Experiments — Test Cards & Evidence Grading

Credits: David J. Bland & Alexander Osterwalder — Testing Business Ideas (strategyzer.com); MVP/concierge practice — Eric Ries (The Lean Startup); hypothesis discipline — Steve Blank.

Why this skill exists: interviews produce E1 stories and E3 commitments, but some beliefs — above all willingness to pay — only yield truth at E4: a refusable price, accepted or declined. Surveys and "would you pay?" answers are E0–E1 regardless of how many you collect.

The Test Card (one per experiment — template in TEMPLATES.md)

1. Belief under test — one ledger item (A⟨n⟩), phrased falsifiably.
2. Test — the cheapest setup that produces a real behavior (not an opinion).
3. Metric — what you count, defined before you run.
4. Pass/fail bar — a number committed in advance (an educated guess beats no bar; moving the bar after results is self-deception).
5. Evidence grade the test can produce — design for the grade you need: pricing needs E4-capable tests; channel questions need E2+.
6. Cost & duration cap — cheap and fast beats rigorous and never-run.

The core test menu (pick the cheapest that can move the belief)

• Concierge / manual service — deliver the service by hand, no software; real transactions (E4) at near-zero build cost. Usually the strongest first test for service businesses; instrument every delivery (time, distance, cost-to-serve, order value).
• Price test — quote a real, named, refusable price to real prospects at the moment of intent. Track accept/negotiate/decline by level. Visible surcharges beat bundled costs — you learn nothing from a price nobody can refuse. (E4)
• Pre-sale / deposit / LOI — money or signed intent before the thing exists. (E4/E3)
• Smoke test / landing page / forwardable offer card — a real call-to-action into a channel; measure who acts, not who likes. (E2–E3)
• Channel test — same offer, 2+ channels, counts kept per channel; instrument referral chains (who forwarded to whom). CAC only exists after this. (E2)
• Wizard-of-Oz / prototype session — watch real users attempt the real task; count completion and drop-off step, not opinions. (E2)
• Shadowing / observation — watch the job being done today; workarounds found in the field are E2 gold.

Grading results (when the founder reports back)

1. Compare against the pre-committed bar — pass, fail, or invalid test (didn't run as designed; a broken pipe is not a demand verdict — check delivery before interpreting silence).
2. Write the ledger delta: grade moved (e.g., A7: E1 → E4-fail at ₹150, E4-pass at ₹100), items killed, new unknowns.
3. Watch for: bar moved after the fact · counting compliments as conversions · n=1 celebrated as a pattern · concierge costs ignored (a test that loses money on every order proved demand, not a business — route to /business-model-canvas unit economics).
4. Persist to discovery/experiments/⟨date⟩-⟨name⟩.md.

Output

Test cards for the 1–3 riskiest ledger items (never a backlog of ten — the queue is the enemy of the loop), each with belief ID, setup, metric, pre-committed bar, target grade, cost cap — plus, for reported results, the graded ledger delta and the next cheapest test.

Fill-in templates: TEMPLATES.md in this skill's folder.