To build a billion dollars company you have to have a new solution and work on a big problem that is not solved yet, or come up with a better solution on a massive market, or maybe work on developing a new invention that is about to change dramatically how people go about their days or their life’s. Peter Thiel in his book Zero to one mentioned that “ Great companies are one of their kind. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine, and The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t make a social network. If you are copying these Guys you are not learning from them.

Key insights

1. Great companies are based on great products. Revolutionary products that need a lot of passion and experimentation until it succeeded and become a reality.
2. In engineering and business, Experimentation means procedures to test customers response. Build a product, see how it works and how people react to it, then kill it or keep developing it until it’s 10x better than other products or current ones.
3. Never ask how do you think this problem can be solved for you or if my product is good or not. This is your task. Discover through rapid experimentation what is the right solution to meet the need 10x better.
4. You just need a prototype that can give you behavioral feedback. A way that enables you to build fast, and cheap, capture how users behave to it, and see if you can get some sales that will allow you to build the next version of it.

How great companies have been developed??

If we look at the history of great companies that’s shaping our lives today, we will find that all of them started in a humble way just trying to discover how this idea might work and try to develop it and make it work as much as the founders can. And BTW, those founders often push the limits of their capabilities and do extra work to make it happen. They were not rich nor 100% ready, skilled, or knowledgeable about what they were building. But because of their entrepreneurial spirit, they didn’t keep their ideas in their heads but rather build something out of it and the curiosity to see how it works kept them moving. YES, they did developed big believe in the future of their projects afterward which led them to keep going when it gets really hard. But this is not how they get started at all.

Look at Google. A PhD project of two computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Some of us might think that Google was developed when the idea landed in the founder’s brains one Monday morning while they were taking a shower, but the reality is that none of the great products have been developed this way, and Google is one of them. It developed because of two computer scientists who didn’t care much about money as they cared about how people could access organized informations and web pages easily and wanted to solve that problem and worked hard again and again and again until they came up with the version that can be shipped. Larry Page said “We need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.

Now look at Apple. Two kids in a garage passionate about computers end up building a nice personal computer that can be sold and compete with IBM and HP. Some of us might think that the two Steves were too smart to only go through the think, build and sell process but the reality is that Steve Jobs And Steve Wozniak were part of a local organization called Homebrew Computer Club where they discussed and experimented with projects on both hardware and software. Steve Wozniak said, “ And thanks to all science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: Patience “. He also mentioned that he worked a lot in his room until they did the assembly in the garage.

And Finally, Look at Facebook. A social network that was developed in a dorm by undergraduate 19-year-old kid Mark Zuckerberg. Most of us think that Mark’s first Project was Facebook. May be Facebook system, business model and interface were as the same as they look today. It was nothing but a community tool for Harvard students and that’s it. But again and again for other startups and big companies today, founders were interested in their projects to the level that kept them working alone at night without any idea that it could be billions of dollars in products or platforms.

Now we know that great products are revolutionary products that need a lot of passion and experimentation until they succeeded and become a reality.
But What does Experimentation mean and involve?? And most importantly how to do it right to make sure there is an outcome of it that might change the world.

What is Experimentation and what is the goal of it?

An Experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refuse a hypothesis of something that no one tried before. The goal of it is to discover the possible outcomes of particular causes, features, materials, products, services, models, etc..
Look at children, they try and try and try different ways of doing things and they learn faster than any adult. They don’t take things as granted, they don’t understand what others are doing and most importantly they don’t judge the right from the wrong based on the analogy or what the majority of people are doing. Once they learn something they move fast to the next experiment and learn a new thing. They don’t have a cognitive bias because they don’t have a perception of how things are and so try to predict an outcome. Everything is possible and nothing is true until proven by experiment.

In engineering and business, it means procedures to test customer response. Build a product, see how it works and how people react to it, then kill it or keep developing it until it’s 10x better than other products or current ones. The key factor is Effective feedback. You might be the one who gives feedback as a user of it or you might ask other potential users ( called control groups in science ) to give you feedback about the product. Now, a key factor to have great and effective feedback is to ask the right questions in the right way to the right people. What a lot of people tend to do is that they do experiments with a state of mind that they are right about their assumptions, they just need confirmation. This Literally kills the experiment. Your mindset should be like a scientist who said “ Be skeptical of everything until proven otherwise “

There are two types of feedback. Behavioral and perceptual. Behavioral feedback is how users react to the product and what actions they take and in which order. Perceptual feedback is how people think they will react to the product. These are the kind of insights you get when you run a survey, interview or you tell others about your ideas and the great features you will put in your next billion-dollar product. Even though perceptual feedback might be helpful at the start to know about what is at the top of user’s minds, it reveals very little information about what can also be true. This is exactly what you have to discover by behavioral feedback through experimentation of real products or their elements.

