فصل 2

CHAPTER TWO

Avoiding bad data

Practically everyone I’ve seen talk to customers (including myself) has been giving themselves bad information and you probably are too. Bad data gives false negatives which means you’re thinking your idea is dead when it’s actually not, it still has a lot of potential) and—more dangerously—false positives which is convincing yourself you’re correct when you’re actually doomed).

There faulty conclusions come from three types of bad data:

Compliments

Fluff, which is kind of my bucket term for generics answers, hypotheticals, and basically anyone’s opinion about the future, and Ideas, suggestion, future request, opinions. So compliments, fluff and ideas.

Sometimes we invite the bad data ourselves by asking the wrong questions, but even when you try to follow The Mom Test, the rules of the Mom Test, conversations still go off track. It could happen because you got excited and started pitching in the middle of another good conversation, or because you had to talk about your idea in order to justify the reason for the meeting itself, or the whole conversation is just stuck in hypothetical la-la-land.

These things happen. It’s no big deal. Once you start to notice these problems as they occur, it’s fairly easy to get back on track by deflecting the compliments, anchoring fluff, and digging beneath the 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. Or even if they’re telling the truth, it doesn’t matter because that compliment does not equate to a future purchase.

And what is the opinions matter? Like someone likes it, someone hates it. So what? Venture capitalists who are professional judges of the future, they’re wrong far more often than they’re right. And so even if a VC’s is the best of the word, if their opinion is probably wrong, then what weight could some random guy’s possibly have?

With the exception of industry experts who have built very similar businesses, opinions are generally worthless. You want facts about people’s lives and about the industry and about the world, and you want commitments that they’re committing and giving you something of value and really really using it, you don’t compliments.

The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid gathering them all together by not even mentioning your idea. However if compliments come up ant way or if you’re accidentally in a force to mention your idea, then you just need to learn how deflect the compliments so that you can get on with the real business of gathering facts and commitments.

Before we look at how to properly deflect, here’s what happens when you take them at face value:

A bad conversation:

“…And that’s it. It’s like X for Y, but better because of Z.” you’re thinking, bam! I totally nailed that pitch.

And they say something like: “That’s cool. I love it.” While they’re thinking how is this relevant to me? But they’re giving you a compliment cause that’s a polite way to end a meeting. You keep going though. You don’t get the hint: “It’s going to totally change the way you work. We’re predicting cost savings of 35%.” You’re thinking, I am so great, I’m such a great entrepreneur.

And they say: “Sounds terrific. Keep me in the loop.” They’re thinking, I can’t believe I keep letting these startup guys into the office. What they’re giving you here is compliment + stalling tactic. Sound traffic, keep me in the loop. You’re like: “Awesome.” You’re thinking just like Steve Jobs but more handsome.

And back at the office you tell the rest to your team, you go: “That meeting went really great. They said they loved it! In fact, everybody I’ve talked to loves it. I really think we’ve finally found our big idea. We’ve found something people want.” It’s margarita time!

And your Team, 6 months later is like “Rob why do we have zero customers still? I thought you said everybody loved it?” Wasn’t this your job?

And you’re like: “I don’t know, I talked to like a thousand people. I must have missed of their buying criteria. Don’t worry, I’ll go talk to them some more, we’ll get it next time.” There’s like the music playing behind you, it’s like you’re Doooooomed.

So we wanna try this again. What happened in the bad conversation is that we failed for the compliments and how our clients are thinking. So we need to start noticing the compliments, then deflecting them.

A good conversation:

“…And that’s it. It’s like X for Y, but better because of Z.” And you’re thinking, I just screwed it up, I slipped into pitch mode. So I’m gonna try to fix this.

Of course they answer with the generic compliment: “That’s really cool. I love it.” So this is where you start to fix it, you go: “Listen, whoops — I’m really sorry— I got excited and started the pitch mode. Listen: you guys seem to be doing a good job in this space — do you mind if I ask how you’re already dealing with this stuff at the moment?” What’s happening is, you didn’t necessarily notice you slip, although you could have but you should always notice when they give you a compliment. I have this mental process running in my head. Every time a customer compliments me or my product, I get incredibly suspicious of them. I’m like, I must have said something stupid to get them to compliment me in this way. They’re now in a loop of compliments, empty compliments lying. So I need to save the conversation by getting back to reality.

