How I Became an Experiment Addict [50] When Marc Andreessen coined the term “Product/Market Fit” back in 2007, he said, “In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.” This aligns with Steve Blank’s Customer Development methodology, in which he insists that product makers begin building by understanding their customers’ problems, and then tweaking the solution to the customers’ needs. In a UX strategy, you do that by running experiments. First, though, we need to define what exactly an experiment is. An experiment is a test of a hypothesis. The goal is to discover whether your hypothesis is right or wrong based on measurable results. After the experiment, you should be able to evaluate your results and accept or reject your original hypothesis. Experiments are diverse and can be run in a laboratory or in the field. They can be controlled (run with a control group for comparison) or natural (run with no control groups). No matter what type, though, experiments are all about testing a variable in order to falsify a hypothesis. This variable is any item, factor, or condition that you can control or change. In observing the variables in the experiments, you look for a cause-and-effect relationship, and you conduct the experiment for a finite amount of time, because you want to measure and empirically capture observable evidence about what happens when the variable changes. It’s that simple. Or so you might initially think. In early 2011, I was working full-time as an offsite UX strategy consultant for Cisco Systems. At the same time, I was looking for smaller, get-your-hands-dirty opportunities with local tech startups in Los Angeles. In March, I met Jared Krause, a brash, hilarious, articulate entrepreneur, and a fellow NYU alumnus to boot. He had big plans to make a fully featured online platform that enabled people to easily trade all types of goods and services, and he also had initial private investment lined up. Sure, there were other bartering/trading platforms out there, but none with a sophisticated mechanism for matching users based on common interests and geolocation. Other trading platforms such as BarterQuest and Swap.com had clunky interfaces with the type of inventory you might find at a yard sale. Jared wanted to create something groundbreaking. I started working on the project immediately in addition to my full-time enterprise job, going through a divorce, and my son starting kindergarten. About six months later, we had completed the business requirements, a project roadmap, information architecture, and about 50 percent of the UX wireframes.