The 4-word phrase that kills good ideas

Nothing sucks the energy out of a brainstorm faster than “we already tried that.”

Why this phrase is dangerous

Every time an experiment fails, we draw a big circle around it and wall it off in our minds, and rule out entire approaches based on a single experiment.

My favourite? “We tried Facebook ads, they don’t work.”

Really? Then why is Mark Zuckerberg a trillionaire?

Meta ads, like most good ideas, only work after dozens of failed attempts.

But how do you know if you should try again or if it's genuinely a bad idea? I’m not comfortable making huge decisions based on a single experiment whose specific details nobody quite remembers.

My solution

That’s why, in my company, we have a rule:

If somebody says “we already tried that” they must show you the experiment doc.

An experiment doc contains, at a minimum, 5 things:

1. The original hypothesis and experiment design

2. The success metric and everybody’s predictions

3. Screenshots of all variants

4. Screenshots of the results metrics

5. Notes from the debrief on learnings and next steps

(I’ll link to a template below)

How to decide if you should re-try the idea

Read through the doc and ask yourself “Does this really disprove my hypothesis?” “How does this change my thinking?” “Are these same conditions still true in our business, or has something changed?”

If you’re not convinced, run the experiment again. The best ideas in history seldom work the first time.

What if you have no experiment doc’s? 

In that case, definitely run the experiment again, and document it.

I know, documentation takes time. You know what really takes time? Debating theories in the absence of data. And ignoring your best ideas because somebody said “we already tried that.”

Resources:

Here’s a link to my experiment doc template.

And my 20 scrappy growth experiments PDF

I hope this helps.