How to validate your business idea with 5 simple steps from "The Mom Test"

Rob’s “The Mom Test” is one of the most actionable books I’ve read about business and startups. It talks about how to conduct customer interviews (even if you’re a noob and an introvert) and evaluate if your product idea is the real Sh*t.

In the first five minutes of the book, he shows you how phrases like

• Would you pay for…
• If I could build…
• Would you like…

forces people to lie and give you fake validation and ego boost.

End result?

7 months of focusing on the wrong idea, thousands of dollars down the drain and crickets instead of customers.

So, I’ve read the entire book and summarized it to give you step-by-step instructions on how to start, conduct, and end interviews.

We’ll break it down to 5 Stages

Stage 1 — Setting the Stage
Stage 2 — Getting your Ducks in a Row
Stage 3 — What to Avoid like Plague
Stage 4 — Diving Deep
Stage 5— How to end with a WIN

Let’s get into it.

Stage 1 — Setting the Stage

The first step is framing the meeting to a prospective customer. No one wants to “get on a call for 5 minutes”, or feel like they’ll get nothing out of the meeting for your customer validation.

So, if you’re talking to normal customers like friends, or social media connections, or someone you met at an event, it shouldn’t even be a meeting.

It should be a casual conversation about their problem, what they’ve been trying now, and what’s working or what’s not working.

Don’t mention your product because if you have, you’ve started pitching. They’ll be forced to compliment you on how “great” your idea is, and you’ve ruined the market “research”

This is customer validation. It is for finding out if they really have space for your product, and if they care about the problem.

However, if you are setting a meeting with a lead in a company, an investor, or someone required to go more formal, here’s the framework you should use:

Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask (To remember : Very Few Wizards Properly Ask)

Example —

“I’m trying to make desk & office rental less for pain for new buisnesses (vision). We’re just starting out and don’t have anything to sell, but want to make sure we’re building something that actually helps (framing). I’ve only ever come at it from tenant’s side and I’m having a hard time understanding how it all works from landlord’s perspective (weakness). You’ve been renting out desks for a while and could really help me cut through the fog (pedestal) Do you have time in next couple weeks to meet up for a chat? (Ask)”

That’s it.

Stage 2 — Getting your Ducks in a Row

That is, preparing for the real meeting.

Before every meeting think about the 3 BIG QUESTIONS you want to ask.

List down 3 BIG Qs for customers, investors, hire etc. before jumping into any meeting. These 3 big questions can change through the journey of your product but always have them.

Next, is the MOM TEST — the real big idea of the book.

The Mom Test has 3 simple rules:

Rule 1. Talk about their life instead of your idea.

Rule 2. Ask about specifics in the PAST instead of generic opinions about the future. Don’t ask “Would you buy this..” Everyone is insanely optimistic about the future and they can’t say no to your face. Instead, ask “Have you downloaded an app to solve this”

If they’ve never downloaded an app to solve their problem, they won’t download yours.

Rule 3. Talk less, listen more

Drill this into your head, even practice it with your friends before you get into a meeting.

Stage 3 — What to Avoid Like a Plague

Now, before getting into what to do, let’s look into what to avoid in a meeting.

• Never ask if they would pay for your idea. Instead, ask how much they’ve spend to fix this problem.
• Never ask how is your idea. No one should be telling you how is your idea. Only the market can do that.
• Never get happy about compliments. “That’s a cool product”- They’re stalling and diverting you. They wanna get out of it fast. Deflect them and get on the point.
• Never believe in generic phrases like I usually, I always, I never, I would, I will, I might, I could. If they are using this, steer them to data. Ask them what happened the last time and what they did. Ask they why they feel so, and what they face. Data of the past is >>>>

Stage 4 — Diving Deep

Now let’s get into what you should be doing.

