How To Test An Idea Before You Invest

Over the last three months, the Rugby Bricks blogs have generated 2738 visits to our website.

The best-performing blog is about improving your gym performance for rugby. 

This one blog generates nearly 700 site visits per month.

We assumed that building a gym program generator for this blog via ChatGPT would be a great way to capture emails.

We had quotes from developers for $500 - 1500 to build this.

Everyone in the business agreed this was a great value add for our customers.

Before we pushed go, though, we decided to test whether our customers wanted this.

We set up this form on the blog page using our email marketing tool, Klayvio.

3% of people opted in for the program.

Based on 700 people visiting this blog per month, we would have captured 21 new email subscribers and, over a year, 268 subs.

Had we spent the $1500 on building the API and program generator, this would have equated to $5.59 per email subscriber.

We currently pay $0.49 on Facebook for an email subscriber.

The cost of making poor decisions hastily stacks up in business quickly.

If you are bullish on an idea, it pays to test it before you invest in it.

You could save yourself some money too.

Notes: Look for the simplest version of an idea and test it with your target market first.

Most of the time, our ideas need refinement before they become their best version.

Why "Unrealistic" Goals Are Easier To Achieve Than You Think

Ninety-nine per cent of us are convinced we cannot achieve great things, so we aim for the mediocre.

The level of competition is thus most brutal for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most taxing.

Take university, where those of us with big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally intelligent peers over conventional careers.

Becoming an equity partner at a law firm will take at least four years of study, a decade of 60-hour work weeks and cost upwards of $200,000 to buy in.

The value of Rugby Bricks, the company of which I’m a managing director, was recently valued at $2.2 M, and my involvement was four years of 20-hour work weeks.

If the trajectory remains the same, the company's value will be in the tens of millions in another four years.

Many of us want to become law firm partners, but only a few want to build world-class rugby products.

Your “dream shot” idea has a higher chance of success than competing for coveted “safe” careers.

The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective ideology of being realistic makes it easy for us to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for first base.

“Unrealistic goals” are easier to achieve than many of us think.

Notes: Remember that outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom; the problem is that traditional knowledge is usually right.

On the flip side of this, given a 10 per cent chance of 100 x payoff, we should look to make that bet every time.

The issue is that we will be wrong nine times out of ten.

The return on hours though invested, will be of far greater value than sticking with the beaten path.