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CHAPTER ONE

The Mom Test

People say you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea because she loves you and she’ll think everything you do is great. 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 fundamentally a bad question and invites everyone to lie to you at least a little.

It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to tell you the truth. It’s your responsibility to find it. And you’re gonna 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 into it, let’s look at two conversations with mom and see what we can learn about our business idea: selling digital cookbooks for the iPad.

Failing the mom test

So the son, you, the entrepreneur comes up: “Mom, mom, I have a great idea for a business — can I run it by you?” and they’re sort of saying, I am about to expose my ego — please don’t hurt my feelings when I share my idea with you.

So mom says: “Of course, dear.” You are my only son and I am ready to lie to protect you.

So the entrepreneur continues: “You like your iPad, right? You use it a lot?” “Yes.” You led me to this answer, that’s a fact. Yes, I do.

So the son says: “Okay, so would you ever buy an app which was like a cookbook for your iPad?” What’s really happening here is, he’s optimistically asking a hypothetical question (would you ever), and setting his ego on the line. You know what he wants you to say.

Mom says: “Hmmm.” She’s thinking. “Well, I” She’s also thinking aren’t apps supposed to be free?

And the son says: “And you can share recipes with your friends, and there’s an iPhone app which carries your shopping list. And videos of that celebrity chef you love.” Now which is really just saying, please please please, say “yes.” I will not leave you alone until you say something nice about how great my business idea is.

So mom says: “Oh, well, you’re right, that does actually sound amazing now that I hear all of it. And you’re right, the price is a good deal. It’s much cheaper than a cook book. Will it have pictures of the recipes?” So here what’s happening is that the mom has rationalised the price outside of a real purchase decision, which has no bear in reality. She’s made a non-committal compliment, and she’s gonna had to make a feature request to appear that she’s engaged and cares.

But the son totally mis-interpret this. He thinks this is all massively positive feedback and goes: “Yes, we can definitely build that feature. Thanks mom — love you!” And he’s completely mis-interpreted this conversation. He’s taken it as validation. When what really happened is that he completely led her there.

So mom says: “Before you go, eat some lasagna.” I am concerned that you won’t be able to afford food soon.

Our misguided entrepreneur has a few more conversations like this, lays his ego on the line, leads people to get compliments and opinions and becomes increasingly convinced that he’s right. He quits his job, sinks his savings into the app. Then wonders why no one (even his mom) buys it, especially since he had been so rigorous. He talked to customers.

But 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: he’s more confident but not capable and it’s ultimately not an improvement.

Let’s re-run the same conversation, fixing it and showing that if we do it right, even mom, the most bias person, can still offer great insight into whether or not our business is a good idea.

Passing the mom test

“Hey mom, how’s that new iPad treating you?” “Oh - I love it! I use it every day.”

“What do you usually do on it?” So, this is kind of a generic question, which probably won’t be terribly valuable but at least it’s not a massively biasing question. It will get her to start talking.

“Oh, you know. I read the news. I play sudoku. I catch up with my friends. The usual.” “What’s the last thing you did on it?” This is getting more specific. It might be off topic, from what we’re trying to learn but getting into the last thing they did, a specific in the past is a great way 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. That’s fine.

“Did you use an app for that?” This is a bit leading question, but it’s okay to nudge people to get to the topic we’re interested in.

“No, I just used Google. I didn’t know there was an app. What’s it called?” So this might be interesting to us because as a younger person we kind of use the App or the App Store as a search engine, looking for the tool we need. But we’re just in the loop. We know lots of Apps whereas for mom, she waits for specific recommendations. If that’s true more broadly, then finding a marketing channel outside the App Store is going to be crucial for our business. That’s a nice little insight.

Son goes on: “So, how did you find out about the other Apps you have?” What he’s doing here is great. He’s digging into an interesting and unexpected answers to try to understand the behaviours and the motivation that’s beneath it. As she only knew a few Apps and she’s very touchy about where she gets them from, then we love to know how that works.

