System over projects

The system I run is simple on paper and hard to hold onto in practice.

The system is permanent. Whatever specific idea I am currently testing is not. It is a contestant. It has to earn its place every month, and it has to accept being retired when the data says so. My job is not to win with any one idea. My job is to keep the system honest enough that the winners, when they appear, are actually winners.

Guilty until purchased §

Here is the rule I try to live by: assume an idea is guilty until it has been purchased.

Not complimented. Not shared. Not bookmarked. Purchased.

A compliment tells you somebody is polite. A purchase tells you somebody was willing to trade a real thing — time, money, attention — for the thing you made. Everything short of that is noise, or it’s too early.

This is unpopular advice because it’s slow. You don’t get to feel good about an idea until the market has voted with a wallet. You have to sit in the uncertainty. You have to test the idea enough times that if the data is flat, you can’t tell yourself “they just didn’t see it.”

What this costs §

It costs ego. The system doesn’t care that I’ve been working on an idea for three months. It doesn’t care that the idea is clever. It doesn’t care that my friends said it was promising. The system only cares about the data, and the data is sometimes unkind.

It also costs momentum. Most founders want to feel like they are winning. The system doesn’t let you feel that often. You feel it when you get a real purchase, and you don’t feel it otherwise, and you have to be okay with that.

What it’s worth §

What it’s worth is every idea I didn’t keep pushing past its expiration date. Every month I saved by retiring something instead of dragging it. Every attention dollar I spent on a live contestant instead of a zombie.

The system is not a shortcut. It is the opposite of a shortcut. It is the discipline of running each idea through the same loop — $100, 30 days, five angles — and letting the data do what data does, which is disappoint you and occasionally surprise you.

I would rather be disappointed on a schedule than surprised too late.