Part II - Hypothesis & Testing

Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Hypothesis

Everything that I've been lucky to be exposed to has left me with a very strong belief that, if currently available technologies were to be wielded efficiently & strategically by a digitally self-reliant individual, they can be tremendous enablers for people with rich and moving personal stories to reach millions, if not billions, of people around the world.

I finally took credit for all of the jaw-dropping odds I had to overcome to be where I am and realized that I've never stopped honing my digital self-reliance skills. So, with all the finesse I've developed over the years with everything that has to do with technology, I strongly believed that, as a digitally self-reliant individual who can efficiently and strategically command cutting-edge technology, I can growth-hack my story to the New York Times Best Seller list, one day, by leveraging everything I've learned about how the internet, money, and people work.

To know whether I was on to something or blowing smoke, I had to establish go/no-go criteria. Having learned from one of my favorite books on content creation that one does not go from entertaining zero people to entertaining a million people overnight, I decided that if 6 to 60 people were to express interest in my story, I would greenlight the whole project. If not, I was determined to try my luck at some other project.

Why the 6-60 people range specifically? I figured that if I couldn't get at least 0.1-1% of the total people I can reach with my social media channels (6,000 on IG + LinkedIn), 6-60 people, to be interested in what I was peddling, I would have to re-think the whole idea.

Testing

I understood that it was not realistic to expect everyone who liked/loved/was interested in hearing more about my story to DM me or call or email me directly. So I ruled that out as a viable means to test my hypothesis.

So I went back to numbers. Because, you know what they say, numbers don't lie.

But if only there was a way to share a link and know how often it was clicked and where the people who clicked on it are located. If such a way existed, then I could just create my pilot episode, use my social media channels for distribution (to share the link to the episode), and sit back and wait. Wait for people to tell me that either:

• they are interested in what I have to share with them by clicking on the link I've told them that if they click it they will be listening to my story or
• they are not interested in what I have to share with them by (not) clicking on the link I've told them that if they click it they will be listening to my story.

I just saw it like "it will be great and feel amazing if people do personally reach out to let me know what they thought but if they don't then so be it. I will just keep an eye on the click count and it will tell me the story behind the story".

In Part 3, I share the tools & techniques I used to test this hypothesis.