Summary

<aside> 💡 The Mom Test is a set of simple rules for crafting good questions that even your mom can't lie to you about.

• Avoid mentioning your idea too early to avoid bias and compliments that might lead to false positives.
• Three rules of The Mom Test are: Talk about their life instead of your idea, ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future, and talk less and listen more.
• The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives us concrete facts about our customers’ lives and world views.
• Anchor fluff by asking about specifics in the past, not about the future or hypotheticals.
• Dig beneath ideas to understand the motivations that led to them.
• Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed. You should understand the problem, but deciding what to build is your job. </aside>

Notes

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. (Location 21)

every question we ask carries the very real possibility of biasing the person we’re talking to and rendering the whole exercise pointless. (Location 25)

The advice that you “should talk to customers” is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. (Location 36)

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 that causes you to over-invest your cash, your time, and your team. (Location 38)

CHAPTER 1 THE MOM TEST (Location 66)

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. (Location 68)

The Mom Test is a set of simple rules for crafting good questions that even your mom can't lie to you about. (Location 72)

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. (Location 96)