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3 months of mornings bought one Saturday's worth of information. In 2012 I coded before work every day on a product nobody had agreed to buy, then found out the truth in an afternoon at a car dealership. Thirteen years later the same test cost hours instead of months and produced a paying customer before a line of code existed.
Show Notes
3 months of mornings bought one Saturday's worth of information. In 2012 I coded before work every day on a product nobody had agreed to buy, then found out the truth in an afternoon at a car dealership. Thirteen years later the same test cost hours instead of months and produced a paying customer before a line of code existed.
Featuring: Saras Sarasvathy
Brought to you by:
Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities.
HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do.
Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video.
Chapters:
(00:00) A Shanti proverb on testing depth
(00:05) Three months building Shommi before one Saturday's test
(00:45) Long loops make finding out expensive
(00:51) Unilever's nozzle bred across 45 generations
(01:23) Notion docs test HeadsUp on eight founders
(01:42) Google's 12000 split tests a year
(01:55) Sarasvathy's affordable loss rule
Where to find Dru:
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Creators and Guests
What is Dru's Notes?
One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
"No one tests the depth of a river with both feet."
Ashanti Proverb
I wrote code for 3 hours before work each day. It was 2012 and I was building Shommi, a tool that tracked Twitter to find potential customers for businesses. I told myself a working solution would sell itself.
After 3 months I ran out of things to improve. On a Saturday I drove to a strip of car dealerships on the north side of Atlanta and walked into 3 of them. I told them people in their area were tweeting about buying cars.
They were polite and said "interesting."
The most interested person at those 3 dealerships wanted to hire me for Ruby on Rails contract work.
3 months of mornings bought 1 Saturday's worth of information.
Long feedback loops make finding out expensive. Short loops make failure cheap.
Unilever's mathematicians tried to design a detergent nozzle first. Fluid dynamics and phase transition were their specialty.
The nozzle clogged anyway.
Unilever's biologists came at it without the theory. They made 10 variants, kept whichever sprayed 1 or 2 percent better, made 10 variants of that one and ran the loop again.
45 generations later, they had a nozzle shaped unlike anything the mathematicians designed.
449 rejects bought a nozzle that sprayed many times better.
13 years after Shommi, I changed the scale of the test. I paid hours instead of months to test the idea that became HeadsUp. I handcrafted Notion documents laying out what each founder's competitors were doing and sent them to 8 founders.
One offered $300 a quarter before a line of code existed.
Google runs 12,000 split tests a year because each test is cheap to run. In 1 test on 41 shades of blue, a single color shift added $200 million in annual revenue.
Saras Sarasvathy sat 27 expert entrepreneurs down with the same startup problem and had them think out loud. They set what they can afford to lose before they start, then skip forecasting what they might gain. She named it affordable loss.
Size each test so a miss can't finish you.
What test could you shrink until failure is cheap?
Dru: "no h2 in this post... this may have been organized before we had our story pattern. I'm noticing there's a lot of like lists and number of things. It's not that we never do that. But it's that this looks like it's overdone on top of the H2 thing. And then I'm not seeing stories from other domains here either."
Structure density was 41% of body lines against a published median of 10%, with 10 headings in a 44-line body. That is above the p95 of 208 published posts.
- All 10 body headings, the 4-bullet "Why Small Experiments Reduce Risk" list, the 4-item "When Experiments Invite Ruin" list and the three-way gambling / business / experiments list. Each of those claims is now shown by a story instead of asserted.
- The "Courage Over Comfort vs Risk of Ruin" section. Separate idea, and posts/published/micro-failure-vs-macro-failure.md already published the dosage argument.
- Four internal links pointing at dead targets: break-it-down-until-you-can-start, the-heartbeat-between-bottlenecks-and-state and protect-the-golden-goose are all in posts/compost/, and there-are-no-financial-experiments is unpublished.
- The money heuristic. posts/unpublished/there-are-no-financial-experiments.md is a live 89-line draft that argues it at length. It also contradicts personal-dictionary.md:154, which defines an experiment as anything uncertain or uncomfortable and retires the narrower framing as wrong. That draft needs its own pass.
- The decomposition, state and golden-goose heuristics moved to fresh drafts in posts/unpublished/.
"Time is non-renewable" stayed, folded into the Shommi and HeadsUp payoffs rather than stated as a rule.