“The only lasting truth is Change.”
Octavia E. Butler
For years I built businesses that went nowhere. Then one took off: Trends.vc.
By then I’d started holding a floor of 21 experiments a day: the fewest I let myself run. An experiment is anything I do that’s uncertain or uncomfortable: a question I’m scared to ask, a tool I’ve never touched, a thing I build before I know it’ll work.
Below that floor, nothing I built took off. At 21 a day, one did. I run the same range now: 21, 34, 55.
Those numbers are a Fibonacci sequence: each is the sum of the two before it. Each step up is a phase transition. Moving from one level to the next feels different the way water at 99 degrees is still water and 100 degrees is steam.
I call this a hurdle rate, a term I borrowed from finance. It’s the minimum return an investment has to clear before it earns anything. Below the hurdle rate, your capital loses ground to the cost of holding it. Above it, the curve bends and small inputs throw off larger outputs.
Experiments work the same way. Below a certain rate, you’re putting in effort and still slipping backward. Above it, the same effort compounds.
Slipping backward against what? Your environment.
Your environment keeps drifting. The market shifts. Tools change. What worked last year quietly stops working. Experiments are how you stay fit to it, how you keep matching a target that won’t hold still. Run enough of them and you adapt about as fast as the world moves. Run too few and you fall behind while standing still.
This is why a number that works for someone else can sink you. Their environment drifts at a different speed. A founder in a fast market needs a higher floor than a woodworker in a craft that’s barely moved in a century. Same with eras. Same with places. The faster your world moves, the higher your floor has to sit just to hold even.
Fitness to your environment is the first thing you get back. More follows.
- You make more luck because you’ve widened the surface it can land on.
- You learn faster because each experiment pays you information.
- Confidence becomes a byproduct of the volume.
Your rate has to keep pace with how fast your world moves. Below your line, standing still is falling behind. Above it, you compound.
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What would change if you doubled your experiment rate?
