How I decide what deserves $100
A $100 test across five angles over thirty days. The cheapest version of a clear answer I've found.
Every idea I take seriously goes through the same test: $100, thirty days, five angles.
A hundred dollars is enough that I can’t hand-wave the result. Thirty days is enough that the market has seen me more than once. Five angles is enough that I’m not judging the idea by the single execution I happened to try first.
The question the test answers isn’t is this good? It’s does this want to exist? Those are different questions, and most founders conflate them.
What the five angles look like in practice §
If the idea is a piece of software, the five angles aren’t five landing pages. They’re five framings of what the product is — five different stories about why someone should care. Same core; different wrapper.
Sometimes the wrapper matters more than the core. Sometimes the core is just wrong and no wrapper rescues it. Five tries is the smallest number that tells me which one I’m looking at.
The part that surprises people §
About thirty percent of what I test gets discarded after the $100 is spent. Not “pivoted.” Discarded. The idea goes into the vault and I move on.
I used to feel bad about that number. Now I think it’s the ratio that keeps me honest. If I were discarding five percent, it would mean my filter upstream was doing too much work — I was pre-rejecting things I hadn’t actually tested. And if I were discarding seventy percent, the filter would be doing too little work, and I’d be wasting money on things my gut already knew were dead.
Thirty percent is the band where I’m surprised often enough to trust the process, and wrong often enough to know the process is real.
Why the test is cheap on purpose §
You could run a better validation test for $5,000. You’d learn more. But the point of $100 isn’t to get the best possible signal — it’s to get enough signal to stop arguing with yourself.
Most arguments about whether an idea is good end not because someone was persuaded, but because someone got tired. The $100 test ends the argument for you. The market either leaned in or it didn’t, and you stop relitigating.
That is the actual product of this test. Not the ideas. The decisions.