The Mom Test — discussion question #1
Hey book club, how's the reading going? How are you liking The Mom Test so far?
Let's start discussing. But before we get too heavy into book-specific questions, we'd love to hear about your experience (even if you haven't started reading). So, here's our first question:
How have you found people to talk to about your product/business? Was your approach successful? What worked and what didn't? Tell us about your experience in the comments below!
First of all, thanks for choosing this. It gave me a lot of insights. That said, I can't fully answer the current question, as I understood my mistakes of being in "pitch-mode" instead of listening. I will try to work on that in the future.
Glad you got a lot out of it! That seems like a good takeaway :)
For testing out initial ideas, I found that reaching out to people who complained about competitor products on twitter was pretty effective. I sent people emails referencing tweets and asked 2-3 questions that had short answers. Then followed up with questions that might take a bit longer to answer.
More recently I've been getting referrals through my network. I do my best to keep meetings/chats with people I know short and I ask for intros to anyone they know that's passionate about the space. For me this is often engineers/PMs who refer me to tech leads that are passionate about driving better docs practices.
Interested to see what's working well for other people.
Good thinking. Twitter seems like a super effective tool for this and I like your approach of starting brief before getting into the bigger questions.
One of the best sources for me were specialized meetups. I would go to a community that’s closest to my customer segment and network with people - usually would find good leads and a few customers there.
Then, I found attending conferences as a participant (not presenter) beneficial. I would approach booths that are relevant and since presenters are keen on chatting with you and answering the questions about their business (as if you were a potential customer), I would end up with good leads too.
Those, of course, are mostly applicable to B2B, haven’t done yet any of consumers projects.
Then warm intros, of course, work the best, as Rob mentioned too in his book.
Great advice, thanks @tair! Meetups are great. I haven't tried conference booths but that's smart
I really like the mom test approach. It has some great tips, but i find it hard to talk to other people with open-ended questions and not leading them to my solution.