M
Michael Ashley
· LinkedIn
Founder at Radi8 // Executive Coach // Host of the Inspiring Founders Podcast
I've been running founder peer groups for years. One thing I see constantly: founders who've done customer interviews but still don't know if their idea is viable.
It's not because they skipped the research. It's because they asked the wrong questions.
There's a difference between asking "Would you pay for this?" and asking "Walk me through the last time you dealt with this problem. What did you do?"
The first question gets a guess. The second gets a story. Stories are what you can actually build on.
This is the whole premise of The Mom Test — a book I recommend to every founder I work with. But even founders who've read it revert to opinion-seeking questions the moment they're in a real conversation.
So I built MomTestQuestions.com. You put in your product and your target customer. It generates a set of behavior-based interview questions you can use in your next discovery call.
Free. No account needed.
If you're still trying to figure out whether you're building something people actually need — this is a good place to start.
DM me if you want to talk through what you're hearing in your interviews. Happy to help you make sense of it.
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Told 4 times, Jun 4, 2026 – Jun 18, 2026
· X · Open
The most expensive sentence in startups:
"My customers said they'd use it."
People are terrible predictors of future behavior.
Stop asking what they'll do.
Start asking what they've already done.
That's where product-market fit lives.
#startups #customerdiscovery
· LinkedIn · Open
Your customers won't save your bad idea.
But they will help you make better decisions if you learn how to listen.
Most founders go into discovery calls hoping for validation. They ask leading questions. They get encouraging answers. They build. Then they discover nobody wanted the solution badly enough to change behavior.
What looks like a marketing problem later often starts as a customer understanding problem earlier.
The fix is learning to ask about behavior, not intent.
Not "would you buy this?"
But "what have you already tried?"
Not "does this sound useful?"
But "what is this costing you today?"
The most expensive assumption you've ever made about your customers is probably still shaping decisions somewhere in your business.
What's the most expensive assumption you've ever made about your customers?
· LinkedIn · Open
The most common mistake I see in customer discovery isn't talking to too few people.
It's asking questions that confirm what you already believe.
"Do you think this would be useful?" is not a customer interview. It's a poll.
And the founders who get stuck are rarely suffering from a marketing problem.
They're suffering from a decision-making problem.
They're making product, positioning, and go-to-market decisions using opinions instead of evidence.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is still the best framework I know for fixing this. Ask questions your mom couldn't lie to you about. Not "would you use this," but "what do you currently do when this problem comes up?"
I put that framework into MomTestQuestions.com because I wanted founders to get to better decisions faster.
What's the most surprising thing a customer has ever told you?