“Well, the Sunday paper has a section. It’s called the apps of the week.” I cut it out. I save it. I can give them to you. So, this is interesting too cause maybe you can’t remember the last time you took a recommendation from a newspaper, specially for a digital tool but it makes you think that maybe traditional PR might be a viable option.

“Okay, that makes sense.” This is the son talking again. “Hey, by the way, I saw a couple new cookbooks on the shelf — I know it’s wired question but where did those come from?” There’s multiple failure points in any business idea. Here it’s both the medium of an iPad app and the content of a cookbook. So we wanna learn about most. This kind of transition can feel awkward but usually people just go with it. Just say, “hey, wired question” and boom, you’re onto the new conversation topic.

Mom says: “They’re one of those things you just end up getting at Christmas. I think Marcy gave me that one. I haven’t even opened it to be honest. As if I need another lasagna recipe at my age!” All right, this is gold for 3 reasons: 1. Although we have thought that people like our mom is the perfect customer, cause she had lots of cook books and enjoys cooking, she’s saying that doesn’t need another generic set of recipes. So that’s worrying but on the other hand the gift market may be strong. She was given the recent cook books and it makes me think that maybe younger cooks who don’t know yet their favourite recipes, they may be a better customer segment. But anyway, let’s keep digging. There’s often, people stop their conversations too early, typically. And it’s good to keep digging underneath, dig dig dig, behind the signals.

“What’s the last cookbook you did buy for yourself?” You always want to push back a bit on generic answers like “I never buy cookbooks”. Asking for specific examples in the past. “When’s the last time it did happen?”

“Now that you mention it, I bought a vegan cookbook about 3 months ago. We’re trying to eat a little bit healthier and my veggies weren’t that interesting so I was trying to find some fun ways to make them taste a bit better.” So this is really interesting too. Experienced chefs may still buy specialised or niche cookbooks so maybe there’s breaking the App up into small pieces and using a micro transaction model around various ethnic and diet foods.

And the conversation will continue. If it’s going well, I might raise additional topics like, whether she’d ever looked for the recipes on the iPad or watched cooking videos on YouTube.

It can flow for as long as both of you are having fun and if it seems like she’s clearly not a customer, you can just politely end the conversation and leave. You head home. You thank her. You have some lasagna, pet the dog. And this is a great conversation because regardless of whether or not she’s actually a customer, you’ve learned a great deal about her particular customer segment. You’ve learned that for people like your mom, building an App and waiting for her to find it in the App Store would probably be business suicide. But you’ve got some good insight about either how you might change the value offering, the value proposition or the customer segment and that gives you some places to start, some ways to continue. So that’s a useful conversation.

A useful conversation

The measure of usefulness of an early stage customer conversation is whether it gives you concrete facts about your customers’ lives and world views. Those facts, in turn, allow us to improve your product and your business.

The original idea for the iPad App look like this: old people like cookbooks and iPads. Therefore, if we build a cookbook for the iPad it will be successful. But this is very generic and there are a thousand possible variations of this premise.

With an idea this vague, it’s very difficult to answer the hard questions like which recipes to include for the first version or how we’re gonna spend our limited marketing budget to make sure people will hear about it. Until we get specific with an idea, every product seems like a good one.

But after just one conversation with our mom (who’s the most bias of all people), we have a higher fidelity vision. We now see that there are at least 2 specific customer segments who we might serve, each of which needs a slightly different product. We’ve also identified some major risks that we might need to look at and address before we commit too heavily.

So 2 possibilities: we could offer niche recipes (like ethnic, diets) to experienced cooks who may not already know this, this type of cooking. Our big question in this case is how we reach them if they’re not searching for apps on the App Store. But we have a possible lead with traditional PR in newspaper and magazines.

A second alternative would be to make a generic recipes for younger cooks who are easier to reach via the App Store and online advertising and who haven’t memorised all their favourites yet. Of course we haven’t talked to any, so we have loads of questions, but we might wanna start with whether this segment who isn’t already in the habit of paying for expensive cookbooks will pay a premium for ours or whether they think that it just ought to be free, like everything else on the internet.