What Questions to ask?

It doesn’t matter what is your solution, what matters is that: Does your first version of your product ( Called Minimum viable product in the startup world ) solve the potential user’s problem or take them from 0 to 1??. And so ask if potential users have that problem. How they are solving that problem now?? And what do they hate about those current solutions??
Never ask how do you think this problem can be solved for you or is my product is good or not??
This is your task. Discover through rapid experimentation what is the right solution to meet the need 10x better.

You might have noticed that this is the high level, which is Products and solutions experimentation. To build 10x products you have to do a lot of low-level experiments where you figure out what are the materials, features, and elements that make the product work 10x better.

How to run Experiments?

1. Step number 0 is to clear your mind from any thoughts that says “ hey I have a billion dollar idea of a product that will change the world. I just need to raise fund and hire people”. Remember that you are wrong until you prove that what you are passionate about is right.
   Don’t follow what is the trendy Technology or what is the trendy industry with a giant market size.
2. Develop Empathy. Live among your users. Listen to them carefully and have a clear image of their problems.
3. Don’t think about incremental improvements. Think 10x better. Ask yourself “How I can solve this problem dramatically in a way that changes the user’s life”
4. If you don’t know how to build it, learn or find a partner who can build it. ( Just make sure he or she is a great passionate partner )
5. Build a small cheap version of it. A 10x better Product is not necessarily expensive, or big. It can be small enough to be tested fast but still 10x better and changes the way users are solving the problem now dramatically. As mentioned in the Harvard Business Review “ Much of what companies learn from mammoth experiments can be gleaned from smaller tests that involve fewer variables, saving resources for follow-up tests”.
6. Test how new features, materials, or elements work until you find the minimum viable working set.
7. Ship and test with the right potential users.
8. Gather data and learn from it using both Analytics and intuition.
9. Apply the learning in your next experiment plan.
10. Repeat the process.

Experiments best practices

1. When experimenting different features, materials or elements, make sure to test different features with different users sets or groups to get accurate results. If that is not possible, you have to separate the same user group and test over time.
2. Go with the mindset of: “It has to be a better way” And “ What if”. It’s really important that you exclude the possibility of limitations. A lot of people think that coming up with new products that might change the world is exclusively granted by luck to genius individuals, but they miss the part that is totally granted to those who can challenge what is possible and stand in the face of failure thousands of times. And remember: You don’t have to be right all the time, you only have to be right Once. Your mission in doing those experiments is to find that one.
3. Have attention to details. Having the fact that a simple detail from a user about how he uses the product and what exactly makes it great can make a huge difference in development strategy and prioritization, you should never run any test without complete focus and the ability to capture as much data as you can.
4. Try as much as you can to exclude the multiple factors and focus on how a specific change, feature or material affected the outcome or the user behavior.
5. Have Fun, and don’t expect much. Don’t run the experiments thinking 24/7 about the time you will succeed and become a billionaire. The great advise here is that you should think in how you want to impact positively the life of your users. It’s bigger than yourself and your desire to become rich. It’s about the world, humanity, and economic progress.

prototyping is the fastest and most sophisticated way of Experimentation

The good news is that often time you don’t need to build the actual product fully and perfectly from A to Z. You just need a prototype that can give you behavioral feedback. A way that enables you to build fast, and cheap, capture how users behave to it, and see if you can get some sales that will enable you to build the next version of it. You have to learn about your users as fast as you can and come up with the next version as fast you can. Sam Altman said, “ Your goal is To build the fastest iterative company”. Think of it this way, even if you have big competitors, the one who knows more about what exactly customers want will end up running fast in the right direction, and that is what matters. Find the cheapest and fastest way possible to build a prototype and go build great inventions.

If you found this article helpful, reach out to me to have a 1:1 Workshop together and let’s talk solutions of challenges that face you in your startup.