The Mom Test

The Mom Test

How to Talk to Customers and Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everybody is Lying to You

Rob Fitzpatrick

Proxy Trap

Metrics become mirages when optimized directly.

Ignoring compliments should be easy, but it’s not. We so desperately want to hear them that we are often tricked into registering them as positive data points instead of vacuous fibs. ... Rule of thumb: Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless.
False Positives

Rare signals drown in false positives.

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.
Polite Conspiracy

Silent agreements to avoid uncomfortable truths.

Most of your meetings will end with a compliment. It feels good. They said they liked it! Unfortunately, they’re almost certainly lying.