So that’s what you’re doing: “How you’re dealing with it already? How did you do it last time?” And they’re like: “What? Oh, well, I can tell you what we’re doing. 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 a lot of emails to keep it all moving. Anyway, I really like your idea though. I’m sure it will do really well.” So what’s happened to you is, we asked for facts, so they gave us facts, that’s great learning but in the customer’s head they’re like: “I still want this meeting to end. The idea isn’t a right for me, so I’m going to express an interest, I’m gonna give them some compliments, hopeful that wraps it up.

Buy you wanna keep it about them: “That’s interesting. I haven’t heard of anyone solving it quite like that.” You’re just ignoring the compliment completely. “Can you talk me through how it actually all fits together? What steps do you have to take? Can you walk me through this?” This is the key to dealing with compliments, ignore & deflect them. Focus on the facts that they’re spending a lot of effort to solve this. Two full time staff!? They’re giving you all these incredibly valuable signals and they’re a little off hand comments in this facts in answering your specifics Mom Tests questions. So you wanna keep ignoring the compliments and grabbing unto the facts and digging beneath them. “2 full time staff? That’s crazy. I never imagined it would be so important to you. Why do you bother?” I’m getting to the good questions.

So you know as you ask more specific questions, they’re giving you more of this delicious and delightful concrete work full data and you can keep the conversation going for as long as they’re interested in and have time. If you’re early in the learning process, the meeting could end at this point quite happily. You have the learning that you came for. If we were slightly later-stage and already had a product, you might continue by zooming in and showing them the product, usually ask for permission, you go: “It sounds like we’re building something that sounds like it might be useful for you. Would you be interested in spending an extra 10 minuets so I could show it to you. Not pushy, cause they’ve already given you so much by answering your questions but you can ask for permission to make a transition into a sale’s meeting. But early stage is fine, you’re learning, that’s a great meeting, that’s a great conversation, big success. But notice how much of that came from your follow-up questions. If you just pitched and asked for an opinion, you got basically nothing, you got worst that nothing. If I just asked 1 or 2 questions, people won’t give me all these valuable signals and it’s foolish if you then leave these signals on the table. You’ve gotta be on top of your game, of noticing the compliments as a red flag, warning, warning, I screwed something up. And noticing these juicy facts about their lives as a green flag, there’s some value here, dig underneath it, see what more you can learn.

Of course you’re not always gonna end up hearing what you wanted to hear. And it’s still a good conversation even if the customer doesn’t care. Your goal isn’t to convince them, it’s just to get to the truth. Do they care, do they not, how does it fit into their life.

Here’s an example of a good conversation where they don’t care. It’s good cause you run it properly:

So they say: “That’s really cool. I love it.” And you follow up. That’s the generic compliments. You’re gonna deflect it and get back to concretes.

“Can I ask you, how are you dealing with this stuff at the moment?” And they’ll say: “Oh, honestly it’s really not that big of a deal for us. We kind of just ignore it.” What they’re saying here is that the implications of the problem are non-existent and they’re really not in the market for a solution.

Maybe they’’’ be polite, they’ll look at your demo, blah blah blah—But they’re not just that motivated. They’re hugely unlikely to become you’re an actual customer. Maybe later, once it’s mainstream, they could be a mainstream adopter like years down the line but they’re not gonna be your first. And you can be happy with this conversation. You saw through the false compliment, you got to the facts behind the mirage. If the conversation was friendly, if you guys got along well, you could ask them a few more question anyway just to understand the mentality behind non-consumption. You can try to figure out whether it’s an industry wide view point or something specific to them. But it’s also just cool to just bail, like they’re not a customer. That’s great, give them back their time, save your own time, get out of there.

So, you may have noticed that in a conversations once you start showing your product, almost every response will contain some kind of hidden compliment. These compliments are pervasive and they constantly trying to trick us into believing that the meeting “went well” when in fact there was no real data within it.

Ignoring compliments should be easy, but it’s really not. We so desperately desperately crave validation and as such we are often tricked into registering compliments as if they are reliable data instead of vacuous fibs. Sometimes it’s easier to spot the symptoms like the way you respond to the compliment than to notice the compliment itself.

So symptoms in the meeting could be you saying things like:

“Thank you!”

“I’m glad you like it.”

If you noticed yourself saying that, again warning bell should go off your head. Me responding that way means they just complimented me, which means I asked a stupid question, what can I do to fix this conversation before it’s too late.

