Parental guidance: Customer discovery

If you’re looking to get honest feedback on your ideas, then The Mom Test* is a highly recommended read. One of the most popular books in the Enterprise Lab library, it’s a handbook on how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea.

*Or ‘Mum’, depending on your side of the pond.

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Your mum (or dad, gran or best friend, for that matter) might be the last person you want to think about when imagining the potential customers for your venture. However, likening your clients to your nearest and dearest is exactly what The Mom Test recommends to understand what people really think about your business.

Written by serial technology entrepreneur Rob Fitzpatrick, the book shines a light into the yawning gap between what customers say and what they actually mean. Put simply, the book suggests that, like your mom (Rob is American), customers are inherently programmed to give a positive response when asked about your ideas. As such, you should never ask anyone directly what they think about your venture.

Rob wrote the book after one of his businesses failed to get on its feet, despite the fact he had raised funding and found some early customers. The company was working on social advertising before Facebook and Twitter adopted the concept. “I would talk to customers and I would have these interviews,” Rob says. “And then a month later I realised that what I thought I had learned wasn’t true. When you ask people what they think of your product, you are always going to get compliments, and that’s not real data. They will lie to you. You need to ask them in the right way and you need to be very careful with these biases.”

The Mom Test suggests a more customer-centred approach to interviews, which Rob believes can remove those automatic biases. “No-one can tell you if your business is a good idea,” he says. “Your job as an entrepreneur is to learn about your customers’ lives, frustrations and problems and then come up with the solution. Stop talking about your idea and start talking about their lives.”

A programmer by background, Rob is the first to admit he found it difficult to take on a customer-facing role. Having read several books about sales interviews, he came to the conclusion that the authors were people who were naturally talented in this area and who couldn’t empathise with

When you ask people what they think of your product, you are always going to get compliments, and that’s not real data. They will lie to you.

Top tips on talking to customers:

1. Stop talking about your idea and start talking about your customers’ lives. 2. If your customer doesn’t care about your data, just walk away. You have your data and the data is… they don’t care.

3. Learn some coding to really understand technology businesses. 4. Make your early attempts in a place where you feel safe.

5. Find a way to record your interviews because if it’s in your head, your memory evokes another set of biases. 6. Look at your list of potential people you could talk to and don’t start with the most competent, start with the friendliest.

the non-salesperson. “I was an introverted technical founder,” he says. “And I felt what was missing was a very practical book on how to talk to customers.”

In keeping with the ethos of his book, he asked around to see if other people identified this as a problem in their lives. He mom-tested The Mom Test and it turned out to be something that people needed and that he could sell.

According to The Mom Test, it’s not just the interview questions that need to change. The context of your interviews should be casual and you should start with the friendliest customers. For Rob, it’s about trying to set a scene so you can snap out of pitch mode and get some real data. “We so badly want to convince customers that our idea is a big deal because we think it is,” he says. “But it’s so important to recognise when people don’t care. Often when entrepreneurs are in that situation, they go into sales mode when, in fact, they just need to walk away. This doesn’t mean you give up on the idea but you do need to realise that this particular person doesn’t care.”

In terms of sourcing potential customers, Rob recommends that, for new technology, it’s best to identify the people that do care, who are the ‘earliest adopters’ or ‘early evangelists’.

Having tried at several businesses himself and not always succeeded, Rob is very down-to-earth about the experience of being an entrepreneur. He recommends that you get your idea into the user’s hands as quickly as possible and, in his own words, that you consider ‘screwing up’ as being an intrinsic part of starting a business. “Make your early attempts in a place where you feel safe,” he says. “Forgive your mistakes and soon you’ll find you’re getting better. You’re not just going to read a book and be a master.”

However, despite suggesting founders take a ‘suck-it-andsee’ approach to starting a business, he recommends a more reflective approach to choosing a business model. “Try to match

it to your personality and goals,” he says. “With my first company, I just thought I wanted to build a big billion-dollar business but it turns out what I actually want to do is work on fun, interesting products with a small team and have a good quality of life. I just didn’t know it or think about it at the time.”

Considering Rob was due to embark on a boat trip from France to Spain just after D/srupt interviewed him, it seems he’s doing a pretty good job.

The man behind The Mom Test

Rob Fitzpatrick is an author and technology entrepreneur originally from the US and now living in Barcelona. He studied computational media and video games at Georgia Institute of Technology and, prior to writing

The Mom Test, he ran several technology startups for about ten years in London and the US. The Mom Test was published in 2014 and is now a standard textbook in a number of institutes, including

Harvard, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT),

Imperial College London and

University College London (UCL). As well as innovating and writing,

Rob runs workshops based on the ethos of The Mom Test. He also has a small sailing boat that, in his own words, he “putters about in”.