casual
Ask good questions which pass The
Mom Test
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 plans
Decide on the next 3 big questions
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.There you go. Now you know everything
I do about how to learn from
conversations. Combine this process
with The Mom Test, Keeping it Casual,
and Advancement for maximum learning
in minimum time. But even if it goes
wrong, don’t worry so much. Eternity
will forgive.
This stuff is fast
The time scales of the process are
important. The point is to make your
business move faster, not slower.
Don’t spend a week prepping for
meetings; spend an hour and then go talkto 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.
You’ll keep talking to customers for the
life of your company, of course. I’m not
advising you to become a recluse after
the first two weeks. Your customers are
a crucial source of ongoing insight and
will help catch any badgers in the bush,
so to speak. With the tools in this book
(especially Keeping it Casual) you
should be able to keep benefitting from
customer learning without spending anyreal time on it. You can do it alongside
growing your business rather than in
place of it.
This stuff moves really quickly when
you’re doing it right. This book isn’t
meant you an excuse to squander
precious months on theorising. It’s meant
to help you extract maximum value in
minimum time from conversations so you
can get back to what really matters:
building your business.
_Rule of thumb: _Go build your dang
company already.Conclusion and
cheatsheet
I still ask dumb questions all the time.
You will too. Don’t beat yourself up
over it. In fact, just yesterday I screwed
up a particularly important meeting by
slipping into pitch mode (this was
yesterday at the time of writing…hopefully not again at the time of
reading).
It happens. It’s okay. Review with your
team, don’t beat yourself up (or your
cofounders) over mistakes. Work on
getting better as a team.
I make tons of mistakes. At least now I
notice and have a chance to fix them.
Most bad conversations can be fixed.
You’re trying to do something difficult.
You’re never going to be perfect, but it
always helps to be better.
People love startups. Startups do cool
stuff and make their lives better.
Everyone supports the entrepreneur.When entrepreneurs screw up, people
want to forgive them. They want the
entrepreneur and the startup to succeed.
By asking good questions, we can fix
many flawed ideas before they get us in
trouble. But still, sometimes it doesn’t
work out. It’s okay. Go to the people
who believed in and supported you and
thank them. If relevant, apologise.
They’ll say something like:
“Hey, don’t even worry
about it — I know how it
goes.”
Eternity will forgive our earthly
blunders. Everyone loves anentrepreneur. After all, you’re putting it
on the line to try and make their lives
better.
_Rule of thumb: _It’s going to be okay.
Hack it
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 and
with a single stroke, cut the knot in half.
The knot was undone and he became
“the Great”.
Struggling to untie the knot was the“proper” process. Cutting through it was
a hack (ba-dum tish!). Alexander jumped
straight to the end result without any of
the work.
When we find a new and exciting
process, it’s easy to spend hours
obsessively geeking out about exactly
the right way to untie this big, gnarly
knot.
At a workshop about customer
segmentation, a personal trainer said he
was spending most of his time on the
non-billable commutes between his
clients. At some point it was suggested
that the police might be a better
customer, since he could go to the stationand spend all day working with different
officers. No commute, more billable
hours, and a less price-sensitive
customer. Sounds good in theory.
We all started geeking out about how he
was going to validate this. Who could he
talk to? Did anyone have family in the
police? What should his interview
questions be? What was the market size?
Etc etc.
He looked at us like we were all idiots
and held up his phone. “Why wouldn’t I
just call them?” It’s not like he didn’t
know their number. We all stood around
a bit dumbfounded while he went
outside and called the police. Twentyminutes later, he came back in with a
trial session scheduled.
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.Cheatsheet
Just in case you like lists.
Key skills:
Asking good questions (Chapters 1
& 3)
Avoiding bad data (Chapter 2)
Keeping it casual (Chapter 4)
Pushing
for
commitment
&
advancement (Chapter 5)
Framing the meeting (Chapter 6)
Customer segmentation (Chapter 7)
Prepping & reviewing (Chapter 8)Taking notes (Chapter 8)
The Mom Test:
1. Talk about their life instead of your
idea
2. Ask about specifics in the past
instead of generics or opinions
about the future
3. Talk less and listen more
Getting back on track (avoiding bad
data):Deflect compliments
Anchor fluff
Dig
beneath
opinions,
ideas,
requests, and emotions
Mistakes and symptoms:
1. Fishing for compliments
“I’m thinking of starting abusiness… so, do you
think it will work?”
“I had an awesome idea
for an app — do you like
it?”
1. Exposing your ego (aka 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!”1. Being pitchy
“No no, I don’t think you get it…”
“Yes, but it also does this!”
