https://amzn.to/383bo92

It talks at length about the challenges, especially, of getting _honest_ feedback from prospective users. And it has a lot of ideas to that effect.

Ask good questions. Read The Mom Test. Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

Two books I would recommend are

How to Win Friends and Influence People

And

The Mom Test

I went on to read The Mom Test after pondering over your message. It reflects the learnings from "The Mom Test"

Good stuff to read "the mom test" and "sell more faster".

I.e. not first finding out if it's something people want to pay for, before building the SaaS.

A mistake that's easy to do

The first few pages blew my mind. It was a great read all the way through.

p.s. I've read Lean Startup, but will check out The Launchpad, thanks!

The Mom Test (Book) is a way to verify the thing you're building people will actually want. Providing market-fit can be hard.

Startup School by YC is another good resource to keep you accountable and make progress with your ideas.

. The Mom Test - good and bad questions for customer discovery

. Competing Against Luck - introduces the concept of "jobs to be done" - people are hiring your product for a specific job they need to get done

Do you know about user interviews and user research? Here's a great short intro: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

I strongly recommend learning about product management and user research. Read The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook and do what's relevant. Start there!

Happy to discuss more and share more resources that could help. Email in profile.

I did a summary here: https://www.chestergrant.com/summary-the-mom-test-by-rob-fit...

I recommend getting a copy, solid advice from a past y-combinator founder.

The Right It - Alberto Savoia

The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick

Combining these and your chances of success have just increased by 500%

The Startup Owner's Manual (note: this and the entry above are sorta/kinda the same book, just different editions. But there's enough difference between the two that I recommend both)

The Art of the Start

The Lean Startup

The Mom Test

And then build in the real world.

You're talking to them in order to understand the problem that you're trying to solve.

The best book on this that I've read is "The Mom Test", well worth the price

- Vagabonding (Potts): made me travel more than ever

- Steve Jobs (Isaacson): amazing life story, beautifully described

- The Mom Test: required reading for any young founder/PM IMO, I've gifted this more than any other book

- It doesn't have to be crazy at work (DHH/Fried): best advice on how to run a company in a sustainable way to maximize team happiness & output

- Masters of Doom: epically entertaining, super nostalgic

For qualitative data such as user interviews/calls the solution for most teams is either to spend a lot of time on find users to talk to and set up calls or to pay companies like usertesting.com for access to their panels.

These tools don't allow you to get quick (and for most teams affordable) access to your own users for user interviews though, which is something that was enough of a pain point within my own team that we've built a tool exactly for that (https://tryribbon.com).

The Mom Test is also a great read on how to get useful user feedback in general (https://amzn.to/383bo92).

Lucky indeed. Their resources are so valuable. The Mom Test is always worth a re-read, I recommend it so often to people.

I understand the tendency to be broader and speak to more different people (larger target market, more potential buyers), but it makes it harder to effectively communicate your message in the language of the buyer. Also different people have different priorities. The more focus, especially at first, the better.

Do some experiments and see who has the problem in the most pressing way, or who can and is willing to pay enough to solve it to make it work for you and them. Consider size of company, decision maker, potentially industry/sector, location, time since money raised, bootstrapped vs investor funded, anything that makes sense - you never know which niches will be amenable to you.

This video from yc explains how most of our conversations with (potential) users are at best useless and at worse misleading, and how to do it better. Based on the book, “The mom test”

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to-users

A little bit later, I relayed these situations to someone who was giving advice on where to take the product / business, and he pointed out that these low-effort supportive comments and "please add feature X" suggestions are ways in which people brush you off in a non-confrontational way. He pointed me to a pretty good book called The Mom Test, which goes through the reasons why this is the case, and also how and what type of questions you should ask. Highly recommended reading, it was eye-opening for me.

Mostly I blame myself for not validating the idea properly. If “The Mom Test” book had been around at that time I could have saved that money and a lot of strain on my marriage. I feel strongly that it is by far the most important business book to be published in the last three or four decades.

