Book 143 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: You Can’t Mom Test Art!

Book – The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea by Rob Fitzpatrick

Book Description: The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both customer development and lean startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong, and how you can do better.

Reflection:

The Mom Test is a fantastic practical how to guide for conducting customer interviews to validate an idea and whether or not it can solve an actual business / personal problem that people would be willing to pay.

The problem for me these days is that I DON’T CARE ANYMORE!

I read this book early on in this journey at the request of a potential business partner when we were deciding if we wanted to revive a past idea I had before I had met Emilia and turn it into a business. At this stage of my year of magical learning journey, I was just beginning to emerge from the rubble of my life, and I was ready to begin re-engaging with the world. My head was filled with all new kinds of ideas, questions, beginning to understand my values, and slowly beginning to feel my purpose emerge inside of me that I now know as living a life for 2 in Emilia’s honor.

I knew that my paradigms on life had changed from what Emilia, myself, and my family had gone through…I just didn’t know how to bring that new perspective back into the world I had previously inhabited.

So I went back to what I knew and that is the business world. My intention this time was to find a business partner to help me turn my new paradigms on living a purpose driven life filled with values into something beautiful that we could manifest into this world. I didn’t care specifically what we did, rather why we did it.

Unfortunately, the first person I met that seemed like they may be a great match to bring this vision into the world…turned out not to be. He was focused on the traditional what we were trying to produce only which is why we decided to read this book together. If you want to validate an idea and determine if it will make money or not, check out this book. That wasn’t my goal and our relationship didn’t work out. That is okay! He was a great person and we are still friends, but he just didn’t see what I was seeing.

About a week later, the universe connected me with a guy named Trieu.

Trieu got what I was trying to say immediately, and we instantly connected on trying to build something together based on values, purpose, meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Over the past 20 months, that has slowly blossomed and grew into what we are now calling ClubAny and we’ve been having a blast ever since the first day we met.

If we were to “Mom Test” ClubAny…it would fail in spectacular fashion.

That is kind of the point.

You only “Mom Test” something when you are trying to make sure it fits in with current paradigms of what others value. What you care about is irrelevant in the Mom Test. The goal is to bring an idea into this world and then figure out whether enough people would be willing to pay money to acquire it that would justify the time put into the solution. It is so impersonal and transactional.

ClubAny, on the other hand, IS 100% personal. ClubAny is about breaking free from the traditional business world only focused on money and growth to create a whole new paradigm focused on unlocking personal values. ClubAny is about helping to turn what an individual values into meaningful work and to build meaningful relationships that aligns to what you say is most important in your world.

ClubAny is the exact opposite of the Mom Test, and I couldn’t be happier with the results.

Question: What would happen if you stopped focusing on unlocking value for others and began to focus on unlocking value for yourself?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea by Rob Fitzpatrick