The first conversation, the bad one, where we pitched our idea and asked for opinions, that gave us rope to hang ourselves. The second conversation where we never mentioned our idea and we talked about the customers’ lives, that gave us actionable insight. So what was different about the second conversation?

Mom was unable to lie to us simply because we never mentioned our idea.

That’s kind of weird, right? To find out if people care about what we’re doing, we need to never mention it. Instead, we talk about them and their lives.

The point is a bit more subtle than this. Cause obviously, eventually you do need to talk about what you’re building. You need to show it to people. You need to pitch them. You need to take their money for it. However, the big mistake that founders make is almost always to mention the idea too soon rather than too late. You wanna delay it.

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

To make it a little bit more concrete, here are 3 rules to help you which are collectively called: The Mom Test:

Rule number 1: Talk about their life instead of your idea. If it is possible, don’t even mention your idea just ask them how they’re already dealing with it and why they’re doing it that way.

Second rule: Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or hypotheticals about the future. Instead of saying, would you ever, might you ever, could you ever, ask them what they did last time, get specific in the past.

And the third rule is: to talk less and listen more. If you’re spending the whole meeting talking, then you’re not learning anything. You’re just pitching. You gotta get them onto a topic they care about, nudge the long track with good guiding directions and then shut up. Take good notes and listen.

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 a business idea. There are some other important tools and tricks that we’ll introduce throughout the rest of the book. But first, let’s let’s put The Mom Test to work on some questions.

Rule of thumb: Every customer conversations are bad by default. It’s your job to fix it by asking good questions.

Good question / bad question

All right, so we’re gonna run through a series of questions and talk about whether each is good or bad. In other words, does the question pass or fail the Mom Test. If it fails, why? And how could you improve it? I’m gonna sort of work through this list but if you wanna think through it and treat it more like a workshop exercise, feel free to pause as we go after I give you the question and decide for yourself.

Question number 1: “Do you think it’s a good idea?”

Alright this is an awful question. This is the worst. “Here’s my business, what do you think. Do you think it’s a good idea?” 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 sort of question just give you 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. Instead of pitching your idea and asking what they think, which is a terrible way to do it, unless you can take their money of course, cause money never lies, but if you’re still in the development process you might ask them to show you how they currently manage their suppliers. Watch them manage their suppliers. Talk about which parts of the process they love and hate. Where does the frustrations come from? When they do it a certain way, why are they doing it that way? What are they trying to achieve? Then in terms of product, if they’re not happy, are they actively searching for a replacement? If so, why haven’t they found one already? What’s the sticking point? If they’re not searching for a replacement, why not? Where are they losing money with their current tools? Is there a budget for better ones? Or are they just indifferent? Is it not that important to them? Now, take all that information that you’ve learned, not about your idea but about your customer’s life and decide for yourself whether your product is correct.

Rule of thumb: Opinions are worthless.

Alright, next question: “So would you buy a product which did X?”

This is also a bad question. It’s a hypothetical, would you, would you ever, might you ever. It’s non-comital. 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.

To fix it all you have to do is, similar to the above, similar to the previous question: Ask how they currently solve X and how much it costs. Ask them 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 on Google? Like do they not care at all?

Rule of thumb: Anything people tell you hypothetical about the future without actually paying you or giving you something of value is an over-optimistic lie.

Alright next question: “How much would you pay for X?”

This feels a lot better but it’s still a bad question. This is exactly the same as the last one, except it’s more likely to trick you because the number makes it feel rigorous and truthy.

You fix it the same as the others. You should be noticing a pattern: Ask about their life as it already is. How much does it cost them? How much do they currently pay to solve it? How big is the budget they’ve allocated? How emotional do they get about this thing when it comes up?

Rule of thumb: People will lie to you if they think it’s what you want to hear. You gotta keep your ego off the table cause once you reveal your ego, you get the lies.

All right, next question: “What would your dream product do?”

This one’s sort-of-okay, it’s got some good and some bad. It’s good but only if you ask good follow-ups. Otherwise, on its own, it’s bad. If you think about Volleyball, a question like this is the “set” before the spike. You’re putting the ball in position so that you can ask the real valuable question. It’s not helpful on its own, but it’s useful overall.

