Why Smart Entrepreneurs Test Everything

As an entrepreneur, you will face a lot of challenges. These challenges will test you at every step of the way and you must be able to fall back on the tenets of hard work and perseverance to be able to succeed. There are no two ways about it.

Either you’re working towards your goal or you’re not. But there comes a time when you must test your theories out. When you have certain assumptions about life, your customers, your own performance, and the industry, you should test out your theories so that you can create better results for yourself and your company.

Action Vs Thought

When you test out your theories in real life, you can create actionable insights that arise from deep testing. When you are in deep thinking mode, you can overthink and get nowhere eventually. However, when you switch over your mindset towards action-orientation, then you can take advantage of the full range of your thought and mindset. You can create new avenues of growth, understand why your analytics aren’t showing up real time, and communicate with customers on a regular basis.

The more you test, the more you get to learn about yourself and the world around you. You can test until the cows come home, but you must start with a good null-hypothesis (H0). Then you must get enough data to prove yourself right or wrong and have an assumption in the back of your mind that you are trying to obtain the truth and not simply fulfilling your fallacies.

Changing with the times

When you mature, or when your industry does, you will find that there are certain theories and practices that retire. You no longer need to rely on 12 people to do that job of one robot in the future, and all your theories about management and technology go out of the window when something disruptive happens. To be able to stay ahead of the times, you must be ready to change. You can change your theories, your ideas and conceptions.

When you are more open to change, you can create new ideas that work better than the old ones. Technologies get replaced, people get displaced and new terminology gets reinstated. As an entrepreneur, the best way to stay ahead of all this is to test out your notions. When you can test out the things that you take for granted, you can truly stay ahead of the game. This requires that you keep yourself open-minded and stay connected to the end-goal. Otherwise you’re never truly going to learn from new shifts in trends or avenues of advantages.

Small vs. Big

The power of small ideas and changes – is huge. You can easily get a great insight from a small test or a deeper one from a big insight. These minute tweaks and tests can easily drive new insights that create better business outcomes. You shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of whether a test is small or big, whereas you should find new avenues of testing all the time. When you start to explore new ideas, and new ventures, you can test out new things that you want to see in the world.

You have certain notions that you think are correct, and then something comes along that changes the way people think and act – iPhone, AI, ML, Alexa, etc. When you are able to test out smaller iterations one at a time, then you can focus on the big impact that you are eventually going to make on the industry and in the world. You can have a deeper focus on your own mind and get better results from analysis and tests that you conduct.

Technology, analytics and results-mapping

There are many technological solutions like analytics, CRM and database mappers, that can help you to run small and major tests around your organization. You can run tests on customer bases, employee culture development, and even shareholder engagement. You can open yourself up to new forms of ideas through technology as well as through human intervention. You can even create new forms of excitement in the company, as technology is a contributing factor to overall employee stimulus.

Technology is a great thing for people that understands how to use it best, and when it comes to testing things out – it’s the number 1 way to analyse findings. Remember though – your findings need to be replicable. Only then will they become actionable insights. E.g. if you find that customers from XYZ city face ABC challenges while using your SaaS solution, then an insight is only derived when its applicable to all the customers from XYZ city in the industry. When you can reproduce those results in a different setting, they become actionable.

Testing as a mindset

The most important part of testing things in entrepreneurship is to have a testing-oriented mindset. Few entrepreneurs listen to new ideas, or guidelines, while even fewer test out these myths for what they really are. It can be a fun endeavour as you test out what people think, act and say – so that you can create change in the way that you do things.

To be able to have this mentality requires a shift in the way that you do things. You need to be open to changing, in the first place. And you need to focus on creating new opportunities through unbiased testing. E.g. if someone tells you to work hard through the night, you can test it out with a simple A/B test on certain nights.

You can wake up really early one day and the next you can sleep all night. You can measure your productivity and see if there is a difference. This can beat/enhance common wisdom, and you can use it to boost your work output.

Conclusion

We shouldn’t take things for granted, and neither should we take it as it is. We need to test things out in our life, as entrepreneurs, so that we can truly experience the world for what it is.