A lab notebook is where research scientists keep track of their experiments so that they can be reproduced and verified. Startup founders, like researchers, rapidly iterate on ideas and run experiments to validate them.
How would a lab notebook help?
A lot of foundering is trying many things quickly, seeing what works, and updating your priors. That doesn’t always lead to good explanations of why it did or didn’t work. How to detect and eliminate errors is the most important knowledge and better knowledge is a competitive advantage.
What should go into a lab notebook for founders?
- Overview: why you decided to run this experiment (I like to write briefs using SCQA)
- Protocol: the step-by-step of how you going about running the experiment
- Findings: observations, new problems that arise, and data collected along the way
- Results: the outcome and conclusions drawn from the experiment
See also:
- Product work is a pursuit of facts about the user, market, and their problems and conjecture is vital to product development
- The path from concept to product is an annealing process
- Avoid too finely organizing experiments, there is a downside to first-principles thinking, danger in empiricism, and having too narrow a view