Concept
Secrets
A secret, in Thiel's sense, is an important truth about the world that is hard to see, that few people know, and that you are positioned to discover; valuable companies are built on one, and a startup without one is a copy.
Thiel divides secrets into two kinds. Secrets of nature are found by science and engineering, and they are rare. Secrets about people are things people do not know about themselves or do not want known: how a market really behaves, what job customers actually hire a product to do, what they would truly pay. Most startup secrets are the second kind, and they hide in plain sight because looking for them is uncomfortable. They live in the annoying customer whose complaint everyone dismisses, the industry nobody ambitious wants to work in, and the problem experts have declared unsolvable. Thiel's advice on what to do with a secret is as important as finding it: tell it only to the people you need to build the company, because a secret told to everyone stops being an advantage. The Mom Test is how you check that a secret is real rather than a founder's wish.
A real-life example
Everyone in Turkish e-commerce knew that returns were a cost of doing business. A small team in Istanbul noticed that a handful of sellers had almost no returns because they photographed every product on a real person of average size. That was the secret: buyers returned clothes because they could not judge fit, not because they changed their minds. The company built on that observation sold sizing photography, not software, for its first year.
How to use it
- 1Look for secrets about people in the unglamorous places: the customer everyone finds annoying, the industry nobody wants, the problem the experts gave up on.
- 2Write the secret as a sentence about how customers actually behave, then check it against their past with Mom Test questions.
- 3Tell the secret to the people you need, and no one else. A secret in a pitch deck sent to fifty investors is a press release.