How do you adapt the "mom test" with the Coronavirus situation?
The Mom Test is a great book about product validation. The author Rob Fitzpatrick seems adamant that you should meet people face to face to ask the questions, and do it informally (ask people as you meet them, not set up meeting times etc.)
E.g. see these 20 seconds or so of the video near the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LwbFZkyRKk&feature=youtu.be&t=2665
How can you adapt this for coronavirus where it is now harder to meet as many people face to face? Is it possible to do this well via Zoom meetings? Has anyone done this, and are there any gotchas?
Trending on Indie Hackers
Hi Martin,
I'm a huge fan of The Mom Test. I use the approach almost everywhere.
However, I've always handled the meetings via Zoom - it's a way faster to get the result :)
My former co-founder and I did 20+ user interviews over Google Meet. They work very well and I don't think being face to face would have changed anything. The nice thing about video calls is that you can record the session (after asking for permission!) and you can review it later.
One thing that I learned is that, depending on your audience, people might have trouble connecting to the meeting. Google Meet, and I think Zoom too, allow folks to dial from a phone and something like 30% of the people that we spoke with, used that option.
I think the questions that you ask are much more important than how you run the interview.