9/8/20254 min

Observa, aprende y decide

Observe: real evidence

When you launch something you have created, it is difficult to examine it objectively. It is normal to look for signals that confirm your expectations, which is why observing requires:

Return to the questions you wanted to answer (what you needed to learn with this launch, what behavior you expected, what would be a favorable signal, what would have challenged your Hypothesis...).
Look for real evidence.

Ask yourself what you are going to analyze to obtain the data you need. For example, if a landing page receives a thousand visits, the number may seem relevant, but perhaps your question was not how many people arrived at it, but how many were willing to share their data to try the proposal, how many responded to an email afterwards, or how many accepted to pay. The data only acquires meaning when it relates to a hypothesis.

What if nothing happens?

What the people say provides information. What they do provides a stronger evidence. But… what if they say or do nothing?
This the absence of a response is also information; it may indicate that the channel was not suitable, that the message was not understood, that you reached the wrong people, or that the proposal was not relevant enough. It does not automatically reveal which of these explanations is correct, but it does forces you to formulate a new question. And with it will come a learning that will help you decide.

Learn: Is it worth building something?

Learning means updating what you thought: perhaps you thought you had detected a problem and conversations led you to a different one. A solution that seemed obvious may have proven irrelevant when tested. Or you may have found your audience in a place you did not even imagine at the beginning. That journey is not a deviation from the entrepreneurship process; it is the process. Surely, your own idea about what it means to start a business has changed on that path.

All this has happened thanks to learning. And the way you have acquired this knowledge has also taught you that you do not need to build something to understand whether it is worth getting to work. With the signals and the evidence, you can now decide whether to do it… or not.

Decide: opinions vs. evidence

making a decision is not easy, but you have all the tools you need you need. You already know to distinguish between your interpretations (what you imagined) and the facts (what actually happens). Use the evidence you have observed and ask yourself:

- Is there enough evidence to continue? Keep going.
- Is the evidence insufficient to decide? Adjust a specific part, design a new experiment and try again.
- Does the evidence show that any of your fundamental hypotheses do not hold? Pivot.
- Does it show that there is no interest in your idea? To stop.

Stopping is also a valid decision

Entrepreneurship is often told as a story of perseverance: you have to insist, overcome obstacles, and keep trying. That this outdated narrative can become poor advice to make decisions. In reality, continuing only makes sense when there is a reason to do so. The time and effort you have already dedicated to the project are not evidence that you should dedicate more; they are resources you have already used. The relevant question is what the available signals tell you about what is worth doing next.

To answer it, it may be useful establishing criteria in advance to indicate when to reconsider or abandon an idea: the problem is not as important as you thought, the audience does not respond, the channel does not allow you to reach the audience sustainably, people are not willing to pay… these signals already point you in a direction.

Stop is not a failure, since there is always learning. In fact, this entire process has taught you to to ask yourself better questions. Not to waste time building something nobody wants. You did not have this information when you started. that’s why it was necessary to go out into the street.