The Mom Test Filter
Talk about their life, not your idea. Ask about past behavior, not hypothetical futures. Look for commitments, not compliments. The diagnostic: did they give up something real?
The most expensive form of validation is the one that returns false positives. When you ask a customer "would you use this?" you have not validated anything — you have collected a polite lie. The Mom Test is the rule that fixes this: talk about their life, not your idea. Ask about specific past behavior, not hypothetical future behavior. Look for commitments, not compliments.
The diagnostic question for any customer conversation: at the end, did the person give up something real — time, a referral, a deposit, a calendar slot? If yes, you have signal. If they only gave encouragement, you have noise.
The 42% of startups that fail because they built something nobody wanted didn't fail at execution. They executed flawlessly on a corrupted signal source.