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

Organise meetups For marginally more effort than attending an event, you can organise your own and benefit from being the centre of attention. Want to figure out the problems HR professionals have? Organise an event called “HR professionals happy hour”. People will assume you’re credible just because you happen to be the person who sent the invite

Rule of thumb: In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is a side-effect.

whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and give you your first sale.

Joel Gascoigne did a classic landing page test with his startup Buffer, describing the value proposition and collecting emails. But contrary to popular understanding, it wasn’t the metrics or conversion rate which convinced him to move forward. Instead, it was the conversations which resulted from him emailing every single person who signed up and

If you’re really desperate, you can always be “writing a book” and hoping to interview them.

Immerse yourself in where they are

Even when I had no audience, I still found blogging to be helpful. When I sent cold emails from my blog email address, folks would often meet with me because they had checked my domain, seen my industry blog, and figured I was an interesting person to talk to. In other words, the traffic and audience were irrelevant. Blogging about an industry is a

Drumming up good conversations from cold leads is hard. It’s doable and sometimes you have no choice, but it’s far from ideal. The goal of cold conversations is to stop having them. You hustle together the first one or two from wherever you can, and then, if you treat people’s time respectfully and are genuinely trying to solve their problem, those

Steve Blank’s original book on Customer Development, 4 Steps to the E.piphany,