Run customer interviews that surface the truth instead of the encouragement you wanted to hear, so you build the product people actually pay for.
The interview that left you feeling great is usually the one that lied to you.
Founders ask leading questions, collect compliments, and walk away convinced they have validation. Then nobody buys. The problem is rarely the idea. It is the conversation: pitching instead of listening, asking about an imagined future, and mistaking politeness for commitment.
This course teaches the discipline behind The Mom Test. You learn to deflect every compliment, ask about what people already did rather than what they say they will do, and avoid the three questions that reliably produce false positives. You also learn to read real signals of commitment, time, reputation, money, and to run a batch of ten interviews that gives you data you can trust.
Compliments are the fool's gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and worthless.
- Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
Founders: keep hearing "I love it" and want to know whether anyone will actually pay.
Product and research teams: want interview habits that produce evidence instead of agreeable noise.
Anyone validating an idea: would rather find the flaw in a coffee chat than after months of building.
