Introduction

If you are an innovator or entrepreneur (and chances are that you are, since you’re reading this), you know that building a new, successful product or business is both incredibly rewarding, and incredibly hard. 

Achieving it means you’ll not only need to learn about your customers and market, deeply understand their needs, and fulfil that need in an exciting way, but you’ll also have to overcome … and even ‘wiring problems’ in the human brain, that conspire to make you take bad decisions. 

For everyone involved in startups and new products, it makes sense to try to increase the success rate. 

Unfortunately, nobody knows the exact recipe to build a successful business or product from scratch. There is no sure-fire step-by-step plan to follow, where if you check all the boxes, you’ll end up with a success. It’s not that easy.

However, there is one thing great innovators and entrepreneurs have known from the start, and that is to figure out what the biggest risks and roadblocks are, and then to try to solve those with small experiments. 

Some of these innovators and entrepreneurs did this based on their own, private methodology, or even on a very well-developed gut feeling. That makes it hard to follow in their footsteps. Some of them used a more structured approach based on science.

That is exactly what Experiment Driven Innovation does. 

The Lean Startup movement, started by Serial Entrepreneurs and Startup Gurus like Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, and others, has become successful by taking the idea of the scientific method and using it to rigorously test business assumptions. This way of thinking helps you focus on the most important roadblocks first, and solve them in a way that reduces the risk. 

Now, the idea of experimenting like this is straightforward. To most people it makes immediate sense. But when they try to run their first experiment, it turns out that it can be quite difficult to make it work and get clear outcomes. 

Most of the literature on Lean Startup thinking focuses on the theory, explaining why it is a good idea to experiment. Hardly any literature shows you the nitty-gritty details of running experiments in practice. What experiments should you run? How should you set them up? And when? What do the results mean? What is the best course of action? Tough questions to answer when reading the theory. 

That means people are basing their potentially life-changing startup-decisions on flawed experiments. 

When I started doing practical experiments with clients a few years ago, I constantly ran into these questions. What I really needed was an ‘Experiment Cookbook’. A list of recipes that I could draw from to build the right experiment for any situation.

This course aims to give you that cookbook. It will help you solve that practical problem and get you to running super effective experiments in no time.