📚 Book Notes: The Mom Test - How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You

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Here are my notes from The Mom Test - How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You:

1. Every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person we’re talking to and rendering the whole exercise pointless.
2. Until we get specific, it always seems like a good idea.
3. 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.
4. The Mom Test:
   A) Talk about their life instead of your idea.
   B) Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.
   C) Talk less and listen more.
5. 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.
   If they haven’t looked for ways of solving it already, they’re not going to look for (or buy) yours.
6. 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.
7. Most of your meetings will end with a compliment. It feels good. They said they liked it!
   Even if they really do like it, that data is still worthless. For example, venture capitalists 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?
8. The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.”
9. Feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is just a side-effect.
13. 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.
14. What 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.
15. 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.

If you liked the above content, I’d definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

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