Colin Gardiner says startups should treat every initiative as a test from day one, documenting what they learn before they can afford formal tools. Investors want to see your hypothesis, what you tested, the results, and what you learned. Formal experimentation platforms make sense around late seed or Series A.
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I have a question about experimentation and sort of as you're working with companies that are, you know, early on versus all the way to going public, what's the right thing you need to see before you start investing in product experimentation or in an experimentation platform or also in marketing experimentation?
I mean, I think you should be experimenting from day one, whether you have a formal apparatus around it and want to pay someone like Optimizely or you know, whatever it may be to do something like that, that's a bit different. It's more of a budget question. But I would say that like, and you as a company, you should have it, try and instill in your DNA that everything is like a test, right? And that you're trying to learn. And I think it's more about a mindset than it is about like tooling in a certain time, if that makes sense. I think Probably around late seed to Series A is probably where people have budgets and team sizes and bandwidth to like do that. If I'm just kind of throwing something at the dartboard there, like that's kind of my experience where people would do that and you have enough people to run a process. But I think you should be doing it culturally anyway earlier, right? And that, you know, 'cause I see a lot of people like early stage, they're like, this is our goal. And we need to drive revenue now. And they're like, here's our, that's our objective. Here's something we're gonna do. And they don't really frame it in terms of like, let's actually, all the things we're gonna throw at the dartboard, let's try and set them up so that we can get a learning out of it and get that systematically documented. I think that's the thing that sets people apart. And as like an investor, I like, I love getting those things in updates saying like, here's what we tested logically. This is why we did this and it didn't, and this is what we learned and it didn't work out. Like that to me is like awesome. Like that's what you like want to see. And I'm less concerned about like what platform or tool or whatever it is. I just want to see that you've come up with a hypothesis, you tested it thoroughly, you have a finding. Now we're doing this other thing, right? Or we're doing that thing more because it's working.
