What I Learned from "The Mom Test" - Chapter 7: Choosing Your Customers

A developer's guide to why talking to "everyone" is the fastest way to learn nothing There's a saying in the startup world: 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 and make progress on nothing. Chapter 7 is about the antidote: customer segmentation. Choosing who to focus on so you can actually learn something useful instead of drowning in mixed signals. Outline In this post, I'll break down Chapter 7 into the following sections: Segmentation: Why Starting Broad Kills You — How Google, Paypal, and Evernote all started narrow, and why you should too. Babies or Body Builders? — A real-world example of what happens when you try to serve everyone with one product. Big Brands or Mom & Pop? — Fitzpatrick's own painful lesson of choosing a customer segment that was way too broad. But What Does It Mean? — Why "students" or "advertisers" aren't real customer segm