Ravi Mehta: recommendation

Transcript context

…Got it. Cool. The second thing is really thinking differently about how to make decisions. I think a lot of really effective companies today that have large audiences get to rely on an experimental way of making decisions. So you throw things out there, you run an experiment, you get to see what's statistically significant, and based on that, that provides a really nice way to learn about what users want and iterate towards an optimal product. At a startup, you can't do that. You just don't have those users to test with. And I think a lot of startups make the mistake of trying to use an experimental approach too early where it just takes either way too long to get statistically significant results, which reduces that latency, or those results aren't as valid because you have to use a much smaller sample set. And so I've had to shift my mindset from an experimental-oriented approach to making decisions to much more of a conviction-oriented approach. And I've often found myself asking the question of like, do we just have enough data to have informed conviction and we should move forward and stop digging, move forward in a particular direction, and then see whether or not that turns out to be the right one? Because too often in a startup you can spend a lot of time in paralysis around analyzing market research or going through all of the different things you could do strategically, thinking about all the different potential variants that you could build, all the different pricing strategies, whereas instead, a startup just makes sense to kind of get to a point where you have conviction, execute on that, and then move on to whether or not that felt like the right thing, in which case you can double down, or that was the wrong thing, in which case you can shift direction and do that pretty quickly. Awesome. What else?…

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