TLDR: read The Mom Test and Deploy Empathy.

Oh, you’re still here? Ok, I’ll give you more.

Talking to past, present, and potential customers will help you understand their problems and confirm if your solution will work for them.

The Mom Test

The Mom Test talks about how we should talk to customers. The name comes from the truly terrible validation question “Mom, my idea is 𝒙. Is it good?” Don’t ask this!

Your mom will always say yes. You will learn nothing useful at best, and be led down a wrong path at worse.

This book talks about the questions you should be asking so you can have productive conversations.

Deploy Empathy

Deploy Empathy takes the same concept and applies it to the entire conversation: what to say, how to say it, and how to structure the entire narrative of the conversation.

Deploy Empathy is full of scripts for a ton of standard issues you will run into. I keep this book very close any time I am updating content for my brand.

So What’s the Point?

Simple. Get out of your head, and get into your customer’s head.

Many early-stage SaaSs die because they don’t do this! This is the key activity that will get you your first customers.