Testing Hypothesis

Every business is a stack of assumptions. Most founders test the easiest ones instead of the riskiest ones. This page is about flipping that.

The loop

1. List your assumptions — about the customer, the problem, the price and the channel.
2. Rank them by “if this is wrong, does the whole thing fall over?”
3. Turn the top one into a prediction you could prove wrong.
4. Run the cheapest test that would prove it wrong.
5. Look at the result honestly and change your mind.

Cheap tests

• Five customer interviews asking about the past.
• A landing page with a real “buy” button and no product behind it.
• A pre-sale or a letter of intent.
• A concierge run for one customer.

The hard part

It is not designing the experiment. It is accepting the answer when it disagrees with the thing you are excited about. Bring that tension to a meetup — someone in the room has already paid for that lesson.

Go deeper

• The Lean Startup (book) — the source of these ideas

Take the next step

Reading is cheap; doing one small thing and talking it through with someone is what moves it forward. Come to a meetup and bring whatever you are stuck on. No pitch, no sign-up, no sales — peers over beers.