Yesterday we organised a webinar and we messed up. This piece is about how we turned that failure into a learning.
The webinar was about market validation - a masterclass format we were experimenting with for the first time. And by virtue of this incident, we ended up doing some market validation of our own.
A little context: we set up the meeting link wrong. Some registered attendees received a Google Meet (we were using Zoom). Others didn’t receive a link at all.
We realised this 4 minutes into the webinar, sitting in an empty room.
And then came the flood of LinkedIn messages and the phone calls. People who were trying to join but couldn’t. By this point, my colleagues were already scrambling to respond individually.
In validation you look for early signals. Data that confirms what was (till then) just an idea. And as you receive signals, the amount of associated risk reduces. See the know it all curve below.
Unintentionally, we had done a “Interest Discovery Test''. This is where you put an idea out there and gauge the interest of the audience by measuring their reaction.
So while yes, the webinar started 10 minutes late and yes, we probably missed some attendees in the process, the reaction we got from people were the early signals we needed.
This incident validated both the demand for the content and the format of delivery. And based on this, we’ll be spending more time refining and experimenting. I mean hey, I’m already writing a blog post on it.
The only difference now: the time and resources that we spend on organisation and delivery is de-risked.
If you'd like to talk about how to build an experimentation mindset in your team, you can discuss ideas with our Growth Expert here.
