Coming back home to India, I met my childhood buddy after almost 7-8 years. we were hanging out for a while and then we thought – why not build something together. so we dived right in.
We started validating our assumptions by “doing things that do not scale”.
Then, one day we thought why not start an @instagram page and build a community because this development thing is gonna take a while.
That’s the time when rapid experimentation started and this is something that keeps me fired up all day now.
I sort of created a structure around rapid experimentation and thought – why not share with y’all.
1/ Vision
You would be running directionless if you got no vision as to where you want to reach.
2/ Community
Figure out your target user group, connect with them and validate your assumptions.
3/ Failure
As long as you’re quickly executing and learning fast, your effort is compounding. so don’t worry about failure.
Also once people see you working hard at your thing, they would contribute in one or the other way to help you get there.
4/ Experiments, not Products
Don’t have high expectations from every idea.
This thought process will make you look at ever failure as a learning. Experiments are bound to fail, that’s just the nature of it.
5/ Ethics
As long as you’re ensuring user’s privacy and not hurting anyone in any way, you’re good to experiment with whatever you want.
6/ Document results
You cannot compare your new experiment with your previous one if you got no historical data.
Make a log of everything and do not rely solely on memory. Also, make the process of documenting easier so that it’s easier to keep doing it.
7/ Iterate
Whether things are working or not, keep iterating, keep experimenting.
8/ Accept
If something didn’t work, accept it.
Look at everything objectively. No blame game, analyze and figure out what could have been done better.
9/ Probability
Nothing is black and white, everything is a shade of grey. Think in probabilistic terms.
Read “Thinking in Bets” if you want to dive deeper into this thought process.
*** Yes, there are situations where this belief system doesn’t work.
10/ End game
The end goal is always to find product-market fit.
Is it solving a painpoint and are people actually going to use it? Is it satisfying a strong market demand?
New Product Idea
If you liked it, leave your comments here!
Prashant Bagga 