You learnt experientially what most either never learn or a rare few learn from books like The Mom Test. Even compared those who read the book and get it, I fear it does not translate to a lived earned experience.

Take some time to rest, recuperate, recharge and go build #4!!

No relation to the author, I don't make money off the recommendation, etc.

2) Have you tried cold emailing people? It tends to work better than linkedin in my experience. Look for people who blogged or tweeted about topics related to your product. Not everybody will respond but people that the time to share what they know have a tendency to help other people.

Like others have mentioned, of course there's an element of luck. It helps to have a product that fits the zeitgeist.

But in my experience, the remaining 99% is all working smart and understand what and the "why" of the problem at hand.

The Google Ads technique is good, but only if you're working on a product with a known problem. For anything new... it probably won't be much help on it's own. It's useful though if you use to see how people try to solve known problems.

Best resources hands down IMO for understanding 0 to PMF are:
The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen. Gives a good view on how products fit with the market. If the problem space is wobbly, the solution space will suck.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick (my favourite). Excellent book on user interviews. It's so good that I made a primer out of it: https://gum.co/DeSxL
The PMF Engine by the founder of Superhuman: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...
It's a more quantifiable way of approaching it.

As an engineer, it's _so_ easy to fall into the traps she mentions ("not really listening to your users and [...] building something you think people want", or becoming "more focused on the excitement of the technical challenge than your users").

Until I actually tried starting a business, I always scoffed at this advice -- "obviously I won't make those mistakes!" But I still find myself goofing up over and over. It's so attractive to think that "this one new feature will make all the difference, so I should probably just focus on coding rather than talking to users."

Has anyone found a particularly effective way to overcome this? Is it just a lack of discipline on my end? (Maybe I need to reread "The Mom Test" a few more times...)

Chimpanzee Politics (interesting)

Corporate Confidential (paranoid, but worth a read)

Developer Hegemony (red pill for developers!!!)

Bargaining For Advantage (reasonable)

Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making (abstract as hell but rewarding)

Thinking Fast and Slow (loved it)

The Elephant In The Brain (seriously underrated)

The Brain That Changes Itself (inspirationally freaky)

The Power of Habit (good!)

The Secret Barrister (mildly disturbing)

Thinking In Systems (huge fan of this book!)

A Short History of Truth (meh...)

Man's Search For Meaning (brooo... I am so sorry)

Thinking In Bets (meh.. really meh)

The Road To Ruin (alright. Interesting even.)

Lying For Money (lots of fun!)

Great Answers To Tough Interview Questions (what it says on the tin)

Traction (good overview of marketing tactics)

Lean Customer Development (pretty good)

The Mom Test (eye opening)

Lean B2B (solid playbook)

Principles (instant classic)

It illustrates in the most logical progression a set of easily implementable steps to ensure that your own confirmation bias doesn’t sink your company.

This is a great example why user feedback needs to be taken in close proximity to a salt mine.

We, or at least most of us, being human, have a horrible job anticipating our future emotional state. So when his friend said that she'd be interested if FontForge was available on her Mac, she probably meant it, but her request didn't reflect the underlying reasons she held for not using the software.

Not out of dishonesty or malice, but because she probably didn't know herself. It's like all those times somebody swore they would love to have an app that frobnitzed the foobars, but when said app became available, it was met with a chorus of shrugs and mehs.

There's an excellent book on this topic -- The Mom Test -- that anybody building products should read.

A book recommended by YC's Aaron Epstein is The Mom Test[0]. The first 50-60% of the book is dedicated to how to discover problems with end clients/users that are worth tackling.

I have used the techniques personally and it's great to see what users say is a huge problem vs a problem they're willing to pay for.

It is easy to get stuck in a self-fulfilling trap that a user complains is a big problem. I recently spoke with a customer:

- "What's your biggest problem?" (book says this question is a no no)

- He replies, "If I sell 3 cars at the same time, I'm out of available float (cash) while I wait for those deals to close. This is a HUGE problem for me!"

