Alex Mehr describes a weekly sprint process for finding macro trends: generate an idea Monday, build by Friday, launch Saturday, measure Sunday, pivot Monday. He used this method in 2007 to test which dot-com businesses could transition to mobile, eventually discovering online dating. The same framework applies to new sectors like crypto by mapping existing services to their equivalents and testing them.
Chapters
So you just take a step, you dig, you look at it, a soil sample, see if there's any gold, right? If there isn't, what do you do? Do you feel pity for yourself? No. No. Don't keep digging either because there's no gold. Move forward, go left, go right, go back, and just keep moving until you hit gold, a gold sample, right? We're going to pivot and this is what I'm going to do. Every week we're going to launch a new app and this is my formula. We come up with an idea every Monday, we implement it until Friday, we launch it on Saturday, I monitor it. On Friday we test it, on Saturday we launch it, on Sunday we monitor it, and on Monday like clockwork we will pivot. Does that make sense? How many of you guys can do some variation of this formula? You think you can implement it in your own business? Just one person? 2? Okay. All right. So I give you guys another variation of it. Some of— for some businesses it is harder to do, and I'll give you another variation of it that actually helps. For businesses that are kind of quick to pivot, that is the best formula, like a week or 2-week sprints. Do one idea, run for a week or two. At the end of it, don't kill the idea. Just force yourself to start a new one. It could be one pivot from that idea. So it doesn't have to be drastically different, but it's a change in direction. So we did that from October to December of 2007. And December of 2007, I stumbled upon online dating. It's really like, it's just like that. I had never thought of online dating before that in my life. So we got to it. We were just going vertical by vertical, and I had a simple formula. This is one way to think about it. It's like I mapped the online businesses that were successful at that time, and I said which one of them would transition from .com to apps. All right, and I literally went one by one by one by one until I hit online dating. Does that make sense? Do you guys see the thought process? And when that happened, we started getting like, we were getting 40,000, 50,000 users a day. Does that make sense? Okay, I just stepped on a gold mine. So let me actually give you a visual. So this is how it works as an entrepreneur. You're somewhat blind. You're trying to look for a gold mine, literally. All right? So you just take a step, you dig, you look at it as soil sample. See if there's any gold, right? If there isn't, what do you do? Do you feel pity for yourself? No. No. Don't keep digging either because there's no gold. Move forward, go left, go right, go back one step, okay? Take another soil sample. All right? Is there gold? No. Go this way. Is there gold? No. And you just keep moving until you hit A gold, a gold sample, right? What do you do at that point? Go down. All right. So I tell you one other thing. This is a little bit more advanced. So sometimes— so imagine the actual gold mine is right there. I'm giving you a visual, right? So you got close to it. You took a soil sample and you have some gold, right? You start digging. That's the first logic. You just start digging, right? But there is a possibility if you go one step to the right, there's even more gold, right? So what you do is almost two things at the same time. You start digging furiously. All right? So you have traction, you start digging furiously, then you take a step right while your crew is digging there. You took another— Step right. Does that make sense? And then if it turns out there's more gold here, you say, guys, glad you're digging over there. Please move over one step to the right. Does that make sense? You guys understand the visual? So in our case, the time when I got the first huge traction was when I started building quiz apps and friends were rating each other. So that's when I got a lot of traction. All right? It was, there was some gold. I was getting a lot of users, but it wasn't quite right. I'm like, okay, this is not exactly a product that actually becomes a big company. So I was almost there and I didn't. So I went one step to the right, took another soil sample, and I'm like, all right, here we go guys. All right, abandon everything. Some people are still doing polling widget or whatever. Just drop everything. Everybody come right here. All right. We're going to dig. Does that make sense? So it's a combination of a bunch of things. It's kind of— I think of it as there's luck definitely is an element of it, but it's more than that. So one, what did I exactly do? So I said, this is kind of like higher level. So you always want to have a macro trend in mind. The macro trend is dot-com is going into apps. That was a macro trend I was betting on. All right, so then naturally you think, what is viable in dot-com and which one of those will go smoothly or first into apps? So I listed out big dot-com companies at the time, and Match.com, eHarmony were part of them, right? So were travel sites. So I basically looked at them and I went, okay, so So this is a— you develop a hypothesis. You're like, okay, so online dating could be that, right? And then you just— that's how you determine your test site. Does that make sense? For example, if you wanted to go into crypto, how would you apply the exact same logic? Come on, it's easy. See what type of financial services Exactly right. Exactly right. Just look at the biggest finance-related companies, online companies, and then create a roadmap of their crypto version. And then go take a soil sample, then move on, take another soil sample, then move on, take another soil sample. Does my visual walking around, monkeying around the stage help?
