Is your startup idea good? 5 takeaways from Rob Fitzpatrick’s Mom Test

Welcome back to our monthly series where we review books that offer the best advice for those new to the world of VC and startups! Our co-founder and managing partner, John Vrionis, is book-obsessed; if you visit our offices, you’ll find plenty of reading material to take home with you.

We are a mission-driven team, and for plenty of us, this is our first foray into venture capital. We often look for advice from business experts, experienced founders, and startup operators to help us learn about building great companies. We’re eager to learn from the best and enthusiastic about passing on this knowledge to others!

This month, we’re reviewing The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, published in 2013 and revised in 2014.

You shouldn’t ask your mom if your business idea is good since she’ll probably just tell you what you want to hear. While that’s true, Fitzpatrick argues you shouldn’t ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It’s a poorly framed question, and everyone will give you some degree of misleading feedback. Ultimately, it’s the founder’s responsibility to ask good questions to gain deeper insights into what customers truly need.

Fitzpatrick’s “Mom Test” consists of 3 simple rules for crafting good questions:

1. Talk about the customer’s life instead of your idea
2. Ask about specifics from the past
3. Talk less and listen more

The Mom Test offers invaluable guidance for anyone navigating the complex landscape of startups and customer conversations. By emphasizing the importance of asking the right questions, focusing on customer experiences, and avoiding the pitfalls of bad data, Fitzpatrick equips us with tools to drive towards product-market fit. 

Here are some key tools from the book:

Ask good questions

Good questions shouldn’t focus on what you should build. Instead, Fitzpatrick argues that your questions should delve into your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. By gathering as much information about them as possible, you can then take a visionary leap to a solution. 

For example, asking a question like “Why do you bother?” encourages deeper exploration beyond surface-level problems, uncovering motivations that drive customer behavior. Similarly, “What are the implications of that?” helps differentiate between costly issues and those that exist but aren’t truly impactful. Asking the customer to “talk me through the last time that happened” helps you learn from their actions rather than their opinions.

Avoid bad data

Bad data can lead to significant issues, including false negatives (mistakenly believing your idea is failing) and, more dangerously, false positives (convinced you’re right when you’re not). To avoid bad data, Fitzpatrick says to focus on three key strategies:

• Deflect compliments: Aside from industry experts who have built similar businesses, most opinions are worthless. The best way to escape the misinformation of compliments is to avoid them completely by not mentioning your idea. If they happen anyway, you need to deflect the compliments and instead gather facts and commitments.
• Anchor fluff (generic claims, future-tense promises, and hypothetical maybes): When someone starts talking about what they “always,” “usually,” “never,” or “would” do, anchor them back to specifics in the past and the actions they’re already taking.
• Dig beneath opinions, ideas, requests, and emotions: To understand the motivations behind customer data, you need to ask the right questions and dig deeper to find the root cause.

Push for commitment

A meeting is successful when it ends with a commitment or a clear next step. As Fitzpatrick notes, rejection isn’t a true failure; not asking is. While not everyone will convert, you’ll at least understand your position and gain valuable insights. 

Commitment comes in three forms: 

• Time (e.g., a clear next meeting with known goals)
• Reputation risk (e.g., introductions to peers, teams, or decision-makers)
• Cash

The more they’re willing to give up, the more seriously you can take what they’re saying.

Framing and controlling meetings

When requesting and framing a meeting, Fitzpatrick suggests using five key elements:

• Vision — how you’re making the world better
• Framing — where you’re at and what you’re looking for
• Weakness — where you’re stuck and how you can be helped
• Pedestal — show that they, in particular, can provide that help
• Ask — Ask for help

These elements can be combined or rearranged as needed. Once the meeting begins, it’s important to take control to prevent them drilling you on your idea. Learning about a customer and their problems is often more effective as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting. As Fitzpatrick says, if it feels like they’re doing you a favor by talking to you, it’s probably too formal.

Avoid learning bottlenecks

When all the learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoiding bottlenecks had three parts:

• Prepping: Before a conversation, create a list of the 3 most important things you want to learn from them. At least one of these questions should have the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.
• Reviewing: After the discussion, review your notes with your team promptly. Use this time to update your beliefs and 3 big questions based on new insights.
• Taking good notes: Write down exact quotes, strong emotions, and specific names and companies. Add symbols to your notes as context and shorthand.

If you want to give The Mom Test a read in full, we encourage you to do so! You can check out Rob Fitzpatrick’s website to find out where the book is sold. And, make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter to ensure you don’t miss next month’s book review and plenty of other content from our team.