Built on the note-taking system from The Mom Test

Your customers already told you what to build. It's buried in your call notes.

MomBoard turns raw interview transcripts into tagged, searchable evidence — pains, workarounds, budgets, commitments. And it grades you on how well you interviewed.

Get started — self-hosted & free See a tagged conversation
Open source · runs on your machine · your transcripts never leave it
You

How do you handle infringing listings today — what happened the last time you found one?

Jane

Every Monday I export everything to Excel and clean it up by hand — it's half my Monday, every Monday.

➡️ workaround⚡ pain
Jane

Honestly, I'd totally use something like what you're describing!

🎈 compliment · zero signal
Jane

I'll set up a session with our legal team next week and share our takedown log.

🤝 commitment☆ follow-up
8/10 Interview critique: asked about the past, pushed for commitment. One slip: pitched before the ask.

The customer interview graveyard

You do the calls. Then the evidence goes somewhere to die.

📊 The spreadsheet

One row per call, a link to a doc nobody reopens. Six months of interviews you can't search, compare, or trust.

🧠 The highlight reel in your head

You remember the quotes that flattered your idea and forget the ones that didn't. Your product decisions inherit that bias.

🎈 The compliment trap

"I'd totally use this!" feels like validation. It's noise. What people already do, pay for, and commit to — that's signal, and your notes give it no structure.

You read The Mom Test. Your note-taking didn't.

Three steps, no ceremony

From messy transcript to interrogatable evidence in the time it takes to get coffee.

1

Drop in a transcript

Paste it, upload a .txt or .vtt, or (soon) pull straight from Google Meet. Metadata takes ten seconds.

2

Signals tagged, you in charge

Verbatim quotes get annotated with the Mom Test taxonomy. Every tag is a suggestion you accept or reject with one key. Nothing enters your evidence unreviewed.

3

Interrogate your history

Filter every quote by tag, company, date. Synthesize themes across calls. Watch hypotheses accumulate evidence — or die.

pain🧱 obstacle ➡️ workaround · past behavior, the gold 💰 money🤝 commitment 👤 introfollow-up 🎈 compliment · tagged so you stop counting it
The signal system from the back of the book — as a database, not a memory.

Three things nothing else does

Most note-taking tools help you file. These features help you get better.

It grades the interviewer

Every call gets a Mom Test critique: did you ask about the past or pitch the future? Did you fish for compliments?

Score 3/10 on your first call, 8/10 by your tenth.

Compliments count against you

Other tools summarize "positive feedback." MomBoard tracks your compliment ratio and celebrates when it drops.

Flattery is noise. Behavior is signal.

Hypotheses, not folders

State a falsifiable belief. Every new conversation attaches evidence for or against it automatically.

Decisions point at a meter, not a vibe.

Your customers' words never leave your machine

Interview transcripts are the most sensitive documents a founder owns. Treat them that way.

Self-hosted, open source

One SQLite file, no infrastructure. Postgres when you grow. Open source on GitHub.

Fully offline with local models

Point it at Ollama and a Qwen MoE model — a 32GB-RAM machine runs the whole pipeline. Zero API calls, zero per-token costs.

Or bring an API key

Use OpenAI for maximum tagging quality — or mix both, per pipeline stage. Your call, per agent, one env line.

We track commitments, not compliments

So here's our scoreboard, the same way we'd make you keep yours.

★ 0
stars
🤝 0
real deployments
🎈 0
compliments (worthless, but flattering)
Launched August 2026. Numbers update weekly. Yes, even if they're embarrassing.

The five real questions

Everything else is in the README.

Is my data used to train anything?

No. Self-hosted, your database, your models if you want. There is no telemetry — the footer of this site is the whole privacy policy.

Do I need a GPU?

No. A CPU with 32GB of RAM runs a local MoE model comfortably. Tagging happens as a background job, so speed genuinely doesn't matter — quality does.

What if the AI tags something wrong?

Everything lands as a suggestion until you accept it. Review is keyboard-first — j/k to move, a to accept, x to reject — and takes about a minute per call.

Is this affiliated with The Mom Test or Rob Fitzpatrick?

No. It's inspired by the note-taking system at the back of the book, with attribution and admiration. Buy the book. Seriously.

What does it cost?

The software is free and open source. You pay your own LLM costs — or nothing, running locally. A hosted version may come later; if you'd commit to that, tell us. That's a 🤝, and we count those.