Don’t Abandon Your Idea Just Yet
“I don’t know what I expected, exactly, but no response was totally unexpected.”
A stand-out Stanford Law School student stood in LaunchPad office hours, dumbfounded. He had painstakingly collected the email addresses of over noteworthy attorneys all over the world, sent them his new start-up idea, and then… crickets. Literally not a single response to his world-changing new venture.
He had considered many next steps, based on various degrees of customer enthusiasm, but he had not considered the possibility that no one would respond to his 200+ emails. Devastated, he had already started onto his next venture.
“So now I’m thinking about…”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” I interrupted. “Why are you moving on?”
“Well, nobody responded. They don’t like my idea.”
This is a classic example of prematurely dismissing an idea due to a poorly-conceived experiment. The student actually had no data telling him his underlying idea was bad. It’s entirely possible no one even opened his email (in which case, it’s a subject line problem), or even that his email landed in spam (in which case, it’s a channel problem). Sadly, he had no way of knowing even this, because he hadn’t used any software to track open rates, click through rates, etc.
My recommendation was, before moving onto the next idea — but after installing some simple software to give him a little bit of visibility into his email campaigns — try to come up with ten different ways to get his target customers’ attention (could be different platforms or channels, could be different subject lines). As a thought exercise, I asked him to consider ten different ways to change the subject line. Prompts to provoke thinking include, What is it (a conference)? What does it do (connect with others…)? What pain does it solve (tired of feeling isolated…)? What impact would it have (accelerate your career)?
Why not start there? For all he knows, a more compelling subject line might enable folks to read his incredibly compelling offer within! At the very least, testing a small portfolio of subject lines would give him relative data on the best way to frame his value proposition, which would be useful on other channels as well.
Related: Judge Experiments Before Ideas
Related: Create A Portfolio
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.