- "How do you solve this today?" I ask.

- "I have other, larger car sales company who will lend me money at XX rates."

Right there, it's a solved problem. The end user figured out their own way. Turns out other smaller dealers like him rely on large trade line companies.

The only way I could complete is either on lower cost of financing or speed. At which point, for me, it's not a problem worth solving. The problem isn't so big for him where he's willing to throw cash at me for it.

Talk to users.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...

As for the actual content, there’s a massive difference between customers dying to use your product and them telling you it’d be “neat”. People don’t buy “neat” products. This is why you talk money to them as soon as possible. No real surprise it didn’t work out for him, the incentives just aren’t there.

He could have prevented all this by reading the Mom Test - oh well, experience is the best teacher anyways.

Highly recommend it. It's short (yay!) and very practical and changes the way you think about questioning people.

No affiliation, just like the book

Don't try and do everything in the book. Try and take one or two things that resonate with you and just implement those. Obviously you need to be involved in the development of a product to do that.

For example, I listened to The Mom Test earlier this year. Instead of trying to remember and do everything from the book, I just took one part that resonated. For me that was "Don't talk about your product when interviewing customers, talk about the customer and their problem.". When you feel you've improved at that, move on to the next thing you can improve.

- Exactly who is your ideal customer, and what do they care about? Veteran CEO of 4 person seed stage start up in FinTech world trying to build an MVP? Mid career hiring manager at a Series B or C company in healthcare looking to expand their team long term? Recruiter at a Series D company with 20,000+ employees trying to meet their quota of leads for the week? Someone else? Drill down here. Once you identify it and validate that through experiments, focus on as few as possible - ideally just one.

- Is it clear to your potential customer what problem you are solving for them?

- Do they think you are the best way for them to solve it? What alternatives do they use currently? What's painful about it? What's better about your solution, so compelling that they should try it?

- Is the problem they think you solve one of their current
priorities?

If the issue is with framing or marketing, here's a useful guide: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro

Good luck!

>However, I am still quite unsure how to actually get the ball rolling. My current game plan is to just brainstorm for a week or so and then start building the best idea I came up with during that week, then give myself a release deadline of one month for an MVP and see if I can raise some interest.

That mostly sounds sensible to me.

I recommend thinking more about the "raise some interest" part. There's a common trap that indie founders frequently fall into (myself included) where you build an MVP but don't think about marketing it until you've already built it. And then you realize there's no plan for finding customers.

Once you build the MVP, how will you find customers? Can you skip to that part without even building the MVP?

One of the ideas I liked in the Jason Cohen video[0] I linked in the article how he built WP Engine. He wanted to build a product for WordPress consultants, so he just emailed consultants and offered to pay them their hourly rate if they'd jump on a call with him and answer questions about their pain points. He didn't have any demo to show them, but people took his calls because he was showing that he valued their time (most accepted the calls and declined the money).

So, I think building an MVP is great, but it's even better if you can talk to customers before you build anything and find out what problems you can solve for them. A great book for this is The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, for which I've published my notes.[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw

[1] https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/the-mom-test/

I’d add that if you do nothing else, read the first 3 chapters of The Mom Test; it provides a great overview for evaluating ideas.

It failed because quite simply, when we tried to get other sales managers to use it for free (hoping it'd be popular), we found they wouldn't make the time to spend 2 mins planning a 1:1, probably as they're managed on 'selling deals, right now' in many cases, which is a bit sad!

Learning: I should have read the Mom Test.

With hindsight, I wish I'd built it for engineers based on Pull Requests (PR #181 had a ton of back and forth / NLP shows it got heated). It would have been fun if nothing else!

2. do some customer development, but be very careful about introducing bias into your questions. This would give you bad data if you ask the wrong types of questions. See the book The Mom Test

3. listen to a few podcasts where founders are interviewed. The older YC podcasts are really good. If your going for a two sided market, I would caution you. This is more challenging than other types of ideas.