1. Being too formal
“So, first off, thanks for agreeing tothis interview. I just have a few
questions for you and then I’ll let
you get back to your day…”
“On a scale of 1 to 5, how much
would you say you…”
“Let’s set up a meeting.”
1. Being a learning bottleneck
“You just worry about the product.
I’ll learn what we need to know.”
“Because the customers told me
so!”“I don’t have time to talk to people
— I need to be coding!
1. Collecting compliments instead of
facts and commitments
“We’re getting a lot of positive
feedback.”
“Everybody I’ve talked to loves the
idea.”The process before, during and after
the meeting:
If you haven’t yet, choose a
focused, findable segment
With your team, decide your big 3
learning goals
If relevant, decide 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 could be answered via
desk research, do that firstFrame the conversation
Keep it casual
Ask good questions which pass The
Mom Test
Deflect compliments, anchor fluff,
and dig beneath signals
Take good notes
If relevant, press for commitment
and next steps
With your team, review your notes
and key customer quotes
If relevant, transfer notes into
permanent storageUpdate your beliefs and plans
Decide on the next 3 big questions
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 movingto the next step of your real-world
funnel and getting closer to a sale.
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 andit 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
You aren’t sure why you’re having
the meeting
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
Asking for and framing the meeting:
Vision — half-sentence version of
how you’re making the world better
Framing — where you’re at and
what you’re looking forWeakness — show how you can be
helped
Pedestal — show that they, in
particular, can provide that help
Ask — ask for help
The big prep question:
“What do we want to learn from
these guys?”Thanks!
It’s been fun. Thanks for reading :). I
hope it was helpful. For slides, videos,
and other information, check out
momtestbook.com.
When you hit a stumbling block I can
help with or learn that I gave some bad
advice, hit me up on twitter @robfitz.
My blog where I write about early stage
startup stuff is thestartuptoolkit.com.
Subscribe to the rss or email updates
and dig through the archive.
To learn to be a better founder, you’vegot to get your hands dirty. Startups are
more craft than science. It’s something
you learn by doing. The tools help, but
you need to get out in the field. I’ve
learned more from launching silly
projects than I ever did from reading
books or blogs. Make it happen.
And finally, if you’re in the business of
supporting, training, mentoring, or
investing in startups, I work with a few
other founders building educational
curriculum (slides, workshops, videos,
facilitation guides, etc) at
foundercentric.com. Download
resources, join the mailing list, and get
involved. We’ve run training from Costa
Rica to Kiev with folks ranging fromOxford to the UN. Get in touch at
aloha@foundercentric.com.Acknowledgements
A huge thanks to all the people who
helped with feedback, and especially
those who took the time to write up their
ridiculously useful line-by-line
comments: Daniel Tenner, Andreas
Klinger, Veronica Torras, Dave
Chapman, Salim Virani, Sabrina Kiefer,
Madeleine Evans, Spike Morelli, Adele
Barlow, and Orsolya Toth. Thanks!
Nobody gets through the startup life
alone. Thanks to Paul Graham for taking
a punt on us when we were so clearly
clueless and to Devin, Laurence, and
Ryan for getting on that crazy train.Thanks to Saul Klein for lovingly yelling
at me about sales every Friday and for
forcing me to actually read _4 Steps to
the E.piphany. Thanks to Steve Blank
for writing it. Thanks to Peter Read and
Andy C for showing me how sales really
works.
Thanks to Ian and Pete for getting us
settled in London. Thanks to my peers in
the Braintrust who were the perfect
sounding board, and especially Salim
Virani for calling me on my BS. Thanks
to Tom Stone, Dave Chapman, John
Spindler, and Tim Barnes for showing
me the good bits of the startup education
world and giving me my first chance to
teach.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.
And of course, big thanks for Mom &
Dad for gently planting the
entrepreneurial seed through both
encouragement and their own collection
of insane startup and/or shipwreck
stories.The cover was put together by Devin
Hunt.
The author image is provided by
heisenbergmedia.com. Thanks!Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Introduction
Is this book for you?
Talking to customers is hard
The Mom Test
Failing the mom test
Good question / bad question
“Do you
think it’s a
good
idea?”
“Who else
should
I
talk to?”Using the mom test
Avoiding bad data
Asking important questions
Prepare your list of 3
Keeping it casual
How long are meetings?
Commitment and advancement
“That’s so cool. I love it!”
“There are a couple people I
can introduce you to when
you’re ready.”
“I would definitely buy that.”
“Can I buy the prototype?”
Finding conversations
Going to them
To commute or to call
The advisory flip
How many meetingsChoosing your customers
Running the process
Reviewing
How to write it down
Conclusion and cheatsheet
Cheatsheet
Thanks!
Acknowledgements