With science, here’s how to build your startup like in a lab

As the CEO of HotelQuickly, I want to be able to decide with confidence which kinds of projects and minimum viable products (MPVs) to fund and which ones to cut. Focus is everything.

As part of my resolution to master one topic a month, I decided to study how to determine product-market fit (PMF) and scale the product once it’s ready to go. There is a lot of clutter around growth hacking, automation, and A/B testing. So, I wanted to go deep into the subject and be able to apply what I’ve learned to propel the company further.

Set up the lab

To start, I took the framework of the 10 steps to accelerated learning, which I highlighted in a previous post.

• I set constraints: I had one month to master the subject.
• I made my motivation clear: I wanted to understand the fundamental principles of applying the scientific method to a startup’s two phases — PMF and building the growth engine.
• I set a specific, well-defined goal of being able to apply the things I learned to my company within one month.
• I would emulate the experts, read a minimum of one book and five blog posts, listen to relevant podcasts, and take Udemy courses.
• I asked myself open-ended questions about what I wanted to learn.

Some of the questions were:

Learn-Build-Measure

Startups have ultimately two stages:

1. Customer validation (Search: pre-PMF)
2. Scale (Execution: product-channel fit and growth).

Contrary to popular belief, the much-celebrated just-do-it approach to building businesses is not the most efficient way to progress through those stages.

The alternative? Since the early 20th century, the scientific method has been applied to management and has accelerated the growth of today’s industrial giants. It’s the application of the same core principles of the feedback loop “build-measure-learn” that started the “lean-startup” school of thought.

First things first: Find your product-market fit

Scale for growth

Finding the experts

Putting it into practice