Mar 18, 2014

The Immediate Response Fallacy

Why a lot of startup experiments mislead us into believing customers don’t care.

Some things take time to brew.

A good experimenter knows that, and doesn’t draw false conclusions when there are no immediate results.

A few examples
Two years ago, I created Tweetable Text, a simple Wordpress plugin that makes individual sentences in your blog post tweetable. The vision was a better way for good ideas to spread, and the minimum success criteria was a handful of installs in a few weeks. I got none, so I moved on.

Recently I googled for it, and found that it had lived on unbeknownst to me.

Read the full post on Medium.

What am I up to these days?

I’m a new parent, and prioritising my attention on our new rhythms as a family.

Work-wise, I’m trekking along at a cozy pace, doing stuff that doesn’t require meetings :)

I have a few non-exec/advisory roles for engineering edu programs. I’m also having fun making a few apps, going deep with zero-knowledge cryptography, and have learned to be a pretty good LLM prompt engineer.

In the past, I've designed peer-learning programs for Oxford, UCL, Techstars, Microsoft Ventures, The Royal Academy Of Engineering, and Kernel, careering from startups to humanitech and engineering. I also played a role in starting the Lean Startup methodology, and the European startup ecosystem. You can read about this here.

Contact me

Books & collected practices

  • Peer Learning Is - a broad look at peer learning around the world, and how to design peer learning to outperform traditional education
  • Mentor Impact - researched the practices used by the startup mentors that really make a difference
  • DAOistry - practices and mindsets that work in blockchain communities
  • Decision Hacks - early-stage startup decisions distilled
  • Source Institute - skunkworks I founded with open peer learning formats and ops guides, and our internal guide on decentralised teams