If you're building with agents, your biggest blind spot isn't the model — it's the customer conversation you think went well but didn't. Fix that before you automate anything.
Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test starts from an uncomfortable premise: people will lie to your face not out of malice but out of politeness, and most founders design conversations that make lying easy. The remedy is to stop asking whether someone would use your thing and start asking about their actual life — what they tried last month, what it cost them when it failed, what they did instead. Compliments feel good and mean nothing. Money changing hands, or a calendar invite, means something.
The problem compounds when your product is an agent. Users will enthusiastically tell you they'd trust an AI to handle their inbox or their vendor contracts, right up until the moment it matters and they don't. The real signal is what they've already tolerated paying a human to do badly, or what they've duct-taped together themselves at 11pm. That's the workflow your agent should eat first. Enthusiasm in a demo is noise; a story about a recurring painful Tuesday is data you can actually build on.
- Ask about the last time something broke, not whether your solution sounds useful
- commitment — time, money, a real next step — is the only honest answer a user can give you
- the workflows already being done badly by humans are your clearest roadmap.
