Rob Fitzpatrick

Rob Fitzpatrick is an entrepreneur and author best known for The Mom Test, a short handbook on how to talk to customers and learn whether a business idea is any good when everyone is too polite to say so. Published in 2013, it has sold more than 300,000 copies and is used in courses at universities such as Harvard, MIT and UCL and as training material at companies including Shopify.

A programmer by training, he dropped out of grad school in 2007 to go through Y Combinator with his first startup, which raised money from well-known investors and landed big customers before quietly shutting down in its fourth year. That experience, and being forced to learn enterprise sales as an introverted techie, shaped the customer-development approach he later wrote about. He also helped build the education agency Founder Centric to just under $1M a year, Kickstarted a card game and spent a couple of years restoring a sailboat.

Since then he has deliberately chosen smaller projects with one or two friends over chasing scale, and reports reaching financial independence through passive income at 32. He co-wrote The Workshop Survival Guide and in 2021 published Write Useful Books, which applies product design thinking to nonfiction. He shares his numbers openly: The Mom Test had earned around $600K in royalties by early 2022, and Write Useful Books made about $49K in its first six months including a paid community.

Now settled in the mountains of Catalonia, he is writing a second edition of The Mom Test and building Help This Book, beta-reading software for indie authors, with longtime collaborator Devin Hunt.