So to improve it, you need to understand that the value comes from understanding why they want these features. Customer’s feature requests are often insane. They’re just off the mark. They’re silly. They’re asking for the stuff that they wouldn’t actually use themselves. So you don’t wanna blindly collect these feature requests and you’re not building the product by committee. But you desperately wanna understand the motivations and reasoning and though process and goals behind those feature requests. Learn as much as you can about that and then come to your own conclution about which features need to be built and how.

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

Next question: “This seems really hard. Why are you even bothering? Why do you bother?”

This is a great question and I love this sort of things even though it feels a bit confrontational. It’s great from getting away from the perceived problem or the superficial 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 the founders like, “hey, can you build us better messaging tools. We really need better massaging features so that we can save time.” When the founders ask “why do you bother” sending all these emails, why does it matter to you? The finance folks answer, “so that we can be certain that we’re all working off the latest version of the spreadsheet and that no one’s changes are getting lost.” Aha. The solution isn’t a messaging tool. What the founders ended up building was more of a file syncing and collaboration tool, somewhere between Dropbox and Google dox. So that’s a totally different feature than the customers asked for cause the customer knew their frustration but I didn’t know how to solve their frustration. These question like “why do you bother” that’s what points toward their motivations. It gives you the why.

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

Next question: “What are the implications of that? How much does that matter?”

This is a good question because it 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. Other problems technically exist but don’t actually matter. It behooves you to find out which is which. And this sort of question can also give you a good pricing signal.

I once had someone keep describing the workflow we were fixing with emotionally loaded terms like “It’s a DISASTER. It’s the worse part of my day”, and he was yelling and he was waving his arms. But when I asked him what the implications were, I was like, “so, what is this cost you, what happens if you never get is solved?” he sort of shrugged and said “Oh, a few months ago we just ended up hiring a couple of interns to do it and it’s actually working pretty well.” So, as emotional as he was, the problem wasn’t that important to him. He was having fun talking about it but it wasn’t something he was urgently trying to pay to solve cause he already had a good enough solution.

Rule of thumb: Some problems don’t actually matter even if they technically exist.

All right, “Talk me through the last time that happened.”

As mentioned this is a great question. Whenever possible you wanna be shown not told by your customers. You wanna know through their actions instead of their opinions. If you can watch them, that’s great. If you got analytics that show what they’re doing then that’s great. But if you can’t watch them and you don’t have analytics then the best you can do is to be talked through their story.

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 a task will show you where the problems and inefficiencies really are, not where the customer thinks they are.

Next question, “What else have you tried?”

This is a great question. What are they using now? How much does it cost and what do they love and hate? 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 once 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.” But this should raise red flags. They had given me a future promise statement or hypothetical without any commitment to back it up. So I needed to ask some more questions to figure out whether they were lying or not. So I asked them, “When’s the last time this came up?” Turns out, it was pretty recent. So 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.

“Have you tried anything else to deal with this problem? 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, this problem that I asked him about was something he would “definitely” pay to solve. But once we got specific into how he had tried to solve it, “what else have you tried”, he didn’t even care enough to search for a solution. And solutions do exist, incidentally.

It’s easy to get someone emotional about a problem if you lead them there. You say, “Don’t you hate when your shoelaces come untied and you’re carrying groceries?” And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s the worst! I hate my shoelaces.” And then you go off and design my special never-come-untied shoelaces without realising that if the person actually cared, they would already be using a double-knot.

Rule of thumb: If they haven’t looked for ways of solving it already, are they really gonna use or look for yours?

Next question, “Would you pay X for a product which did Y?”

This is so close to being a good question but as it is, it’s bad. The fact that you’ve added a number doesn’t help. This is bad for the same reasons: people are overly optimistic about what they would do. They want to make you happy. Plus, it’s about your idea. What would you pay for my idea instead of being about their life.

