Every entrepreneur knows the feeling. After weeks of silent brainstorming, you emerge with a world-changing idea. You nervously share it with your biggest supporter—your friend, your partner, your mom—and brace for impact. They listen intently, smile, and deliver the verdict: "That's a brilliant idea! You should totally do it!"
This feedback feels fantastic. It’s a rush of validation. It's also, quite possibly, the most dangerous and misleading feedback you can get.
People are nice, especially the ones who love you. They don't want to hurt your feelings. But building a business on compliments is like building a house on sand. You need a foundation of cold, hard facts. This is where "The Mom Test" comes in.
What is The Mom Test?
Coined by Rob Fitzpatrick in his must-read book of the same name, The Mom Test is a simple framework for customer conversations that prevents you from getting biased, useless feedback. It's a method for asking questions that even your mom can't lie to you about.
The core principle is this: stop talking about your idea and start asking about their life.
Good feedback isn't about whether people *think* your idea is good. It's about whether they have a problem that your idea could solve. The goal of early conversations isn't to get a "yes," it's to uncover the truth.
The Three Golden Rules
The Mom Test isn't complicated. It boils down to a few key rules to guide your questions and keep conversations grounded in reality.
1. Talk about their life instead of your idea.
When you ask for an opinion on your idea, you're asking for a prediction or a compliment. Instead, ask about specific experiences they've had in the past.
- Bad Question: "Do you think a smart meal-planning app is a good idea?"
- Good Question: "Tell me about the last time you planned meals for the week. What was the most frustrating part?"
The bad question invites a generic, polite response. The good question uncovers real pain points, workflows, and emotions. You'll learn if meal planning is actually a problem for them, long before you mention your app.
2. Ask about specifics in the past, not hypotheticals about the future.
As we explored in our article on behavioural economics, humans are terrible at predicting their own future behaviour. Asking "would you buy this?" is useless. What people *have done* is concrete evidence.
- Bad Question: "Would you pay £20 a month for a service that automates your invoicing?"
- Good Question: "How do you currently handle invoicing? Have you ever paid for a tool to help with it?"
The second question uncovers their current process and, more importantly, whether they've ever valued a solution enough to open their wallet. Past purchasing behaviour is the strongest indicator of future purchasing behaviour.
3. Talk less, listen more.
Your natural instinct is to get excited and start pitching. Resist this urge at all costs. When you pitch, you're leading the witness and signalling the answers you want to hear. Your job is not to convince; your job is to learn.
Think of yourself as a detective. Ask short, open-ended questions like "How do you solve this now?" or "What else have you tried?" Then, be quiet and let them fill the silence. The most valuable insights often come when people have space to talk freely about their problems.
How Qurate Helps You Master The Mom Test
Knowing the rules is one thing, but applying them consistently when you're passionate about your idea is another. It's easy to slip back into pitching or asking leading questions. This is precisely why we built Qurate.
Our platform is founded on the principles of The Mom Test and behavioural science. We guide you through the validation process, providing structured frameworks and question banks designed to steer you away from compliments and towards concrete evidence. Qurate helps you focus on your customer's problems, not their opinions of your solution.
We help you translate vague conversations into actionable data, so you can confidently decide whether to pivot, persevere, or pull the plug before wasting valuable time and resources.
Your mom means well, but her compliments won't fund your business. The truth will. Ready to move beyond guesswork and build a business on a foundation of real customer problems? Start validating the right way with Qurate.