I think you need more than a count of subscribers to validate your idea though. Ideally you can engage them so you can have conversations will a decent sample size (see the book "The Mom Test" and similar on what questions to ask), and you will know a lot more than just "I got 318 subscribers from HN" or whatever. I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to sell stuff to uninterested lists of even 3000 people and getting nothing.

I'm in a different country to you, and sample size of 1 speaking here, but I'd never sign up your page because you are dealing with money and stocks and I don't recognise you as a banking institution. So I wouldn't waste my time. I've been stung enough by trading platforms run by pig players. I'll use the boring big banks thanks. Things might be different in India though. Unless you are the ex-CTO of Barclays and have $100M in funding or something. Plus its such a competitive landscape that unless you are paying me to trade I can get very good deals out there.

However I might sign up for a tool to help me calculate options prices, or can tell me which shares internationally have falling the most since the COVID pandemic started. That's safe, I'll soon know if it doesn't work properly and it might be handy. Having signed up for that I might answer a survey you send me, and then you'd know more about me. Maybe I'm happy with my broker but I have a big problem with X that you can solve.

First, the Mom Test, it is very short, and it talks about what types of questions to ask and what types to avoid. The main focus is avoiding the introduction of bias. You want good data you can work with.

Second book is Running Lean. It has a great script that you can adapt to the industry you are targeting. It also gives pointers on conducting the interview.

Together, these two short books will get you started.

I've been working on exactly this myself, and while I'm lucky enough to have found an initial handful of customers from the classic blind selling of my product, it's ridiculous how much I've learned & reevaluated things using the actual feedback & conversations with those customers.

For other people wrestling with this, one thing I'd suggest is reading The Mom Test: http://momtestbook.com/. Great intro into exactly how to handle those feedback conversations, who to talk to, and how to talk to them, even if you don't have any product at all.

* Strategy #1: Charge more. patio11 has been shouting this from the rooftops for years, but it didn't sink in until after I started Indie Hackers[0]. If you charge something like $300/customer instead of $5/customer, you can get to profitability with something like 50 phone calls rather than years of slogging. It's still hard, but it's way faster.

* Strategy #2: Brian Balfour's four fits model[1]. It's not enough to think about the product. You also need to think about the market, distribution channels, and pricing, and how each of these four things fit together. I imagine them as four wheels on a car. It's better to have 4 mediocre wheels than 3 great ones and a flat.

* Book: The Mom Test.[2] Amazing book about how to talk to customers to research your ideas without being misled, which is a step I've stumbled on before.

* Tool: Notion. I just discovered it recently. I use it for all my docs and planning.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com - my latest business, and the one that actually worked

[1] https://brianbalfour.com/four-fits-growth-framework

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

I don't consider that good or bad, it just is. Similar to how some people prefer fish over meat and vice versa.

However, I will push back against the broad stroke generalization that you either teach people for free or charge money and be considered a scam.

Our advice is solid and battle-tested. There's Rob who wrote the Mom Test and Devin who wrote The Workshop Survival guide with Rob. And then there's our community with over a 100 up and coming authors who we're helping increase the probability of success through our process. The early results are already positive and it'll only improve as we keep trying to nail our process even more.

Is YC a scam because it isn't free?

If an author is like Tai Lopez you don't get word of mouth and burn through your lead pool. That means you're constantly trying to attract fresh leads, which is why these scams eventually tend to break.

What we're doing is teaching a process that minimizes some of the common mistakes authors make. Yes, we're charging money for that.

But if you look at our process, or heck, just read this article, you should be able to see that there's value worth paying for.

If you use nothing else but this article with these 4 common pitfalls to avoid, you'll do better vs. not having read it. And this was free.

So, I don't think your argument holds any water.

"The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick will teach you how to figure out what your customers really want, because it is almost certainly not what they are asking for.

