quant is one way to handle it… the other is to just go with your gut & gauge customer reaction.

in startups, i prefer the latter. trying, failing, and rebuilding is a much better strategy IMO when agility is your competitive advantage. as you know ;-) larger companies have huge resource advantages but they are slow. they can take a long time to just figure out what the right question is, much less performing a quant study to verify a hypothesis. and by that time the study is no longer valid because market dynamics especially on the Web shift so fast.

i would be very interested to see your thoughts about performing quant studies effectively in a startup environment. how can quant supplement the agility & speed of “doing” that makes better startups so effective. a combination of the two impresses me as the way to go.

Chris