Back at the office some symptoms include telling you:

“That meeting went really well.” Wait, warning bells, like why, what happened, what’s the date we got. If you’ve taken good notes which you always aught to, it’s much easier to separate the fluffy stuff they said from the real stuff they said.

Other symptoms is telling your team: “yeah, we’re getting a lot of positive feedback.” Or, “everybody I’ve talked to loves the idea.” All of these are warning signs. When you say something like this, try to get specific. Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save them? How would it fit into his or his life? What else have they tried? If you don’t know the answers to these types of more specific questions, then all you’ve got is a compliment instead of real data.

Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.

Anchoring fluff

So fluff, our second category of bad data, it comes in 3 cuddly and dangerous shapes:

The first is a generic claim like “I usually”, “I always”, “I never”. The second variety is a future-tense promise with no commitment back it up, “I would”, “I will”. And the third is 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 a generic or a hypothetical fluff. You need to ask good questions which obey The Mom Test, anchor them back to specifics in the past. Ask them when it last happened, or ask them to talk you through it step by step. Ask them how they solved it, and what else they tried and why they did it that way instead of a different way.

The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.” It just sounds so concrete. And 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 that actual future arrives.

The first startup I worked as an employee back in university, the hugely fell for the “I would definitely buy that” trap. They thought they were collecting feed backs, really they were just pitching people and asking for compliments and they subsequently lost about 10 million dollars and went out of business. They mistook the fluffy future promises and excited compliments for commitment They wrongly believed they had proven themselves right, and wildly over-invested in a dumb idea. Not a dumb idea, just an idea that wasn’t quite ready for the investment they put behind it.

The worst type of fluff-inducing question is, “Would you ever?” Of course they might, someday. That doesn’t mean they will, today. Fluff-inducing questions include: “Do you ever…”

“Would you ever…”

“What do you usually…”

“Do you think you…”

“Might you…”

“Could you see yourself…”

These questions are cowardly and you should never ask them. People ask them cause they’re trying hedge their questions cause they’re afraid of the harsh response. So you’re like asking them in a way where they can’t hurt your feelings which is the worst thing you can do to yourself cause you get this fluffy, “yeah, of course. You’re so smart.” It’s like, it’s really useless. These questions aren’t exactly toxic. It kind of goes back to the Volleyball metaphor, “these questions can be the set before the spike.” The questions aren’t toxic but the responses to the questions are low value. So the mistake is in valuing the answers, but you can often use them as the set to transition from a fluffy question to a concrete one.

You can use the fluffy question to get people unto the topic you care about, ignore whatever they say to it, then ask a real question, now that you’re in a correct topic. So here’s an example of transitioning from a fluffy question to a concrete one: “Do you ever X?” This is a fluff-inducing question.

They go like: “Oh yeah, all the time.” This is a fluffy generic answer which has no value in itself, but we can anchor from.

“Interesting. When’s the last time that happened?” Boom! We’re back into a good question. We use the Mom Test and ask for a concrete examples in the past. Yeah, I do that all the time. Don’t believe them. Push through the generic. “When’s the last time?” Get specific.

And they say: “Two weekends ago.” Nice. We’ve successfully anchored the fluff and are ready to get real facts now instead of generics and hypotheticals.

So we follow up: “Can you talk me through that? Two weekends ago, what exactly happened? How did you deal with it?” This is great. We’re now in a perfect conversation.

So that’s like successful anchoring a fluff.

To use a more tangible example, let’s say you’re designing some sort of inbox management tool. Here’s a good conversation where you anchor the generic fluff:

So they say: “I’m an ‘Inbox 0’ zealot. It’s totally changed my life. I never have the email sit in there.” This is a generic which means a fluffy claim.

“I’m always at Inbox 0.” I don’t believe you. So we say, “nice. I’m an Inbox 0’ failure. What’s your inbox at right now?” So by going into right now, this is an anchoring example. We’re getting concrete. It’s not what they believe their inbox is at usually. It’s like what’s it at right now.

And they go: “It looks like I’ve had about ten coming in since this morning.” That’s a fact!

We might say: “Okay wow, so you are on top of this. I have like 200. When’s the last time it totally fell apart for you?” Sometimes people are usually correct in their self believe except for when they’re not. And there are times when they’re not, that really matters. For example I might have flaud insurance for my house even thought my house is not usually flooded but when my house is flooded that’s a big deal. So I buy a product to deal with the rare exception case as opposed to the usual case. So we ask them, ”when’s the last time an email totally fell apart?”

