Video · ~20 min

How to do customer interviews? | Rob Fitzpatrick, author of "The Mom Test"

Rob Fitzpatrick · YouTube (Rob Fitzpatrick) Free Beginner

How to do customer interviews? | Rob Fitzpatrick, author of "The Mom Test"

If you cannot easily meet target users in person, every conversation you do get has to count, and cold outreach is worthless if you then ask leading questions. Rob Fitzpatrick, who wrote The Mom Test, walks through how to run a customer conversation that gives you real signal instead of polite lies. It is the natural companion to cold outreach: this is what to actually say once someone agrees to a call.

  • Ask about the person's real past behavior and current workarounds, not their opinion of your idea, because opinions and hypotheticals will flatter you.
  • Keep your idea out of the early conversation so people cannot just tell you what you want to hear.
  • Dig into specifics: how they solve the problem today, what it costs them, and what happened the last time it came up.
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It answers 8 questions

  1. How do I talk to customers without getting false positives?
  2. How do I get honest answers when the person I'm interviewing is a friend or someone in my network?
  3. My first 5 customers were friends who signed up to be nice. How do I know if any of them actually want the product?
  4. I want to test my idea before writing any code. What actually is a landing-page or concierge MVP and how do I run one right?
  5. Is it a mistake to fall in love with my solution before I understand the problem?
  6. How do I run good discovery calls in India when the person keeps saying yes to be polite but never converts?
  7. How do I validate an idea in an industry I have no background in?
  8. What are the questions that quietly ruin an interview by leading the person to the answer I want?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The cleanest distillation of the one framework that turns a customer chat into a relationship instead of a survey. The three... Sachin Rekhi's Blog Article · 10 min read A Primer on Talking to Customers From Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test Sachin Rekhi
  3. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  4. A YC partner turns 'talk to users' into a repeatable 5-question interview script you can use this afternoon. It's The Mom Test... YC Startup Library Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky (YC / founder of Pebble)
  5. The definitive essay on where good ideas come from: notice problems you personally have, don't force it. Use it as the lens for... paulgraham.com Essay · ~20 min read How to Get Startup Ideas Paul Graham
  6. A deep conversation on why direct questions fail and how story-based interviews surface real behaviour. Torres names the common... Lenny's Newsletter Podcast · ~75 min Teresa Torres on how to interview customers Lenny Rachitsky and Teresa Torres
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