Experimentation speed is everything in growth

Simple math with profound implications for startups.

Maximizing learning velocity is way more important than the success rate of your growth experiments. Especially during the early stages when there’s so much to figure out still.

A high-performing team of 3 running 3 experiments per person per week generates over 100 experiments quarterly. Even with just a 20-30% success rate, that's 20-30 meaningful wins every 3 months.

In contrast, most startups run 5-10 experiments quarterly because they spend a lot of time on trying to get to an 80% success rate. The outcome? 4-8 wins.

They will get absolutely crushed as speed compounds.

The key to increasing the speed of experimentation (and thereby learning) is to reduce ambitious ideas down to their testable essence.

Big ideas that take weeks to build are almost never the right first test. Instead, ask:

"How could we test each individual part of the idea with a script or CSV in an hour?"

This approach isn't about cutting corners. It's about isolating what matters.

By stripping away everything that doesn't address the core hypothesis, high output teams can test five ideas in the time most companies test one.

On top, the best growth teams operate with strict 24-48 hour turnaround times per experiment.

This allows you to start improving the initial hypothesis within 24 hours already. Meaning you learn fast and only spend meaningful time on things that show promising early signs of it working.

While most wait weeks for campaign results, compressed timeframes force clarity and the much higher speed of learning compounds.

Or as Austin put it:

"We would try to de-scope things as much as possible so that we could get down to the learning that we wanted to have and get there as quickly as possible, ideally tomorrow and not next week or in two weeks.”

In addition, it also creates emotional distance from failure. When you invest hours instead of weeks in a project, it's much easier to accept when something doesn't work and move on.

After all, the greatest risk for early stage startups isn't building something imperfect. It's spending months polishing something nobody wants.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Austin Hughes, an early growth leader at Ramp and now Co-Founder and CEO at Unify GTM that changed how I think about growth at startups.

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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