… And it’s all your fault but you can fix it 😅

Imagine this scenario:

• You analyse your mother’s behaviour
• You work hard on coming up with a startup idea to help her daily routine
• You are convinced you have something that will work
• You are very enthusiastic about your business idea.
• Let’s validate the idea. We don’t want to blindly start building, right? That’s a rookie mistake.
• Who better to ask than your own mother? She would never lie to you and she is the core user you had in mind. Perfect.
• You explain what the business idea is to your mother
• You ask her if she thinks it’s a good idea and if she would use the product.

I did not give you any specifics, but the answer is “Yes!”. Your mother thinks it’s a great idea. Go do it!

This reminds me of “magic” number games we used to play when we were younger. I hope you know what I mean. They usually went something along the lines of:

• Think of a number
• Multiply by this much
• Substract this from it
• Do some more math
• The result is 102.
• Oh my god! How did you do that?

The Mom Test

The above scenario is the worst way you could try to validate your idea when talking to your mother. She loves you and cares about your feelings and will unconsciously protect those feelings by giving you the answers you are fishing for. The above scenario is extracted from a must-read amazing book called “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. The book is a quick read (130 pages) and is an absolute pleasure to go through. It teaches you to ask the right questions by avoiding the usual mistakes, by learning about your own biases and the biases of others you talk to. After reading the book you might find yourself describing questions as not being very “mom test”.

My talk about Mom Test

If you read the book and would like to discuss it or if you didn’t and would like to see it in action, I invite you to join my talk on March 24th, at Codecamp Iasi. It’s my first product-oriented talk and would appreciate it if you came by. The presentation would also be a good opportunity to get together with other startup-minded, product interested people.

The presentation title is “If I made a product that did X, would you buy it?” and it will take place in Room “Engineering #5 (floor -1)” at 17:00. As always, this is taking place at Hotel International. Registering before the event is recommended, please do it here.

See you there!