The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.

Learn how to:

• Scope your book into the world's best solution for a certain type of reader
• Test, improve, & iterate your ToC without needing to rewrite anything
• Design a engaging reader experience that makes your book a delight to read
• Discover the hidden analytics of boredom & confusion to identify book-killing problems & make the most of beta readers
• Treat marketing as a temporary activity instead of an ongoing obligation by designing a strong recommendation loop
• Evaluate which of the four seed marketing options are best-suited for your goals, constraints, & skills
• Write a book that endures & grows for years instead of fading into swift obscurity
• Boost long-term growth by optimizing your pricing, platforms, & purchase funnel

Writing a nonfiction book is a wonderful project, allowing you to preserve & share the most important things you've ever learned. Plus, a successful book will improve your reputation, your career, your earnings, & the lives of your readers.

Up until fairly recently, it was possible to receive at least some of these benefits by writing any book, regardless of its quality. But today, a million new titles are published per year and it's no longer enough to simply join the pile. Instead, you must create something that is able to stand out & succeed. And the most reliable path toward that goal - especially for an unproven author who lacks a pre-existing audience - is to write a book so startlingly useful that readers can't stop talking about it.

This guide proposes a different way of planning, writing, & refining nonfiction, drawn from the hard-won lessons of product designers & entrepreneurs. Applied properly, it leads to books that can grow organically via reader recommendations for many years, without relying on either heavy marketing or a large author platform.

The preconceptions about writing a book are so deeply entrenched that most authors don't even ask themselves whether a better way exists. Which is crazy, because the normal approach doesn't work! For example:

• The average NYT nonfiction bestseller loses 95% of its peak sales within a year
• 70% of traditionally published titles fail to pay out a single dollar in royalties
• Vanishingly few nonfiction books sell even 500 copies

These are not good results, but it doesn't have to be this way.

By following a more modern approach, my first two books (2013 & 2019) now do more than $150k/year in royalties (and growing). You can do it too. It's not easy, but it is reliable & repeatable. And in the normally hit-driven, feast-or-famine world of writing, there's something to be said for reliability.

This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. If you want to write a mediocre book the easy way, then you probably want to look elsewhere.

This isn't about prose or creativity. I'm assuming that you know how to write a coherent sentence and are able to do the work. Instead, this guide is about understanding how to design, test, and refine nonfiction that succeeds as a long-lasting, high-impact, and recommendable product.

This isn't a self-publishing guide. The approach in this book applies equally well to both self-published & traditionally published authors. Our focus is on creating the most useful, and most recommendable book possible.

Still not sure?

Head on over to writeusefulbooks.com to find more resources, samples, and information.