A straightforward approach to business idea research

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by Average Founder · February 6, 2021

It hit me hard a couple of days ago.

There is a very straightforward no BS way to measure the quality of your business idea research process.

When we do research we usually start with a hypothesis and then try to confirm or reject it.

The problem with this is that how we set up our hypothesis is usually shit.

We base our hypothesis on things we already know. And to be honest, usually we don't know much about anything regarding the new business.

You would think that a better way would be to first gather more data by trying to learn more about things that we know we don't know well. It will give us a much better understanding of the field and we will be better at creating our hypothesis.

But we can do even better.

We can go and try to find as many things that we didn't even know are a thing.

In other words:

Measure every conversation based on how many completely new things you have learned that you didn't know existed before. Usually, this will open a completely new point of view that we couldn't have otherwise.

This will give us more insight than simply validating our half-baked hypothesis.

I believe that even just learning one such thing per conversation is a a job well done.

How to do that and how to ask such questions?

I have no idea.

But I know a few things that might help.

Read The Mom Test book. Also, check this #AMA from Jason Cohen, it is pure gold.

Let me now get back to building my businesses and not following any of the above advice... (Because I am a moron 🤠)