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Everyone wants a million-dollar idea, but it takes greater than just imagination to turn brainwaves into bankroll—it takes a proven method. Like most youngsters, I learned the scientific method in school, so when I first wanted to start a company, I took the approach I used to be familiar with: I tested my business hypothesis, analyzed the results, and tweaked until I had a solution. In the process, I learned to love solving business challenges through product innovation, which led me to found Influence Mobile, develop our flagship product, and turn a easy idea into tens of millions.
As a leader, I proceed to apply the same scientific approach to progressive product development. To be competitive, we must at all times be progressive, which suggests we should be on the lookout for recent problems to solve. Such progressive solutions often require us to make improvements we have never tried, which raises questions we may not know how to answer. Even as we approach the unknown, we at all times have a tool for drawing conclusions to make more informed decisions—the scientific method.
Observe, query and hypothesize
To fully execute a million-dollar idea, start with a clear goal. Finding that initial spark often comes through your own scientific process: observing a problem to solve and asking questions about the best way to solve it. At our company, we recently saw that push was a major revenue driver and asked ourselves, “How can we engage long-term players in our app and increase their push adoption and retention?” Our traditional strategy focused on early engagement and Day 1 ROAS, so this was our first big investment in extending the engagement window.
To navigate this recent terrain, we let the scientific method be our guide: we observed end-user behaviors and preferences, compared them to previous experiences, and asked how to drive engagement based on that data. Using our market intelligence and what we knew about our users, we hypothesized that individuals would respond well to a game with monthly opportunities to collect and win and attractive gifts. We got here up with a few other hypotheses as well, but when we paired them with our existing data, we selected the one that seemed to most effectively guide us toward a solution.
Experiment and improve
To turn a product hypothesis into a revenue stream, we want to test and refine it into its only form. Once we had our game and the facets we thought people would really like, we built a small prototype and released it to a few hundred players. We again observed their behavior and asked more questions: How did they engage with the game? How many push notifications did they accept?
Interestingly, 90% of players have enabled push notifications, with 6 out of 10 players opting to receive up to 10 per day. Almost 40% of players who traded game items opted for haggling over automated transactions. This high acceptance of push messages and community engagement presented us with recent challenges, but initial feedback was promising.
But no product is perfect right off the bat. That’s why the scientific method requires constant experimentation. In product development, which means rapid, frequent testing to confirm our theories or get immediate feedback to refine our approach. After our initial testing, we rolled out the game to larger and larger groups, surveyed players, and identified areas for improvement. Through user feedback and our own experiences, we determined that more gameplay options would appeal to several types of players, and we refined our product to meet more user needs.
Analyze data and make improvements
With each test comes more data to refine, each iteration moving the initial idea closer to a bankrollable product. Observe and discover key metrics that might indicate product success. Then ask: How are we driving these metrics? Who are the right partners? What is the smallest version we are able to use to test? Start as broadly as possible, then refine with each of multiple iterations.
For us, push acceptance had a direct impact on user engagement, so we observed and asked questions: Were players engaging with the game as expected? Were they accepting more push notifications? What did the data tell us about their preferences? We brought in an experienced game development company, conducted surveys, and analyzed player behavior, engagement, and push acceptance each before and after the game went live. Our hypothesis was on track, but by analyzing the data and focusing on this metric, we revealed what was working alongside our goal areas for improvement.
Draw conclusions, launch and learn
After multiple rounds of testing and refinement, we are able to draw conclusions about the best product to launch that can almost certainly achieve a million-dollar success. In the case of our game, we concluded that competitive gameplay and personalized options would drive long-term engagement and push notification adoption. So we rolled out our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a broader audience, evaluating recent data and uncovering more issues. We turned again to the scientific method to observe, query, hypothesize, test, and refine our biggest opportunities for improvement.
Early feedback gave us confidence, but we didn’t stop there. There’s a good distance to go to truly measure retention and engagement. The MVP phase taught us the impact of scale in real time, but the product is still in very early stages, even after launching to tens of 1000’s of players. Like our flagship app, which took years of testing and optimization to scale to over a hundred million in revenue, we’ll proceed to collect data and refine it, making further improvements to ensure our game stays engaging and relevant.
The principles of the scientific method function a timeless guide for problem-solving and progressive ideas. This iterative process guides ideas through discovery and improvement, turning them into sustained growth and success. Whether you’re developing a recent app, launching a product, or improving an existing service, the scientific method offers a structured process that anyone can follow to navigate innovation with greater confidence.