Name: Martine Ellis's review of The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
Item: The Mom Test
Rating: 5
Author: Martine Ellis

Rob Fitzpatrick

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.

How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

The Mom Test

Sven Schmidt

Martine Ellis

Liam Ellul

Robust and concise book about how to see past the lies in early customer discovery.

Only three things validate an idea
- ongoing time commitment
- reputation exposure
- monetary commitment

Worth a reread

Many people mentioned this book before, never saying a bad thing about it. I finally got to it and have to agree.

It is short, to the point, and practical. For me, the earlier parts about how to specifically talk to potential clients were the most interesting. I liked the example conversations.

I don't think you can cover soft-skills topic as this without any fluff. But here we are. Fully recommend to people wanting to build a framework about how to validate ideas using other people. 

Vojtech

Many people mentioned this book before, never saying a bad thing about it. I finally got to it and have to agree.

It is short, to the point, and practical. For me, the earlier parts about how to specifically talk to potential clients were the most interesting. I liked the example conversations.

I don't think you can cover soft-skills topic as this without any fluff. But here we are. Fully recommend to people wanting to build a framework about how to validate ideas using other people. 

Tuago

Great book that teaches you how to ask better questions and get honest answers

Mudita

I really appreciate non-fiction that manages to be insightful and practical, but also fun. This is one of those.

Hrishikesh Bhaskaran

This is going into the list of must-read books I am going to suggest to the product folks.

Nadav Weizmann

Chris Raastad

After starting my journey in Product Management, I searched the internet for recommendations of books to read. This book did not make any of those lists and was suggested by my CEO, it turned out to be exactly the first book I needed to read.

The Mom Test will teach you how to effectively learn and talk to customers. It packs a lot of super useful tips for just 125 short pages. We sabotage any real learning when we pitch our business idea or fall for the traps of compliments and bias. This book helps you get around the ways to shoot yourself in the foot and make the most of customer conversations.

The Mom Test is simple:
1) Talk about their life instead of your idea
2) Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
3) Talk less and listen more

This will flip conversations to the customer, and armed with big-scary-questions, will help you get to the root of customer problems. Customers own the problems, product owns the solutions.

Skills you will learn:
- Asking good questions
- Avoiding bad data
- Keeping it casual
- Pushing for commitment & advancement
- Framing the meeting
- Customer segmentation
- Prepping & Reviewing
- Taking notes

The tactics in this book are essential for including customer conversations into your product management process. I enjoyed the book for its simplicity and practical advice. It's a little handbook for talking to customers that I'll always keep around.

Nathan

One sentence to summarize: a collective strategy how to ask, pivot, drill user actual behaviors and avoid those fluffy questions, so that even talking to your mom (who would probably blindly support you), you can get some valuable insights.

Tobias Sutterlüty

Great book with lots of practical advice. 

Bryan Maniotakis

A short, insightful and actionable book that anyone that talks to customers should read. 

Highly recommended.

Sam Mead

Please, please, please read this book instead of the Lean Startup! Doing customer discovery is arguably the most important part of scoping out a new idea (for a product, business or project) but it is also really hard to do right. Rob Fitzpatrick does a great job of communicating customer interviews in a way that means you can implement his suggestions in your very next conversation. 

For more on customer interviews check out this LIFFFT inc. YouTube playlist: https://bit.ly/3q3YZKO

Ivaylo Durmonski

As the author mentions in the book, “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.” Instead, you need to about their life instead of your idea.

The Mom Test is an amazingly simple, down-to-earth guide on how to talk to your customers before building your “thing.” It’s full of specific examples of good and bad approaches, and reasons why a certain approach is good or bad. It’s probably the best book about validating startup ideas.

The main thing I learned from The Mom Test – though it’s really hard to point only one – is this: Ask people for their honest advice without mentioning your idea and don’t talk while they’re speaking.

Full summary: https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Aske Dørge

I can’t remember the last time I learned so much, from such a small book.
People lie to you, if you don’t know how to steer the conversation. Not out of malice, but rather because they don’t want to tell you something unpleasant (like a mother: “Oooh! Did you make that by yourself!!?”). This is covered in the first few pages. The rest of the book deals with how to think about the conversations, so you can avoid this trap, and many other.
The book is straight forward, and packed with dos & don’ts, backed up by good reasoning, and examples.
If you are any kind of builder/founder and have no idea how to approach both exploratory conversations and customer development, this book is for you.
The last chapter deals with the dynamics on a startup team, which blew my mind. Every kind of founder (biz, product, sales, tech) should read this book.

Lucas Coelho

I was not expecting to like this book but I actually do, a lot. 

It goes straight to the point on techniques that are useful to ANY product team and entrepreneur to get relevant insights into their product/business/venture by talking to customers. 

It complements really nicely anything you might already have read about customer development, UX research, etc. 

Recommend.

Ankesh Bharti

This book turned my perspectives wholly when it comes to pitching ideas. Also I was in a good frame of mind to consume the material laid out in this book as before this book I read a short book from Jiten Shah where he focused heavily on making the customers centre stage of the whole startup process. It was nice of the author to put a neatly organised cheat sheet at the end to summarize the whole book.

Martine Ellis &
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

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Martine Ellis &The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

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Martine Ellis &
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick