🤖 Crush customer interviews using the Mom Test

Everyone talks about the importance of customer interviews, but few seem to do it — and those who do tend to do it poorly. Let's fix that, with the help of the Mom Test and our AI co-founder.

Hey friend 👋

Interviewing customers is critical to ensuring you’re solving a problem worth solving.

And yet, doing it badly costs time and money, and kills companies.

But there’s a simple test you can use to ensure you remove bias and uncover the real opportunities in their problems. It’s called the Mom Test, and your AI co-founder is here to help.

Let’s go 👇

There’s a weird paradox in the startup world:

Everyone talks about the importance of customer discovery, but few seem to do it.

It seems every week I meet a founder who has some app that they think is pretty good and they want help finding someone who can market it for them.

Unfortunately, that’s not how startups work.

And when I do meet founders who conducted customer interviews, they tout stats with gusto: “78% of people we surveyed want an app like this!”

It’s always unfortunate to meet a cautionary tale... but they’ve made two critical mistakes:

1. They’ve tried to turn qualitative research into quantitative research.

2. They asked people a question rife with bias.

Let’s break it down:

It’s not a numbers game.

Customer discovery is qualitative research — we explore markets to gain an understanding of the underlying reasoning, opinions, and motivations of the people involved. This usually begins with understanding their pain, because pain is opportunity, but quickly moves into what drives buying behaviour.

In customer discovery, our goal is to gather non-numerical data (such as through interviews) from small, non-random samples of a population to provide depth of understanding. And we can’t analyse that data using statistics. Qualitative analysis is interpretive and thematic — we’re after patterns or themes.

Contrast that with quantitative research, where the goal is to test hypotheses and examine relationships between variables using measurable data. We study pre-determined variables with large, random samples in search of outcomes with statistical significance.

But in customer discovery, we don’t yet know enough about our customers’ world to pre-determine those variables!

The key takeaway?

Aim to have conversations with customers — not to run surveys of them.

Now let’s talk bias:

Rule #1: stop fooling yourself!

Few things are as relevant to early stage startups as this advice on science from physicist Richard Feynman:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

While there are innumerable ways to introduce bias into our customer interviews, the easiest way to get bad data is to ask questions that open up what I call a Needs Gap.

Let’s say you’re at a restaurant with some friends.

The food has been thoroughly mediocre, and it’s been a bit noisy to boot. You didn’t have bad experience, but you aren’t rushing to come back. It’s meh.

At the end of the meal, the waiter comes up to you and asks, “how was everything?”

What do you say?

“It was good.”

In other words, you lied... and right to his face. But it’s even worse than that!

Because we know the waiter doesn’t care that much. This isn’t the French Laundry. This probably isn’t his career — it’s just his job, and he works on tips.

And yet... you lied.

Let’s add the twist: when you talk to customers about your startup, they know you care.

How likely are they to tell you truth?

So when you say 78% of respondents said they’d buy your app, I say:

Michael Che sarcastically saying “yay”

All this means that the thing you fundamentally want to learn (will they buy) is the one thing you can’t ask!

So what to do?

Mother knows best (except when it comes to your startup).

Believe it or not, not being able to ask direct questions isn’t a handicap — it’s a superpower!

If you ask questions that pass the Mom Test, you’ll gather an extraordinary amount of valuable information — more valuable than just learning if they’d buy.

It’s like this:

You go and ask your mother, “hey, mom, what do you think of my startup idea?” How will she respond?

Oh, it’s amazing, honey! I can see it! This is the next big thing! You’re going to be as big as Elon Musk! I’m so proud of you!

Because just the like the waiter to the patron, you created a Needs Gap with your mom: you created a gap between what you need to hear, and what they think you need to hear. Your mother thinks you need encouragement. Patrons think the waiter needs the nicety.

And everyone wants to avoid the unnecessary conflict.

You can remove the bias by ensuring that your question creates no Needs Gap — that there’s no difference between what you need to hear and what they think you need to hear.

It’s called the Mom Test:

Ask a question in such a way that even your own mother has no choice but to tell you the truth.

In other words, close the Needs Gap — and remove the bias.

You can’t ask your mother if she likes your idea, or if she’d buy... but you can ask her to tell you about a time she had a particular problem.

You can’t ask her how much she’d pay for your app... but you can ask her how much she’s paying for the competition, or how much time or money she’s losing because she hasn’t yet solved the problem.

Here’s how it works:

It’s qualitative. Questions that pass the Mom Test are designed for qualitative analysis, and not quantitative analysis. They are open ended, rather than yes/no or multiple choice, and are designed to elicit stories from customers — rather than short answers. Perhaps most importantly, the questions ask about the present or the past, but never about the future, because statements about potential future behaviour are unreliable.

It’s unbiased. Questions that pass the Mom Test are asked in neutral ways, and do not lead customers in any particular direction. Further, they are phrased in ways that encourage honest responses, and never give customers the impression that there are any right or wrong answers.

It’s customer-centric. Questions that pass the Mom Test are centered on the customer’s life, and not on your startup idea, your product, or any of your assumptions. They do not seek validation of any idea, but aim to discover genuine insights. They are asked with the humility necessary to accept that we don’t know in advance where we’ll find those insights. And finally, the questions engage customers emotionally — we see the whites of their eyes when they respond.

We can distill all of this to a few core principles:

The 9 constraints of the Mom Test

To pass the Mom Test, a question must be:

1. Centered on the customer’s life, and not on your startup idea.

2. Seeking genuine insights, rather than validation of any idea.

3. Engaging emotionally with customers.

4. Open ended, rather than yes/no or multiple choice.

5. Eliciting stories from customers, rather than short answers.

6. About the present or the past, but never about the future.

7. Phrased in ways that encourage honest responses.

8. Neutral, and do not lead customers in any particular direction

9. Eliciting responses that are specific and tangible, rather than vague or broad.

This is a lot to keep in mind, and it takes practice.

Fortunately, we know someone with a lot of practice...

Bring on the AI co-founder!

And let’s ask it to critique our discovery questions.

This prompt takes your list of customer interview questions and provides a PASS/FAIL grade for each of them, along with an explanation of why it got that grade. For a question that doesn’t pass the mom test, it will also provide 3 to 5 suggested alternatives for you to consider.

Unlike every other prompt we’ve done so far in Founding with AI, we’re are NOT giving our AI co-founder any knowledge or insight into what we’re working on — no elevator pitch, no startup core, nothing. We don’t want to introduce bias into the questions, and the AI doesn’t need to understand the intent behind a question in order to validate it.

However, in a future edition, we’ll talk about using AI to come up with customer discovery questions for what you want to learn. Drop a comment if you want this higher in my queue!

As usual, this prompt should work in both free and paid ChatGPT, as well as in Claude and Gemini. My screenshots are from ChatGPT 4o.

Here it is: