The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die
“You can’t trust the model until you get all the intuition out of it,” says Thomas Thurston, founder and CEO of Growth Science. If you want to predict if your innovation will succeed, don’t use intuition, use analytics. It’s called ‘business model simulation’ and Growth Science has figured out how to be right about 66 percent of the time when predicting that an opportunity will be successful for a company (when predicating failure, they’re right 88 percent of the time).
The Growth Science approach is based on turning various pieces of qualitative information—such as whether a company is a “first mover” or “fast follower” in a market—into quantitative data that he can plug into a simulation built from the actual results of thousands of successful and failed businesses and opportunities. The simulation results in some non-intuitive outcomes such as the finding that the team pursuing the opportunity is only about 12 percent predictive of its success. The market the opportunity is meant for is far more important than who’s in charge.
This is ‘Moneyball’ for innovators and entrepreneurs. It takes the intuition or ‘gut’ out of the equation and helps them avoid particularly bad ideas that, to the untrained eye, look like excellent opportunities.