How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You
Audiobook
English language
Published May 7, 2019 by Robfitz Ltd.
The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.
They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.
Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both customer development and lean startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer …
The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.
They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.
Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both customer development and lean startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong, and how you can do better.
Essential reading for anyone thinking about starting a business. The idea is simple, but important: It's too easy for someone to tell you that they like your idea and would buy. So don't talk about your idea, at least not at first.
Start by finding out what their problems are and what they're doing to solve them. Are they paying for something? Have they tried to find a solution? If not, it's not that painful.
The book shows you how to have these conversations in a way where even your mom would tell you the truth.
In theory, this is perfect and while having an actual conversation with this idea in mind, I can do it. My only issue is trying to get introductions to potential customers. How do you ask someone to take time to talk to you without leading them at all? I think the …
Essential reading for anyone thinking about starting a business. The idea is simple, but important: It's too easy for someone to tell you that they like your idea and would buy. So don't talk about your idea, at least not at first.
Start by finding out what their problems are and what they're doing to solve them. Are they paying for something? Have they tried to find a solution? If not, it's not that painful.
The book shows you how to have these conversations in a way where even your mom would tell you the truth.
In theory, this is perfect and while having an actual conversation with this idea in mind, I can do it. My only issue is trying to get introductions to potential customers. How do you ask someone to take time to talk to you without leading them at all? I think the answer is to only say that you want to talk about a problem and hope they agree it's a problem. Don't mention your solution. If they don't agree it's a problem, you've lost the opportunity to learn from them.
If you have a good answer to this, please let me know.
– originally written 2021-06-30
A very nice surprise, I really enjoyed it :-)
It is so easy to fool ourselves thinking we are customer-oriented, customer-first approach, blah blah. But most of us are not. This is simple, practical and the best guide for talking to customers. It is very short and very actionable. Anyone building products, talking to customers, part of a startup or want to startup should read this.