"How to Make Sense of Any Mess" by Abby Covert. How to organize and present information.

"To Sell is Human" by Dan Pink. This is how you should look at sales and marketing.

Assuming you are going to be building software:

"Seductive Interaction Design" by Stephen P. Anderson.

"Planning Extreme Programming" and "Extreme Programming Explained" are must-reads for working with software teams.

I've worn both product and engineer hats on my path to being a sort of rentable CTO, and am always happy to help out people that are getting started as a PM -- email is in the profile.

Good luck!

Anyways, I'm in the same boat as you (I'm looking for the exact same kind of problem as you), so if you wanna bounce some ideas, shoot me an email: a (dot) v (dot) f (at-sign) gmx (dot) at

I'm Daniel Ch: /r/SaaS moderator[1], founder, etc. I'm launching to HN this podcast, "Talk To Your Users": https://anchor.fm/talktoyourusers

I've previously tested an idea on Twitter [2] (in typical 'talk to your users' validation fashion) and on subreddits [3]: live examples of 'Talk to your users'

The feedback seemed interesting, so... I am now launching it!

What's the idea? - I record (with consent) conversations with users. People that are/will/were users of my product. Why?

Situation: One of the top advice bits in the startup/product world is: talk to your users. PG said it multiple times, but double-stressed it by saying: Half the advice I give to startups is some form of "talk to your customers." And then there's The Mom Test: a book about how 'learning if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you'.

Problem: Ok, any practical examples? I mean me listening to founder X talk to user Y. With good and bad examples

My solution: I'm doing this: recording my conversations with users.

What product will I talk about? - The answer is: I don't fully know. I'm as of now building PriceUnlock.com, a tool that helps SaaS founders find&set the perfect pricing for their tool. But maybe due to the conversations, we'll see a pivot. Or two. Or maybe it'll all go well and I'll just 'talk to my users' about future features. Who knows where this takes us? But I'm launching today with 6 episodes.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas

[2]: https://twitter.com/chddaniel/status/1404484140209082368

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/nzvazj/i...

To better understand how to conduct the discovery and what questions to ask you should read a bit of Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test.

It's hard to give one piece of advice about how you should do customer discovery (without having a high quality conversation about what you are doing) b/c every venture is a different in what needs to be tested. Software ventures tend to need product customer discovery (what you should be building), while STEM companies[1] tend to need go-to-market strategy customer discovery.

[1] An example would be a company that is making an orally delivered anti-coagulant drug. They have HIGH technology constraints that aren't easily adjusted, so their customer discovery tends to revolve around questions about what their real value proposition is (is it pain free needle free drug delivery or no medical training drug delivery or something else) and other such questions.

http :// momtestbook .com (EDIT: I just noticed this is an http site... breaking up the link into pieces for now. Sill recommend Googling the book)

The tldr; is that as soon as you tell someone about your idea, it's going to bias their subsequent answers. They're going to lie to, try not to hurt your feelings, want to get rid of you, etc. So if you're trying to validate an idea, the most important rule is "Don't talk about your idea".

What "The Mom Test" recommends is to instead ask prospective users about their lives and specifically to recall individual moments when they had the problem your idea will supposedly solve. With this "unbiased" recollection, you (as the entrepreneur) have to put 2 and 2 together to figure out if people 1) really have a problem and 2) are open/looking for a solution.

I can't recommend this book enough. It lists every single mistake I ever made and every lesson I learned in doing so.

The only problem is that I discovered the book after making those mistakes and learning all those lessons.

Of course, following the advice in the book won't guarantee a successful business. But I'm 99% sure that NOT following it is a sure-fire recipe for failure.

I've tried and failed quite a few times (10+), and my current experiment - while I think it's a successful one, time will tell.

One thing I would suggest is you read "The Mom Test" book -- I think it'll serve you well in the long run (it's about marketing, and you'll need to do that if you develop your own products).

