Ideas are killing
innovation.
Corporate innovation produces a great deal of activity and very little evidence. The fix is not more creativity. It is writing down what you believe in a form that can be proved wrong, cheaply, before anyone spends real money.
The notation
Every venture we build starts as one sentence in three parts. It is deliberately awkward to write, because the awkwardness is where the thinking happens.
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Because
The reason a customer would change their behaviour. Not the feature, not the technology — the itch that already exists whether or not you turn up.
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Someone
The specific, named, describable person who holds that reason. If you cannot picture them ordering lunch, the hypothesis is not finished.
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Will
The thing they will actually do about it. An action that can be counted, not an attitude that can be surveyed.
Written this way, a proposition stops being an idea and becomes a claim. Claims can be tested. Ideas can only be admired.
The book
The method in full, with the arguments, the failures and the worked examples. If the argument does not land, we are probably not the right people for you — and the book has saved us both a meeting.
Rinsing
One process,
applied the same way
every time.
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Write the hypotheses
Not one. Dozens. Every plausible Because, held against every plausible Someone, until the field is genuinely covered rather than conveniently narrow.
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Rinse them
Cut everything that cannot be tested cheaply, everything that is really a feature wearing a customer's clothes, and everything the team is only attached to.
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Run experiments
Real media, real money, real strangers, in a sprint. What survives is signal. What does not is killed early and without ceremony.
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Build what survived
An independent team, controlling equity in their own hands, and a corporate partner supplying the distribution, brand or supply chain a startup could never assemble.