• Start with their problem. Let them vent how much it affects them.
• Then ask them to go to the last instance it happened. What did they do to fix it?
  “Ugh, I wish there was a coupon app that did bla bla bla” But did they download the 100s of apps that exists. If not, they won’t download yours. If yes, ask what was missing? Talk about the past. It’ll always give you insights.
• Talk about which parts of the process they love and hate. Ask which other tools they’ve tried
• Are they actively searching for a replacement? If yes, whats the sticking point. If no? Why
• Is there a budget they have to fix the problem? How much they’ve spent in the past? -> Much better than asking how much they will spend in future.
• Ask “WHY DO YOU BOTHER?” Sometimes tech guys think that finance founders want data to analyse and that’s why asked for data reports. So they make a whole effing dashboards, but in the end, finance guys just wanted the data to just send customer reports.
• Ask “What are the implications of that problem” . Sometimes people call it a DISASTER, but once you ask about implication, they say “Oh we just threw a bunch of interns at it, and it’s fine”
• Most people are complainers, not customers. They moan about a problem but they don’t wanna fix it. That means the problem is not big enough and their emotional outbursts are just emotional, not actual problems.
• Some more definite questions you can ask

To dig for feature requests

• What do you want that
• What would that let you do
• How are you coping without it
• How would that fit into your day

To dig for emotional signals

• Tell me more about that
• That seems to bug you, I bet there’s a story here
• What makes it so awful
• Why havent you been able to fix it already?

Does this problem matter?

• How seriously do you take your blog?
• Do you make money from it?
• Have you tried making money from it?
• How much time do you spend on it per week?
• Do you have tools that you use for it?
• What are the 3 things you can improve right now?

The whole meeting should be about the problem. You should not be mentioning the product at all.

You aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

Stage 5 — How to end with a WIN

The Biggest mistake founders make — they feel that the meeting went great.

“They were interested, they loved the idea, they’d pay for the idea” And 6 mos later, it's crickets town.

If the meeting didn’t end in a yes or no, it was not a good meeting. After every meeting you should strive for a commitment.

Do not let it end with “Let me know when you launch” “That’s cool, I loved it”.

By giving them a clear chance to either commit or reject, you can get out of a friend zone and identify real leads.

There are no good meetings. It’s either a YES or NO.

Commitments can include: time commitment (clear next meeting with known goals, sitting down to give feedback on wireframes, using a trial of the product), reputation risk (intro to peers or team, intro to decision maker, giving a case study or testimonial), financial commitment (letter of intent, pre order, deposit)

If they don’t, it's fine. Atleast you can go and focus on other real leads.

Rejection is not a real failure, but not asking certainly is.

If after a couple of these, you feel like you’re getting negative validation, that’s still a GREAT RESULT.

If you’ve only got one shot, then bad news is bad news. If you hustle together $50K and spend all of it and see it fail, then it’s bad. But if you know it’s bad before, or have only spent $5K before, it’s good news.

At least you know. Even lukewarm is a terrific response, it gives you a crystal clear signal that this person does not care. It’s reliable information.

So, strive for a commitment at the end of the meeting.

Now let’s conclude.

• Frame the meeting
• Prepare for 3 big questions and the mom test.
• Avoid direct references to your products, compliments, and future promises.
• Talk about their problem, their past, their past actions, what they did to solve.
• Get a clear yes with a commitment or a clear no. Even a rejection or lukewarm response is fine. Don’t just dangle in the friend zone.
• Talk about the past and not the future.

If you liked this article, go read the Mom Test. Even this isn’t enough sauce, and you’ll learn a lot more with his examples and phrases.

If you liked this, I’d appreciate some love on this post.

I’m also doing SaaS marketing deep dives over 30 pieces of content, so follow along if you loved it :)

Let me know what else you wanna learn. I’ll read, watch, research and summarize. You can checkout older posts on the series on my profile :)

Cheers. (3/30)

More posts in this series

1. How to get first 100 users

2. Nail Customer Conversations and Validate your business idea

3. Run your first google ads in 20 minutes

4. 5 email sequences every business needs