Don't hire a marketing expert. This is a bad first step. You should define a very specific subset of customers and talk to them. Find out their problems after talking to 10 very targeted people that fit into a user profile. I recommend reading "The Mom Test" (it's a book about how to phrase customer development interview questions) as a basis for how you talk to potential customers.

User acquisition efforts are not only measurable on a larger scale. You may have this idea because the people you worked with may have had a big company background. For a startup, it is very necessary for your advertising campaign to define a cost per click, find a conversion rate, and then test many different advertising phrases and avenues. This helps put a direct cost per user acquisition price on each campaign and you can compare apples to apples. It takes "voodoo money burning rituals" and turns it into numbers that are measurable.

If you rely on free marketing channels without a clear focus on who is using your product, it is very likely that you have 10 customers who fit 10 completely different segments with 10 different ideas of which features will give them value.

They key is learning. When you estimate future software releases, you typically point a story using things you have learned from previous, similar stories. When you attempt a new advertising campaign, you should use past learnings to determine which ads and messaging will work for different segments - how much they will cost, and how many users you can expect to get based on past results.

In summation, startup marketing should have a focused, scientific, numbers driven, methodical approach - just like writing software. If your marketers are not doing that, you probably aren't working with the right marketers.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...

For example, right now I'm taking notes for customer validation process following the The Mom Test[1] book and existing note taking app is too general for my use case.

That is why I'm also in the mist of developing an app[2] that is solely focus on that particular use case.

[1]http://momtestbook.com
[2]https://www.getfluorite.com

On reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/search?q=how+to+validate+i...

On IndieHackers:

* go to https://www.indiehackers.com/
* click the search icon in the upper right
* type "how to validate idea"

Those 2 sources will give you hours of reading.

My short answer is that if you have to validate an idea then you're doing it wrong.

A good idea is a solution to a problem that you noticed. Maybe because you've had this problem yourself (e.g. "I was trying to share a screenshot with a friend but there was not tool to do it easily") or maybe because you noticed that other people have a problem that you can solve using your programming skills.

Lacing any additional context to your particular situation "validating an idea" conjures a situation where you came up with a solution first and then started thinking "is this a solution to a problem that someone actually has"? Which is backwards.

If you want to learn more about how to improve the skill of noticing problems, read "The Mom Test" (https://blog.kowalczyk.info/dailynotes/note/b4u674cvj43jdajd...).

1. When do they look at their overall roadmap view?

2. Why?

3. What actions do they often take as a result (e.g. print it out for upper mgmt, drag around the timing, ...)?

4. Why do they need to do those things?

5. ...

I could be off base but, based on your questions, I'd suggest you dial up the time you spend interviewing your customers about their problems.

The book 'The Mom Test' is a great guide for how to put this advice into practice.

For more of the same, I got a lot out of Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez. Here's a talk from Cindy if you'd like to get to learn more before committing to a book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5hc7sseHbE

This page just kind of pokes at things everyone's frustrated about without offering a solution. But, as The Mom Test points out, there are lots of things people are kind of unhappy with, but are unwilling to pay for. I think the example they use are shoelaces: "Are you tired of bending down to tie your shoes? Having to stop in the middle of the street to re-tie them? Feeling your shoelaces wear out over time? Getting stuff stuck in there?"

Maybe, but are you actually gonna pay for a shoelace alternative? Probably not.

This page is that. It makes some sweeping statements about how work should be intentional and peaceful, and says "we're gonna solve it with a calendar", without offering any details about what that calendar is actually going to do.

If they had some screenshots, they could learn something about how their users engaged with the product. Saying vaguely positive-sounding things ("Rise is different than your current calendar, because instead of starting with meeting invites from others, it starts with you.") doesn't teach them anything.

Having read over this and a few other replies I would definitely say it would be worthwhile taking a step back now, don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy and continue to burn through cash/time building things you think will help, spend a bit of time away from the keyboard, reading The Mom Test as others have suggested, it’s honestly a fantastic book, very actionable and probably won’t take you long to get through. That will put you in the right mindset for where you are in your journey and what you need to do next - which boils down to trying to validate some of your ideas, the correct way.

