The Innovation Show EP 231: The Mom Test with Rob Fitzpatrick
8 snips
Jul 23, 2020 
Rob Fitzpatrick, author and entrepreneur behind The Mom Test, teaches founders how to get honest customer feedback. He explains why typical questions invite flattery and how tiny wording changes reveal real behavior. Conversations, commitments, and replaying interviews are highlighted as practical ways to avoid false positives and learn what customers actually do.
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Why Asking If Your Idea Is Good Is Useless
- Asking anyone if your business is a good idea is a bad question that produces lies or guesses.
- Rob Fitzpatrick frames customer conversations as delicate excavations where poor questions smash the fragile truth.
Start With Their Life Not Your Pitch
- Start interviews by learning about the customer's life, not by pitching your idea.
- Ask fact-based past questions to avoid fishing for compliments and preserve fragile truth.
MTV Dashboard Was The Wrong Solution
- Rob built an analytics dashboard for MTV after they requested it but never asked why they needed it.
- MTV ended up asking for weekly branded PDFs, a four-hour fix, not a months-long dashboard build.
