How we learn fast
In an early-stage startup, your rate of learning needs to be faster than your rate of spending. 📈📉
In my team we take it really seriously! So I wanted to share a few things we do to be as fast as we can. Would love to learn from you too! Please comment with your tips and advice.
1️⃣ Learn deliberately You can learn things in almost all situations, interactions, experiments. But you need to be learning the right things. Without structure, you can easily learn a lot, but still not learn the most important thing you need right now So the first tip is: create a structured list of the things you need to learn and rank them by priority. Some things naturally inform other things. Some things may seriously invalidate your beliefs, and, if not true, might even negate some other things!
2️⃣ Learn fast What is the fastest and cheapest way to learn each thing? There are different approaches, which give different levels of confidence and different depths of insight. Having customer interviews has a drastically different level of effort/cost than building an experiment in a product. But very often, having a couple of conversations can give you enough confidence that it's worth building a small prototype. How can you learn something cheap, which gives enough confidence to learn something more expensive next?
3️⃣ Accept that information is never perfect All information is imperfect. Your job is not to get 100% confidence in anything, but a high enough confidence to make a bet on the next thing. If you get stuck on trying to be perfect, you'll never move.
4️⃣ Accept that you'll be wrong a lot You'll be wrong more than you're right. Accept it, be prepared to be wrong, and make changes based on that information. Every lesson is valuable, whether you proved or disproved your belief. Be prepared to act, whichever outcome you reach
5️⃣ Think several moves ahead If you learn something, what will you do with that information? What will it unlock for you? Does the outcome allow you to take the next step with your product? To double down investing in marketing to a certain segment? If you don't have a next step for a learning, then don't invest into it yet. Otherwise you'll spend time, energy, money learning things that lead nowhere.
That's my top 5! What are your tips and advice for learning well in a startup? I'd love to learn from you.