Finally you mention someone offering mentorship/advice, and you taking it, just be cautious with who you take advice from, the best person to take advice from is probably someone a few steps ahead of you, that means finding someone who may have just secured their very first bit of seed money as a solo/duo founding team, or an indiehacker who’s reached say $1000 MRR for a B2C app.

Good luck.

To properly talk to customers to identify if there is a need for your product/idea requires for you to not bias them by telling them what you are working on. You should be able to talk to your mom about your idea without her ever knowing that you have an idea for a product.

I also try to read a book or article on something new I want to learn. My most recent book I started reading is called the Mom Test. Its about doing customer development, and it touches on the subject of what type of questions you should be asking.

---

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

This book stresses the idea of starting with customer interviews before you build anything and how to ask questions of prospective customers to get meaningful information when people's bias is to just tell you, "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea," even though they'd never pay money for it. I spent a long time trying to apply it, and the struggle was that in my experience, customers who don't mind diving deep into their unsolved problems for an aspiring founder are a disjoint group from customers who have serious money to spend.

My notes: https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/the-mom-test/

---

Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling

This is a bit dated, but I think it has valuable takeaways. The most important for me was the value in marketing to small niche customers. Big competitors are less interested in catering to niche groups, and the more specialized, the easier they are to find and market to (e.g., they all read the same magazine or attend the same convention).

My notes: https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/start-small-stay-small/

---

"Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business: Jason Cohen, Founder, WP Engine" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw)

A good recording of a MicroConf talk about useful things to consider when building a new Saas business.

Based on this, I'm assuming you want to build an idea that makes money first.

You need to solve a problem that's worth paying for. Easily said, of course.

The Mom Test[0] is a book about how to ask questions that are worth pursuing as a business.

> do some of the good ideas get left out?

That's the question really to focus on. Don't worry about developers or building yet - the first question to ask is - is there really a problem here?

The first step really is about a basic litmus test. What's the cheapest way to "test" the idea without a costly build? End user research, landing page with some targeted traffic,

All about getting to a few potential customers who will give you feedback.

After that, then I say start building.

If you build in a vacuum (you and some developers), you're likely to get it very wrong.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-...

I will look into the sources you shared. I have heard of The Mom Test and The Lean Product Playbook but haven't still had a chance to check them out. Will definitely do.

Thanks for the offer also. Will get in touch.

OP, I suggest you read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, and consider if you've successfully identified who your customers are, and a valid channel for reaching them. Further ask if you've correctly identified a problem that those customers will pay to have solved, and whether or not your product actually solves that problem. How do you do that? Talk to customers. All of this stuff is in the Steve Blank book.

Also consider reading The Mom Test[1] by Rob Fitzpatrick.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+mom+test&inde...

"Create a solution to somebody else’s problem, where that problem sits at the intersection of being genuinely interesting / meaningful to you and being something that you are reasonably capable of addressing."

I also want to second his book recommendation [The Mom Test](https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...). It's really short and will save you a lot of time building things nobody will pay for.

If I'm running a business, why do I need to be able to read financial reports at all? Especially for some other random company. If I need to make a financial report, couldn't I use an online generator, template, accounting software, or hire someone to do it? Looking online there seem to be many services for less than a few thousand dollars for financial reporting.

If I have a product wouldn't I be able to take time to research applications for it thoroughly rather than relying industries that I remembered from some course.

As far as measuring clients worth, do I need a course on that really or do I just need to be aware that there are clients that will waste our time and try to get practical evidence that won't be the case.

Can I not get quite a bit of useful knowledge by reading and carefully digesting some key books like The Mom Test?

When you say think like a marketer, so far every article that comes up when I google that is listing things that any used car salesman would apply.

Just based on what you said it sort of makes MBA degrees seem like a waste of time to me.