
The Mom Test Summary & Review: Ask About Their Life, Not Your Idea
The Mom Test summary: stop asking if they like your idea. Ask about their life, collect past-tense facts, and only trust time,…
Read Summary →"The founder who taught operators to stop asking if the idea is good."
Rob Fitzpatrick is a founder and teacher of customer conversations. After watching early-stage teams collect compliments instead of facts, he wrote The Mom Test (2013) as a short field manual: ask about their life, not your idea. He later taught the method in founder workshops and wrote Write Useful Books.
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work

The Mom Test summary: stop asking if they like your idea. Ask about their life, collect past-tense facts, and only trust time,…
Read Summary →Ask what they already do. Do not ask if they like your idea.
Time, reputation, or cash. Everything else is noise.
"You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea."— The Mom Test
"It's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it."— The Mom Test

The Mom Test summary: stop asking if they like your idea. Ask about their life, collect past-tense facts, and only trust time, reputation, or cash.