Measuring How Fast You Learn
Sometimes you need to measure the speed of learning instead of revenue.
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In the early stages of all new products, projects and businesses there is a period where you don’t have much. You’re starting something new! You are on your way to having a productive business but you’re not there yet.
During these periods how do you measure success? For most people, the measurements of success are metrics like revenue, engagements and adoption. If you try to apply those metrics to your early project it will drive you to do short term things that don’t help reach your long term goals.
For example, if you prioritize revenue you will grasp for revenue wherever it might be. You don’t have a product to sell yet, so maybe you’ll sell services? People pay for consulting and it’s an easy way to show revenue. Unfortunately, that’s not the business you want to be in but you might soon be running a consulting business.
So, how do you measure success in those early days?
By how fast you are learning.
All new things involve a lot of learning at the beginning. Who is the customer? How do you reach them? What does it take for them to buy the product? These are questions you need to answer, and learning is how you get there.
Measuring your rate of learning is tricky, because you can feel like you are learning just by talking to more customers, doing more research and going through the motions. You need an objective way to measure learning that doesn’t let you trick yourself.
There are no perfect solutions, but here is what I have settled on after many years of doing this:
Start a blank document.
Every time you learn something you add it to the document.
Measure your learning velocity by how many lines you add every day.
I know, that sounds really simple. The best tools usually are! At first you’ll be adding a ton of new lines everyday. Eventually it gets harder to add new learnings and you need to work harder to find them. That’s good, as it pushes you to learn faster.
It is, of course, easy to game. You could just type random things into the document to add lines, or just have AI do it for you. It requires discipline to be honest about what you add, and what counts as a new learning. Sometimes learning requires you to remove lines, and that just makes it harder.
But, it’s supposed to be hard. Learning is never easy. If you are going to cheat on this, you’ll cheat on everything and the new project is already doomed to failure. The incentive is clear: do not cheat because if you do you’re just wasting your own time. That’s a powerful incentive.
I have a learning document for every new thing I start, whether it’s a new product, a new customer target or anything else. Whenever I see the number of new lines stall out, I know I’ve stopped learning and it’s time to work harder.
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Kind of related, I forget who it was but someone I met when I first moved to Silicon Valley who had been a long time said "you're either learning or you're earning" and what he meant was you either work at a startup and learn or you work at a big co and earn (his point to me was you *might* indeed earn big at a startup, but statistically you won't). Anyway I def found this to be true personally, the earlier the startup the more things I learned. I also used to write what I learned on a previous blog which is a similar exercise you suggest, it's really helpful.