And they say: “Ug, about a month 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. It was a huge mess” And we might say: “Okay.” Like in our head we’re like, nice. This is getting interesting. Now we’re finding out what happens when the inbox goes wrong. And it does, even for the supposed Inbox 0 zealot. So we say, “can you talk me through what you did? How did you hand it?” We transition from fluff into a great conversation.

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 and it ruins my life.” 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 customers and you hear the guy in line in front of you complaining. So this is a bad conversation where you’re pitching and accepting fluff):

So the person in front of you says: “What idiot decided it was a good idea to make me carry around a thousand cafe loyalty cards? I have a card for Starbucks. I have a card for Costa. This is such a mess.” And you know this is exactly the problem that your startup is trying to solve so you spark up a sudden conversation: “Whoa! Hey! I’m sorry to barge in but I just so happened to be building a mobile app which helps stores give out discounts to loyal customers without forcing you to carry around a ton of different paper cards. Do you think you would use something like that?” This is pretty much a terrible question. You’ve revealed your ego. You pitched your product and you’ve asked them a hypothetical “would you ever”. You’re supper doomed. This is such a bad start

And of course they’re gonna say: “Heck yes, it’s about time! Why hasn’t anyone done this already. I would definitely use that app.” So this is a fluffy hypothetical future promise! It’s an empty compliment. It’s the worst of the worst.

By switching into pitch mode here, you just wasted a perfectly good opportunity for learning and instead got a fistful of fluff and garbage. So let’s try again with the same opportunity, but running the conversation properly, anchoring fluff and bang the Mom Test, etc.

A good conversation:

So they say the same thing: “I hate having so many café loyalty cards. This is so stupid.” And you say: “It’s crazy, right? My wallet is like two feet thick.” But then instead of pitching your idea, you ask them about their existing behavior. You say: “Hey listen— have you ever tried any of those loyalty apps for your phone?” You’re anchoring to their past behaviours.

And they say, “what? Those exits?” They’re thinking maybe my rage is misguided. And you’re saying: “Yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen the little signs in the university cafe. There’s this sign all over in Starbucks. They’re trying to get you to use an app. Everyone is trying to replace these paper cards” And they say: “Oh yeah, I remember seeing those. I remember hearing about it but I’m always kind of in a rush when I’m in the cafe. It’s not like I want to slow down and do that.” This is a nice bit of customer insight about their state of mind and their circumstances when you’re trying to advertise to them.

So we might push them a little further. We go: “Listen, we’re standing in a cue. Why don’t you download it now?” If someone’s being flaky, put them to a decision, in a friendly way. It’s like, “hey you can just do it. What’s the big deal?” If they don’t care enough to try solving their problem today with a goof enough solution, are they really going to care about your perfect solution tomorrow?

And they might do it. They might go: “You know what, you’re right. I’ve been wanting one and they get one and you can have an interesting conversation then about the user experience and all of that stuff. But most of the time, what I found is people, they just look for a way to weasel out of the conversation. They go: “I’m low on data. I’ll do it next time.” What they’re basically saying here is like, as much as I like complaining, it is not an important problem for me. The implication of this problem is low and I don’t actually care about solving it. I just like complaining.

There’s so much customer feed back that is like that. You wanna ger real skeptical. It takes a lot of, people have to care a lot to be willing to overcome the inertia of actually doing anything, changing the way they do stuff. So for your early customers you want to be fairly skeptical. Look for the deep urgent problems. Look for the stuff that people really care about, the stuff they’re desperate for.

You can’t help but laugh when these exchanges happen. “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 but they’re really not.

So anchoring the fluff can yield useful signals:

You might say: “…Have you ever tried any of those loyalty apps?” And instead of saying, “no, I don’t care”, they might say something really useful like: “Yeah, I downloaded a couple of them. You need a different one for every café store. I don’t want a hundred apps any more than I want a bunch of cards.” So this is interesting. He’s an actively searching potential user, but you’d need all of the cafes that he frequency in order for him to be happy. The key feature for this particular user is that you have all the cafes in one app. So maybe then you could focus on critical mass within one geography, within one university town. It’s a way to get started. Or the user might say: “I looked into those loyalty apps, but you only get like a 10% discount. That seems less like a loyalty reward and more like a cheap way for them to collect all my data. I don’t want that” So this particular user was on the fence, but needs better perks. 10% is not enough but something more might be. Maybe we could find a way to force merchants into deeper discounts like Groupon was able to do. And this user also has privacy concerns.

