Build a Lab, Not an Experiment

I was recently inspired by an Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast, featuring the founder of Zynga, Mark Pincus.

He was asked what advice he would have given his former self when he was starting his first company. His reply was that he would have built the company to test many different business models instead of just one. He further went on to explain how Zynga (100M+ active users) does thousands of tests.

This really hit me. So often, people think about starting a company as testing one idea. The reality is that most successful companies make multiple major business model changes until they find the one that scales.

When starting and growing a business, we should structure it to run lots of experiments instead of just one.