Fix it in one of 2 ways. The kind of easier one but it’s not always applicable is to ask them to actually pay you now. But of course if you’re early in the development process that might not be an option. And so in that case, as always you ask about what they already do now, not what they believe they might do in the future. The common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value to the customer rather than cost to you. And that’s true. But you can’t figure out the value to the customer without prodding a bit into their financial worldviews.

Rule of thumb: People stop lying when you ask them for money but until then, ask them about their life.

Question, “How are you dealing with it now?”

This is great. It’s great for all the reasons we’ve already talked about so we don’t need to get into the details. Sometimes though, the way they’re dealing with it now will give you a joyful surprise and show you that the value to the customer is much higher than you expected. I was once talking to an agency and I was thinking our product will be worth £100/month. And when I asked them how they were dealing with it now, it turns out they had a dedicated team of 4 just working to deal with this problem. So actually that was worth half a million a year to them and I significantly increased my pricing as a result to that conversation.

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

Next question: “Where does the money come from?”

Good question. Although it only really applies in the B2B context. You wouldn’t necessarily ask a consumer this. But for businesses, it leads to an amazing conversation about whose budget the purchase will come from and who else within their company holds the power to torpedo the deal and how you need to start to map and navigate the organization.

If you’re terrified to ask them about money or if they don’t wanna tell you, that’s a sign that the conversation’s not as far as you thought it was or they don’t actually care as deeply about the problem as you believed. If someone really wants this problem fixed and they believe you can do it, then they happily start to reveal their finances. As long as you’re in a learning mode and not in a sales mode.

Once you’re asking this stuff, you can also discover that you’re talking to someone who isn’t the budget owner. And all of your pitches will hit a lot of snags and problems and dead-ends unless you can figure out who the budget owner is, who the decision makers are and what those people care about. And eventually, as your business grows, this early knowledge that you’re getting about your customers’ purchasing process, that’s where you start to turn into a repeatable sales road map which is kind of the main criteria for being able to hire a sales team and get them to do the work that you’re currently doing as the founder.

Nice question, “Who else should I talk to?”

Yes! Great, absolutely. End every conversation like this, and even some of the bad conversations. It can be really challenging to line up the first few conversations and get folks to take you seriously and to talk to you, but if you’re onto something interesting and if you’re treating people well, respecting their time, respecting them, not trying to trick them and steal their money; your early conversations will quickly multiply via the intros that your customers are giving you to their peers.

If someone doesn’t want to make intros, that’s totally cool. Don’t push them, that just makes it awkward. Just leave them be. When someone refuses to give intros, you’re basically learning 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. So in those cases, take that as the learning. You’ve learned that they don’t care or that you’re screwing something up, so maybe don’t believe all of the positive feed backs they gave you earlier and take anything they say with an extra grain of salt.

Now this last one is kind of an interesting special question. It’s kind of a crutch that you can use early in the process when you’re talking to someone friendly who kind of gets what you’re trying to do. It’s specially useful for technical founders and introverts. And this question is to basically ask for help. By the end of the conversation, the customer will kind of get what you’re trying to do. They understand what you’re trying to learn, they understand what’s happening. So you can kind of just lay your cards on the table and say, “Hey, listen. Is there anything else I should have asked you? Did I miss anything important?”

And people will respond really well to this. It gives them a chance to politely “fix” your line of questioning. And they will! But they often won’t volunteer this, unless you give them permission. They’ll kind of sit there politely, thinking to themselves, “Man, this guy is totally missing the point.”

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. But until then, asking folks to help you out, “is there anything I should’ve asked you?” it can go a long way.

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

Alright, onto the next section here. 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 people say you shouldn’t abdicate your creative vision and that talking to customers is basically the same as building your product by committee. Given that people don’t know what they actually need, 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 insight and information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution. Once you’ve taken the leap, you confirm that it’s correct (and refine it) through the tools of 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. Customers know what their problems are, they know what their goals are. But in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you exactly what to build. It’s your job to take their problems and turn it into a solution. In other words, they own the problem, you own the solution. And then you obviously test that by trying to get them to use and pay for it.

Before we move look at ways to confirm that you’re building the right product, let’s look a little bit more at spotting and fixing some of the ways that these learning conversations go wrong.