“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward”
Thomas Edison
Science requires thousands of failures in order to find a success. Following the success, we look back and rationalize why that one success was obviously the solution to the puzzle. Prior to finding it, we could not see it. This retrospection however, can cause us to think that we just need one brilliant idea to be successful.
The reality is that you are more likely to succeed if you can try a lot of things and the Internet is a great playground for that. It’s inexpensive to try different experiments and it’s easier to measure the effect. In many ways, you’re better off running as many experiments as you can, fail quickly, learn, and try again rather than trying to figure out the exact right strategy before you even start.
There is still an art to experiment design that should be consider, but trying to achieve perfection in this, often means that you lose out on serendipitous findings that come from trying lots of different combinations. Again, there is much beyond our purview including whole groups of people we’ve never interacted with.
This means, if you can provide a successful service or marketing message to a small niche, the internet’s scale is able to make it be successful. One realization that shocks me is that there are THOUSANDS of successful products that we’ve never heard about. Products that are making a lucrative living for someone. Because we tend to ignore those things beyond our view of the world, we believe we know of all of the successful things (or at least most of them), but this is simply not the case.
This ultimately means that your small idea may find a big tribe.
Got an idea? Try it out.
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