Glossary

7 degrees of bacon — Everyone knows someone who knows your target customer, so ask everyone, more than once (Ch 6)

Advancement — The customer moves to the next step of your real-world funnel and gets closer to purchasing (Ch 5)

Advisory flip — Going into meetings looking for industry and customer advisors rather than customers, which removes neediness and puts you in control (Ch 6)

Anchoring fluff — Turning generic, future, or hypothetical statements into specific past events by asking when it last happened and to talk you through it (Ch 2)

Bringing them to you — Organising meetups, teaching, or blogging so that customers seek you out (Ch 6)

Commitment — The customer shows they’re serious by giving up something they value, such as time, reputation, or money (Ch 5)

Complainer — Someone who grumbles about a problem but has never looked for a solution, so won’t buy yours (Ch 2)

Compliment — Praise for you or your idea. It costs the speaker nothing, so it carries no data (Ch 2, Ch 5)

Currencies of conversation — Time, reputation risk, and cash: the things a customer can give up to show commitment (Ch 5)

Customer conversation — Lowercase term for talking to customers and learning from them, as distinct from the full Customer Development methodology (Ch 1)

Customer/market risk — Do they want it? Will they pay me? Are there lots of them? (Ch 3)

Customer Slicing — Repeatedly asking who within a segment wants the product most, and why, until you reach a findable group (Ch 7)

Deflecting compliments — Ignoring praise and redirecting to their current behaviour (“How are you dealing with this now?”) (Ch 2)

Digging — Asking about the motivation behind a feature request, idea, or strong emotion (Ch 2)

Does-this-problem-matter questions — Cost and value questions that show whether a problem is a must-solve or a nice-to-have (Ch 3)

Earlyvangelist — Steve Blank’s term for an early customer who has the problem, knows it, has budget, and has already built a makeshift solution (Ch 5)

Elephant (gaze upon the) — Facing the critical risk you’ve been avoiding instead of studying only the most interesting failure point (Ch 3)

Facts — Concrete, specific information about what customers do and why; the first result of a good meeting (Ch 9)

Failure points — The separate conditions that must all hold for the business to work (Ch 1, Ch 3)

False negative / false positive — Wrongly concluding that an idea is dead, or wrongly concluding that it works. False positives are more dangerous (Ch 2)

Fishing for compliments — Deliberately seeking approval for a decision you’ve already made (Ch 2)

Fluff — Generic claims (“I usually”), future promises (“I would”), and hypothetical maybes (“I might”) (Ch 2)

Going through the motions — Holding conversations without knowing what you’re trying to learn (Ch 8)

Hack it — Skipping a planned process with one direct action, like cutting the Gordian Knot (Ch 9)

Keeping it casual — Holding early problem conversations as quick chats rather than scheduled meetings (Ch 4)

Learning bottleneck — Customer learning that stays in one person’s head, so “the customer said so” settles every argument (Ch 8)

List of 3 — The three most important things you want to learn from a given type of person right now (Ch 3, Ch 8)

Love bad news — Treating negative or lukewarm answers as valuable learning rather than failure (Ch 3)

Meeting Anti-Pattern — The tendency to put every chance for a customer conversation into a calendar block (Ch 4)

The Mom Test — Three rules: 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 (Ch 1)

Painkiller vs vitamin — A must-solve-right-now problem vs a nice-to-have (Ch 3)

Pathos Problem — Accidental approval-seeking. You expose your ego, so people protect your feelings with nice words (Ch 2)

Pedestal — The part of a meeting request that shows why this person in particular can help (Ch 6)

Pitch mode — Talking about your idea instead of learning about their problems. Fix it by apologizing and returning to their story (Ch 2)

Premature zoom — Asking detailed questions about a problem before confirming the person cares about the area (Ch 3)

Price anchor — What the customer pays now for a workaround, which sets the range of value you compete in (Ch 1)

Product risk — Can I build it? Can I grow it? (Ch 3)

Signal symbols — The author’s note shorthand for emotions, pains, goals, obstacles, workarounds, context, requests, money, people, and follow-ups (Ch 8)

Stalling tactic — A polite postponement, such as “Let me know when it launches.” It means “Don’t call me, I’ll call you” (Ch 2, Ch 5)

VFWPA — Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask, remembered as “Very Few Wizards Properly Ask [for help]”; a format for requesting meetings (Ch 6)

Warm intro — An introduction through a mutual contact that establishes your credibility and purpose (Ch 6)

Who-where pair — A customer segment defined together with the place where you can find its members (Ch 7)

Zombie lead — A prospect who keeps meeting you and saying nice things but never buys (Ch 5)