Experiment design: 10 concrete examples

With every experiment that you run it is important to ask; what is the riskiest assumption and what do I want to learn. But although the theory is rather simple, it is quite hard to come up with good experiments. Experiment design is hard, especially since most of us are entrepreneurs and not trained scientists. So instead of talking too much about what good experiment design is, we did that last time, let’s dive into some concrete examples:

To validate the problem

Are you really trying to solve a problem for actual people? We often tell entrepreneurs that you want to find the person who fell off his bike (We are from Amsterdam remember) and has broken his arm. His bone is sticking out and he is screaming of pain. That guy will do anything and pay anything to get his problem solved. You want to build a painkiller, not a vitamin. But how do you validate that?

Customer interview
The customer interview is almost always the best way to find out if you are solving a real problem. We previously wrote about how to run effective customer interviews, so we won’t get into that again.

To validate interest

One you validated that there is an actual problem, it is wise to first test the interest in a solution, before running off and…