James Altucher’s Startup as Experiment Framework
James Altucher is one of the most interesting people I’ve found online. He is a successful author, podcaster, venture capitalist, standup comic, chess master, and serial entrepreneur.
In his 10,000 Experiments Rule podcast, he talks about many of the endeavors he’s tried, failed, and succeeded at. Through continual experiments and many failures, James Altucher has had some big successes and built a very large online audience.
The Power of Experiments
“There’s a reason why most things you do should fail. It’s because if everything you do succeeds, either you’re the best human being on the planet or you are not experimenting enough. Experimenting is something I like to do in order to learn things very quickly with potentially huge upside and very little downside.
An experiment means you have a hypothesis about what might work. Whether it’s a bad hypothesis or not, there is no judgement at the hypothesis stage.
Then you construct a way to test out your hypothesis. The experiment should have very little downside and enormous upside. It should be relatively cheap or almost free to do and you should be able to do it very quickly.”
10% Success Rate
Early in James Altucher’s career, he created 9 different websites that all failed.
One was a dating site for smokers. He had a hypothesis that smokers needed a way to find other smokers. That didn’t work out.
Neither did the Smart or Stupid dating site that included an IQ test. Apparently, rating people by how stupid they look didn’t catch on at the time.
His 10th website was Stockpickr had 1 million users in its first month and was later sold for $10 million.
How to Get Better Ideas
James is famous for his habit of writing down at least 10 ideas a day. The way to get better ideas is to come up with more bad ideas.
Leveraging his idea generation skills, James researched 10 ideas for 20 different companies and emailed them all. Three responded. One was Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com who hired James as a financial writer and later went on to buy James' website Stockpickr for $10 million.
Bold Experiments with Huge Upside
While working in the IT department at HBO, James was asked to do some IT consulting for Comedy Central. He said he would do it only if he could have the empty 3:00 am slot for his own TV show. He was rejected at Comedy Central, but then by-passed the HBO hierarchy and directly approached the CEO about doing a web-based show called 3am. This time he got the go-ahead.
James went out at 3:00 am and interviewed people on the streets of New York. He later got money to do a pilot TV show of the idea.
Other companies saw the website that James created for HBO and asked James to do it for them. It turned into James’ first successful company, Reset, a web development company that he made millions from. That small experiment of pitching the CEO directly turned out to be very lucrative.
The Experiment Framework
What could you accomplish if you followed James Altucher’s 10,000 Experiments Rule and continually challenged yourself to new experiments?
Personal and professional growth can only come from attempting bigger challenges and encountering on-going failures. You can’t expect exceptional results from doing the same things you’ve always done.
Experiment. Fail. Experiment. Fail. Experiment. Fail. Eventually, you will find success. It is inevitable. No one fails forever. One or two big wins is a successful career.
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