The early founder’s dilemma

Michael E. Gerber wrote in his much-acclaimed book E-Myth about the so-called “fatal assumption” that people transition from employee to founder often make- thinking that since they have a deep understanding of the technical parts of the business they work within, they should/must be able to run the business themselves, if only they had the freedom to. Of course, it’s called a fatal assumption for a reason, as there are many non-technical aspects involved in making any business succeed.

The most commonly understood one, perhaps, being customer research. How many times have we heard stories of people who had a brilliant “billion dollar idea” who then went on to purposefully keep it to themself- building in secrecy for fear that their idea would be stolen, or those who went on to talk to a few potential customers and then build, equally unexposed to customer feedback, for months, perhaps years. This, I’ve learned, is often the exact wrong way to go about building a business.

Now that we’ve accepted that customer feedback is essential, the question becomes “how does one effectively conduct and implement its learnings?”

The Mom Test

Here comes into play one of my favorite (hand)books, the Mom test (https://www.momtestbook.com/) - which is all about how to validate your idea while talking to customers.

You might be thinking “do we really we need an entire book on how to talk to customers?” Yes, yes we certainly do.

Take the author of the book as a prototypical example- he mentioned in an interview that he spent more than 2 years building the wrong product because he incorrectly talked to customers.

Let’s do a quick quiz -which of the following questions do you think are good questions to ask while talking to customers?

1. Could you take me through the last time that problem happened?
2. How much would you pay for my solution?
3. Do you think my idea’s a good idea?

things you can do with this

If you’re anything like me, you’d love to learn this for no reason- but it’s good to know what skills you can expect to learn with this content.

With the material in these pages you should be able to

• Validate your next startup or feature idea
• Find customers to sell to
• Realize you’ve been doing customer research wrong this whole time!

the content

Most of the content here for now is directly inspired by Mom Test, which is a pretty short book so I won’t spend too much time waxing philosophical about it. The following is the content’s organization

Toc

1. Main main content- will divide later on
2. Mechanics the nitty-gritty of where/how for those that want more specific deatils

1. Main main content- will divide later on
2. Mechanics the nitty-gritty of where/how for those that want more specific deatils