Another similar person might say: “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. Looks like it was designed by a monkeys.” So you’re okay. So all you need to do with that user is to out-execute and simplify.

The list goes on. There are a ton 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, reject their incidental complaints, reject their fluffy promises and instead, anchor them toward the life they already lead and the actions they’re already taking.

Diging beneath ideas

Entrepreneurs are always drowning in ideas. We have too many ideas, not too few. Still, the people that you’re asking for feed back, they adore giving you 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 add them 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: “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’s the fast-lane to feature-creep. Instead, take a moment to dig into the motivations behind the request.

You might reply with: “What would syncing to Excel allow you to do?” In your head you’re thinking maybe there’s an easier way I can help you achieve the same thing.

They say: “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?” Okay, they’ve got a legitimate reason but what I’m hearing in my head is that this is not a key buying criteria. I can do that in version 2. “I can do that later.” This is a nice to have, not a must have.

Or they might say:

“We’ve tried a bunch of these things and it’s always the syncing through Excel that kills it. That’s why we haven’t been able to use any of the other offerings in the space.” So this is totally different. In this case, they’re actively searching for solutions which are all missing a must-have feature — this could be your major differentiator. You would need to obviously talk to more people but this is really intriguing.

Or the might say:

“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. It’s a big pain and totally stalls our work.” This is cool, too. They’ve cobbled together a home-brew solution, which shows they care. They also know it’s costing them money, this sort of person is ideally suited to become an early customer cause they’re already expending in trying to fix it. If I hear something like this, they cobbled together a work around, I’m so excited. This is one of my favorite things to hear.

At my first company Habit, when we were adapting our product to sell to enterprise companies, MTV told us and they were a paying customer at the time, so I took them really seriously. MTV said they needed analytics and reports for their campaigns.

We were building advertising tech, social advertising. And I made a big mistake upon hearing this feature request by accepting at a face value and telling my team we had to build it. “Our customer needs this. We have to do it. Drop everything. This is critical.” Huge mistake. So the next time I went back to MTV I had this shiny dashboard. It took a long time to build by 1 month or 2 of dedicating engineering effort which is really expensive and when I showed it to them, they “ooh’ed” and “ahh’ed” and said it was amazing and I left thinking that we’d nailed it. We built a ton of options. It was really powerful. It could carve up and examine the data every way you wanted to. It was technically impressive. It was aesthetically lovely. We were really proud of it.

Unfortunately, 90% of what we had built was irrelevant. We just didn’t know that yet.

They started calling me every Friday, asking me to email over a CSV (a data file) of the week’s stats, so we dutifully took that as a future request and added CSV export to the dashboard. But they still kept calling me and say, “hey, could you just email it to me?” I said, “Okay, I will.” But when we got this dashboard, after a few weeks they asked for the ability to get their data as a PDF, so we obediently built PDF export which that took longer.

Weeks later, they were still calling every Friday and asking me to export and send over the same analytics. And every week, I would explain again they, “hey, there’s this awesome dashboard and we worked really hard on it so you can get you data whenever you want. And eventually I got frustrated. I was like, “listen, why do you even want this? Why does it need to be a PDF? Why does it need your logo?” I was angry so I blew up at them. And they were really surprised and they were like, “listen, we don’t even look at the analytics. It’s just everyone on the team likes to have something. It looks good. It feels good. We know there’s progress and we think it would look a little bit better if it was a PDF instead of a spreadsheet.” I was like, “oh, man. I screwed up so badly. I just wasted like 3 months of my team’s time because I didn’t understand the motivation behind the feature request.

Consider how much easier our lives would have been if we’d understood what they really wanted instead of building all that tech, we could have just hired an intern to build a beautiful report once per week and email it to them. They would have been happier. We would have saved 3 months and probably 60000 dollars. And our business would have moved that much faster. WE would have had that money to do other, more useful things.

Whenever you get a request or a suggestion, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. The way you do that is by digging around the question to try 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? How would the feature change their lives? Why does it matter to them? Dig.

You should dig in the same way around emotional signals to understand where they’re coming from. If you see someone’s embarrassed or angry or overjoyed, dig. Where is that emotion coming from? There’s so much crucial data about their world view and their decision-making process hiding behind these emotional signals.

