• The advice that you “should talk to customers” is well-intentioned, but ultimately a bit unhelpful. It’s like the popular kid advising his nerdy friend to “just be cooler.” You still have to know how to actually do it.

• It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.

• With an idea this vague, we can’t answer any of the difficult questions like which recipes to include or how people will hear about it. Until we get specific, it always seems like a good idea.

• The point is a bit more subtle than this. Eventually you do need to mention what you’re building and take people’s money for it. However, the big mistake is almost always to mention your idea too soon rather than too late.

• The Mom Test: Talk about their life instead of your idea Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future Talk less and listen more

• "Do you think it's a good idea?" Awful question! Here’s the thing: only the market can tell if your idea is good. Everything else is just opinion.

• Rule of thumb: You're shooting blind until you understand their goals.

• I once had someone keep describing the workflow we were fixing with emotionally loaded terms like “DISASTER”, accompanied by much yelling and arm waving. But when I asked him what the implications were, he sort of shrugged and said “Oh, we just ended up throwing a bunch of interns at the problem—it’s actually working pretty well.”

• Rule of thumb: Some problems don’t actually matter.

• “Did you google around for any other ways to solve it?” He seemed a little bit like he’d been caught stealing from the cookie jar and said, “No… I didn’t really think to. It’s something I’m used to dealing with, you know?” In the abstract, it’s something he would “definitely” pay to solve. Once we got specific, he didn't even care enough to search for a solution (which do exist, incidentally).

• Rule of thumb: People stop lying when you ask them for money.

• Rule of thumb: People want to help you. Give them an excuse to do so.

• You’ll notice that none of the good questions were about asking what you should build. One of the recurring “criticisms” about talking to customers is that you’re abdicating your creative vision and building your product by committee. Given that people don’t know what they want, that wouldn’t be a terribly effective approach. Deciding what to build is your job.

• The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution.

• It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

• Did you notice that in the conversations above, practically every response contains a sneaky compliment? They are pervasive, constantly trying to trick us into thinking the meeting “went well”.

• “Everybody I’ve talked to loves the idea.” All of these are warning signs. If you catch yourself or your teammates saying something like this, try to get specific. Why did that person like the idea? How much money would it save him? How would it fit into his life? What else has he tried? If you don’t know, then you’ve got a compliment instead of real data.

• While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

• By switching into pitch mode, we just wasted a perfectly good opportunity for learning and instead got a fistful of fluff. Let’s try again.

• Rule of thumb: Anyone will say your idea is great if you’re annoying enough about it.

• After you introduce your idea (either intentionally or accidentally), they’re going to begin a sentence with something like “So it’s similar to…” or “I like it but…” You will be hugely tempted to interrupt and “fix” their understanding. Alternately, they’ll raise a topic you have a really good answer to. For example, they’ll mention how important security is, and you’ll want to cut in and tell them you’ve thought about all that already. Both interruptions are mistakes. In each case, the customer was about to give you a privileged glimpse into their mental model of the world. Losing that learning is a shame. You’ll have the chance to fill them in later. Plus, it’s annoying to people if they start trying to help you and you cut them off to correct them.

• Rule of thumb: The more you’re talking, the worse you’re doing.

• Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.

• There’s no easy solution to making yourself face and ask these questions. I once heard the general life advice that, for unpleasant tasks, you should imagine what you would have someone else do if you were delegating it. Then do that. And remember, you’re allowed to ask about money. You're a startup. It's okay.

• Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.

• I blog because it’s fun, not because it pays my rent.

• Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? Customer/market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them?

• The most precious resource in a startup is its founders’ time. You have to put yourself where you matter most, and I wasn’t finding early customer meetings to be that place.

• Rule of thumb: Give as little information as possible about your idea while still nudging the discussion in a useful direction.

• I never consider rejection to be a real failure. But not asking certainly is. This can happen because you’re avoiding the scary question or because you haven’t figured out what the next steps should be.

• "When can you come back to talk to the rest of the team?" Good meeting. Bingo! If you are selling anything to companies, you’re going to have to talk to multiple people. If they won’t introduce you, then it’s a safe bet you’re at a dead end. Enterprise sales is tedious, but one of the perks is that you can get really accurate signals like this one quite early in the process. Building consumer products is a lot murkier since the customer conversation process doesn’t mimic the purchase process as much.

• It’s pretty weird that anybody buys anything from young startups. In all likelihood, before the year is up, you’re going to either go out of business, abandon the product, or sell the company. And even if you stay the course, there’s no guarantee you can actually do what you say you can do. First customers are crazy. Crazy in a good way. They really, really want what you’re making. They want it so badly that they’re willing to be the crazy person who tries it first.

• Secondly, whenever you see the deep emotion, do your utmost to keep that person close. They are the rare, precious fan who will get you through the hard times and give you your first sale.

• Rule of thumb: In early stage sales, the real goal is learning. Revenue is a side-effect.

• What does it mean if you reach out to 100 people and 98 of them hang up on you? Well, nothing, except that people don’t like getting cold calls. No surprise there.

• Rule of thumb: If it’s not a formal meeting, you don’t need to make excuses about why you’re there or even mention that you’re starting a business. Just ask about their life.

• If you’re really desperate, you can always be “writing a book” and hoping to interview them.

• Rule of thumb: Kevin Bacon’s 7 degrees of separation applies to customer conversations. You can find anyone you need if you ask for it a couple times.

• Professors are a goldmine for intros.

• People like to help entrepreneurs. But they also hate wasting their time. An opening like this tells them that you know what you need and that they’ll be able to make a real difference.

• But remember, the point of cold calls is to stop having them. If you’re banging your head against the wall trying to get people to answer your cold emails, then you’re probably taking the hard road. Spend your energy finding clever ways to generate warm intros instead. You’ll have a much easier time.

• Rule of thumb: Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff.

• They say that startups don’t starve, they drown. You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas; you have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything. When it comes to getting above water and making faster progress, good customer segmentation is your best friend.

• When we look at the big successes, they seem to serve the whole world. Google lets anyone find anything. Paypal helps anyone send money anywhere. Evernote backs up all the writing of everybody. But they didn’t start there. If you start too generic, everything is watered down. Your marketing message is generic. You suffer feature creep. In their early days, Google helped PhD students find obscure bits of code. Paypal helped collectors buy and sell Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies more efficiently. Evernote helped moms save and share recipes.

• Before we can serve everyone, we have to serve someone.

• Remind yourself that you’ll get to the whole world eventually. But you’ve got to start somewhere specific.