One thing I did this past week was share that I’m starting a blog in a community I’m part of, alongside other people who are also building products. Within that same group, someone soon showed up who matched my ICP, and it was the perfect opportunity to start the practical validation stage through interviews.

The interview, in fact, isn’t a typical one where you fire off questions and the interviewee just answers. Following the principles of The Mom Test, the goal isn’t to ask whether someone would like an app to solve the problem, that actually doesn’t help at all, because people usually say yes so they don’t leave you feeling discouraged about your project. What we really need to do at this stage is understand the person’s problem, how they handle it today, and whether they’ve tried something before. With that in mind, I put together a simple script to use as a guide, not to read aloud while the person responds:

• Profile: (couple? solo? how many pets? puppy/adult?)
• Daily routine: (what does day-to-day life with the pet look like?)
• Do you split responsibilities with someone? How do you coordinate today?
• Current tools: (WhatsApp, conversation, calendar)
• Have you tried to solve this before? What? Why did you stop?

With that in mind, I ran a few interviews and documented everything. From there, I could categorize the most mentioned points, extract patterns, and define the ICP, the job to be done, and the MVP with precision.

Unlike what I expected, each conversation was very unique, pet owners have very different routines from one another. But the big pattern was: nobody feels this pain strongly enough to need a new solution. Everyone I interviewed said they can handle it with what they already have today, through conversation, calendar reminders, and that works well enough for them.

And this isn’t a defeat, quite the opposite. Imagine if I had built the entire product, invested work hours, and only then discovered that nobody would use it lol (just like before 😅). The Mom Test exists exactly to prevent that kind of thing. If people solve the problem with what they already have, there’s no real pain to convince them to adopt a new solution.

Now I have two options: pivot within the pet niche, looking at whether any other common pain came up in the interviews that’s worth exploring, or search for a new problem from scratch and start the process all over again. Spoiler: I already have a new direction in mind, I’ll share it in next week’s post 😜