Everything is an experiment.

An experiment: a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.

A business is a proposed solution (the hypothesis) to a set of problems that you think people will pay you to solve.

Viewed this way, your goal is not to succeed or fail at your business, but only to learn as much as you can as quickly as possible about the problem you are trying to solve. None of this will sound unusual if you have read or are familiar with The Lean Startup.

But it is easy to lose sight of this definition of business and view your business experiments as failures instead of lessons.

In my previous article, I mentioned the numerous businesses I have started in the past 2 years that have failed, were aborted, or are stagnating. My failure with these businesses was not that they didn’t work, but that I took to long to learn anything and iterate based on these lessons.

So let’s not do that again!

Where We’ve Been

Below is a list of the businesses I started in the past 2 years along with a brief description of each (and what my major lessons were).

• Premium Pet Sitter: A pet sitting marketplace connecting background-checked sitters with pet owners in need.
  • Should have targeted one city first. This would have let me learn more, faster and build up trust within a small area. I tried to work with whoever would participate and ended up serving nobody.
  • Took me to long to move on from initial idea and get stuck in no-mans land of indecision
• Kombucha Glass: A glass designed specifically for Kombucha drinkers.
  • I did this one fairly right. Launched a quick landing page to learn more from the target audience. Collected email signups and got detailed feedback. Emailed over 200 Kombucha brewers to see if they would be interested in having a custom glass.
  • Didn’t solve a problem and the creation of a physical custom product was undesirable.
• Soovees: Helping personal blogs develop and sell custom physical products.
  • The idea was a play off of Quarterly.co which has well-known personalities curate their own subscription boxes. I thought that bloggers with a big enough following might be interested in generating recurring revenue with a similar model.
  • After 100 emails… turns out they weren’t.
• SpicePanda: A subscription spice box for the home chef. Shipping quarterly boxes of artisanal spice that you can’t find at your local grocery store
  • Still ongoing
  • Coordination of a physical curated product has added exponential work
  • Have received great feedback from customers about how much the box delights them
  • Does not solve a problem, but delivers happiness (harder to sell people on before they subscribe)
  • Learned that artisanal spice (and food) makers are willing to provide a substantial discount on their products in order to reach a new audience

Where We’re Going

In the spirit of “life is an experiment,” here are the upcoming “experiments” that are in the works or already being tested:

• Overwhelmingly.co: Unlimited small Facebook jobs and support, 24/7 from $79/month
  • I love WPCurve’s business model and have been looking for ways to try it with my own expertise. Since I have been performing Facebook ad implementation and consulting on the side, it seemed like a good fit.
  • Currently advertising via Facebook to a targeted group of small business owners making over $50k per year.
  • Goal with this would be to prove the model and then hire a team with the day to day implementation.
• SpicePanda 2 – Back With A Vengeance: Facebook advertising support for artisanal food companies
  • Based off of the the original SpicePanda, I know that artisanal food makers are looking for ways to reach a new audience. With my Facebook experience and belief that it could help them target a very specific audience, a mixture of online training and support seems like a great fit.
• The Ultimate Online Support Desk For Online Entrepreneurs
  • This is still in the early works, but I am thinking through how to test it. The concept is that many small business owners working online use a TON of tools to sell their product: email management, analytics, payment processing, etc. These people spend time each month troubleshooting issues and implementing fixes.
  • The ultimate support desk is a monthly service that is on call 24/7 to deal with all of your online tools’ support desks. We would even implement fixes so that the entrepreneur can just focus on the business side of things.

What’s Next?

I told you before that I was going to be brutally honest. I feel sick showing the things I’ve tried the past 2 years that haven’t turned into anything, but that’s probably a good indicator that I should share.

I’m even more nervous sharing the things I’m working on now or will start shortly, but by putting them out into the ether, my goal is to figure out quickly if they work or not.

Going forward, I will write in more detail about each new experiment and it’s progress along with a monthly status report. But I’d love to hear what your big “experiements” are for the next few months. We’re doing this together, remember?