Why You Shouldn’t Care About What You’ve Done

From Satya Patel

At Homebrew, Hunter and I are very focused on “Why” a founder has chosen to start a company and what motivates him or her to attack the specific problem or opportunity he or she sees.  But also important is the “how”, the approach the entrepreneur has taken to address the opportunity.  Often, when we starting talking about the “how”, we hear about a lot of different ideas being considered and experiments being run in an effort to find product/market fit.  But at the seed stage, entrepreneurs often focus only on what they’re doing without being equally attentive to what they’re learning.  “Being busy” by itself does not equate to building a company. You should be learning with every step so that you can find a scalable model of success.

Focusing on the key questions and how best to answer them

To create an organization that learns and doesn’t just do, I’m a big advocate of the scientific method approach to building product (and companies more generally).  The scientific method is a simple framework that can help startups focus, experiment, learn and iterate quickly and effectively. Below is a description of that method along with a simplified example of an experiment we ran at Twitter (not the actual data).