Discover What Works: A Practical Guide to Testing New Strategies in Business
How to try new approaches without risking everything
How do you try new business strategies without risking everything you've worked to build?
If your business already has some traction, some followers, some sales, some audience or not just "some" but a lot of these things, there may be times you want to try a new approach but you hesitate to pull the trigger. You might wonder "Will this work?"
How do you decide if you should move ahead with a new idea or not bother?
One way is with a small experiment.
We need to launch experiments to grow our business potential. Here's why.
First, even if you're applying a strategy that has worked for others, you don't know for sure if it will work for your business. You'll only find out by trying it yourself.
Second, if you have an entirely new idea, no one can tell you for sure what results it will produce. You can do a lot of thinking and get advice but you won't really know until you act.
A researcher specializing in studying entrepreneurs found that the successful ones, had a very experimental mindset. They would get an idea and come up with logic for why it might work then they'd act on it. They called this process "effectuation." But I call it acting to learn.
Now if you're sold on experimenting in your business, you might wonder ...
How do you conduct an experiment in your business?
There are three things we do to conduct an experiment so it yields knowledge.
Develop a theory of action, the logic behind your idea
Decide how long you'll conduct the experiment
Measure results
Here's why you need these steps
Taking action only develops knowledge if you're testing a principle, an idea not just a practice. So we develop a theory of action to test as well. This is as simple as asking "Why might this be a good idea?" Write down your answer.
Then we determine how long we'll conduct the experiment and we write this down as well. I learned of the importance of this from Anne-Laure LeCunff's presentation at the Second Brain Summit. If you decide how long you'll try out a new strategy, it prevents you from giving up before you've had a chance to learn anything.
And finally, we measure because without measurement we won't know what's happened. We determine what we'll measure in advance, too. Those measures need to show us whether our theory of action was correct or not.
Now let's see how this works.
A recent example is the micro-newsletter experiment that I'm conducting now
Once a week, in addition to my long-form newsletter, I'm sending out a micro-newsletter.
A micro-newsletter is a short email that consists of links to other content. I try to make the content links as juicy as possible and as teaser-y as possible because I'm modeling it off of Josh Spector's, very successful micro-newsletter. You can see an example of one of my micro newsletters here:
https://rodneydaut.substack.com/p/theres-a-mistake-that-makes-course
I attended a presentation that Josh Spector gave to his skill sessions yearly membership. After learning about it, I thought this could potentially work well in my business.
My theory of action: It would allow me to get more people to click on my content and offers which might increase sales and I could produce this result without a major increase in time spent writing.
How long will I conduct the experiment?
I decided to do this for about 30 days, and that means about once a week for four weeks. It's short, I know but I can always extend this later.
Finally, I had to figure out how to measure results
After every newsletter, I count how many clicks the email received and if those clicks lead to other actions such as sales. So far it's increased clicks by quite a bit. Instead of getting 1 or 2% of people clicking, I get around 10%. That's 5 - 10 times greater than before which is quite an improvement. So far there has been no increase in sales but more time will tell.
An experiment can yield knowledge that can help you grow but is there a dark side?
What if your idea backfires and costs you more than it’s worth?
An experiment's main purpose is to produce knowledge you can use to grow your business.
If the experiment is too costly, or too risky in other ways, don't do it. In a company I work for, people have proposed experiments that, if they failed, would affect the company's financial results for an entire year.
Those are too risky for a small company.
But we launch many small experiments that we can afford and then expand them if they turn out to be profitable.
Summary
We run experiments in our business to get knowledge we can't get any other way
To conduct an experiment, develop a theory of action, determine the timeframe and measure results
We need a theory to test or we may not learn anything, we determine a timeframe to ensure we stick with it long enough to gain knowledge and we measure because without measurement we'll never know if our idea was right or not
By trying small experiments, you can test many ideas and discover what will work for you. Over time, you'll build up a unique body of best practices all your own. If one of your experiments produces blockbuster results, you might even turn it into a course.
Should that happen, try fleshing out the idea into a course you can sell with the Atomic Course Blueprint. It shows you the fastest way to go from idea to complete course. Here's what Dr. Carrie Goucher had to say about it.
The Atomic Blueprint course is small but mighty. Rodney lays out EXACTLY how to create your course and everything about his approach is fresh and actionable.
Because it's so compact, you don't need to schedule in an hour a week to watch endless videos. You can get everything you need in an hour max. And not a word is wasted. The course has really shifted my thinking on the type of course I can create quickly and I'm already 50% there on an atomic course that I thought would take several months to put together.
When you're ready, here's the link: