21–30 of 88 posts
Clickbait, deceptive title. What the author means is ‘get real about continuous learning’ Of course it takes money to run experiments you can actually learn from, and the article is bereft of practical advice about doing this on the cheap. However, I clicked. But you don’t have to.
Correction: It's anathema for VC-funded startups whose backers need one or two to succeed to unicorn size to recoup their losses from the other 98 attempts. For self-funded or privately/bank financed startups, it's fine to stay low profile and grow slowly, as long as the investors get their money back and everyone gets paid fairly. You may not end up a billionaire, but hell, even a small trades shop can reasonably be worth a million dollars or two after a few decades.
It's after all how the many, many "hidden champions" of Germany's Mittelstand got to where they are: start small, focus on extremely high quality products/services, and dominate entire markets even though no one but experts of their respective fields have even heard of them. And that model working out isn't restricted to Germany either... Japanese YKK zippers are the best example there [1].
A side note: if you don't have VCs or, worse, the vipers of the public stock market breathing down your neck, you have so much more freedom as a founder. You can do what's best for the company long term.
[1] https://slate.com/business/2012/04/ykk-zippers-why-so-many-d...
I worked in a SaaS company selling an A/B Testing app where I saw a lot of tests and their outcomes from different clients. Of course there are the low hanging fruits, which scored the clear success. Most of the tests although were not a clear success, but just a slightly better conversion rate. Multiple tests applied after each other slowly increased the overall value. If taken the advice not to implement the change…
After all, pretty much all of writing, music, product design, prototyping, etc. is iterative. It's a purely investor mindset that would have you think that small optimizations do not pay back. Having that mindset in creating something is a great way to give up after one draft of a good idea.
Clickbait, deceptive title. What the author means is ‘get real about continuous learning’ Of course it takes money to run experiments you can actually learn from, and the article is bereft of practical advice about doing this on the cheap. However, I clicked. But you don’t have to.
Clickbait, deceptive title. What the author means is ‘get real about continuous learning’ Of course it takes money to run experiments you can actually learn from, and the article is bereft of practical advice about doing this on the cheap. However, I clicked. But you don’t have to.
Did you read the article? Running experiments means you need to have a null hypothesis - and in a sales conversion experiment, for example, the null should be calibrated to ensure your conversions are scalable wins and not just one-offs.
Having a corporate job is usually a 'mediocre success'. If you strike out on your own with something that involves your passion and you earn a comparable income, you are a stellar success. Don't let a nepo baby tell you otherwise.
> That’s the danger of the mediocre success. The point of startup experimentation isn't the success itself; it’s the learning that comes with clear-cut success or failure. You don't really care about the sales revenue generated by your first two reps; you care about whether this is a strategy you can scale to dozens and then hundreds of reps, or whether you need to use a completely different strategy. It’s all about the learning. And mediocre successes don’t give you any learning.