I once overheard a founder interviewing someone at a cafe next to me. I was listening and I was curious and the founder mentioned something and the person who was interviewing said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much the worst part of my day.” The founder wrote that in his notebook, and then moved on to the next question. What!? It’s the worst part of your customer’s day and you’re not going to figure out why? That’s absolutely insane. What a waste of a great customer conversation. You’ve got to dig.

Some 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 the launch add that feature, or is it something we could add in version 2?”

“How would that fit into your day?

And then some questions to dig into emotional signals, when you see someone’s angry, excited or etc:

“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. Go on, keep talking. What else? That stuff works. It’s enough. And you’d be shocked of how many people don’t do it.

Rule of thumb: Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.

Avoiding approval seeking

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. In other words, you don’t actually want contradictory information. You’ve already made up your mind, but you’re following the process and need someone’s blessing to justify you’re taking the blind leap.

Symptoms of Fishing For Compliments could include saying something like:

“I’m thinking of starting a business. So, what do you think? Do you think it will work?”

Or “I had an awesome idea for an app — do you like it?”

Accidental approval-seeking is what I call “The Pathos Problem.” It happens when 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.

You might say like:

“So here’s that top-secret project I quit my job for. What do you think?”

Or “I can take it — be honest. Tell me what you really think about this!” But that doesn’t work. To deal with The Pathos Problem, you need to keep the conversation focused on the other person. You need to 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 compliments. Disregard that data. Use The Mom Test. Re-focus on the person, their life, and their goals. People rarely lie about specific stuff that’s already happened, regardless of how it’s gonna affect your ego.

Some famous entrepreneurs don’t suffer the effects of The Pathos Problem, because everyone knows that they’re an emotionally resilient superhero. This is people like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Gordon Ramsey are all notorious for actively seeking negative feedback and they have this oral about them. People know that their egos not gonna get damaged so people will willingly be harsh with them. It works for them. But it won’t necessarily works for you. It certainly doesn’t work for me. You and me must be more circumspect in the way we ask for feed back.

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 ask for commitments.

Rule of thumb: If you’ve mentioned your idea, people will try to protect your feelings.

Cut off and interrupt 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 just trying 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.

The symptoms could be you saying something like:

“No no, I don’t think you get it.”

Or “Yes, but it also does this!”

If you slip into pitch mode, just apologise. You’re excited about your idea. That’s good! People get it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have taken this crazy leap in the first place. But suddenly, when 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. All you have to do to fix it is cut yourself off and say what me mentioned before: “Whoops—I 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…” And you’re back to the races.

If they say they really want to hear about what you’re working on, you’ve got a couple of things to deal with it. You can promise that you’ll tell them everything at the end of the meeting or loop them in for an early demo. But then you just want to talk a bit more about their stuff and how they’re dealing with it before introducing your idea and maybe biasing them. You can appease their curiosity by telling them the problem that you’re trying to solve or your grand vision without actually going into the details of what your solution is gonna be. So someone goes, “what are you trying to do?” “I’m trying to imrove children’s education. Anyway we were talking about how your kid learned to read. You were tellinh me that—” So you’ve given them a wage space that you’re working in, a vision, a justification for the conversation but you haven’t bias them with details and then you get straight back into asking about their life. That’s a beautiful solution.

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 minutes shutting up (even if you have something really smart to say).

After you introduce your idea (either intentionally or accidentally), the other person is gonna begin a sentence with something like “So it’s similar to…” or “I like it but…” You are gonna be hugely tempted in to interrupt and “fix” their understanding.

Alternately, they’ll raise a topic that you have a really good answer to. For example, they’ll start talking about how important security is, and you’ll desperately want to cut in and tell them you’ve thought about all that already. But both of these interruptions are a mistake.

In both cases, the customer was about to give you a privileged glimpse into their mental model of the world. Losing that learning just to prove that you’re a smarty pants is a huge waste of opportunity. You’ll have the chance to fill them in later. But give them a few minuets to fully explain. Why do they think this is important? Why is that the first objection that pops to mind? Why did they misunderstand what you’re doing? Why do they not understand the difference between these 2 products? Let them talk, then correct it later, much later. Plus, if you get into the habit of interrupting people, it’s annoying to them. People don’t like it if you’ve asked them a question, they start to answer and then you’re interrupting to correct them. That’s a bad vibe and it’s gonna cause them to shut up and not give you the rest of the insight you want.

Rule of thumb: The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.