Creators, Thought Leaders, and Rebels: It’s Time to Be an N of One

How self-testing is the quickest way to ensure your best work thrives

In the academic and scientific world, we use the variable ’N’ to represent the number of participants, responses, or subject in a testing set. Whether you survey ten thousand customers (an N of ten thousand), or you develop a new therapeutic drug and you need an adequate, estimated patient population to predict reactions in a world-wide release — the N is big deal.

What about you?

You’ve seen the data. There are new numbers daily. If we tweak this we can expect that. There’s a new trend here. The numbers tells us. Don’t do this anymore, because they numbers don’t lie. New results say all customer like blue-colored buy buttons. Surveys say only five industries will survive the next economic collapse… the numbers are everywhere.

The numbers get clicks. The numbers make headlines. The numbers move the needle with content creators.

Most of the research is well-meaning and genuine. Scientific method is thorough when done well. The number don’t lie. Data are data. You can’t argue with the facts. If it’s on the chart it must be true.

Well, the numbers do lie sometimes.

This isn’t a slam on research. I’m a researcher. But if we want our creative work to thrive, there’s a better way (and a faster way) than to assume the research will give us the same results in our niche.

The commoditized data you find for your niche may not be relevant to your creative work. Instead of running the endless treadmill of keeping up with the data joneses, it’s time to take a different approach.

It’s time to be an N of one.

What’s an N of one

If you want results in your business (or your work) there’s no better laboratory than your business.

An N of one develops a custom solution for her specific work.

As creators we have unique customers. We’ve got a unique ecosystem to serve these customers. We’re start-ups, visionaries, established creators, and early adopters. We don’t follow the rules. We make the rules.

The best way we can make a big impact on our work is to test variables in our business and ignore all the other hype.

Sure, we can get some great ideas from the bigger dataset, but without testing and applying changes to our work — none of the global advice should be accepted as wrote.

Even more important are the changes we can test for which the data don’t exist.

What can we test to grow our work?

Whether you’ve got a start-up, you’re an office of one, or your an established creator looking to grow, there are a handful of big-ticket areas you can test for valuable growth.

Yes, you can test colors, images, and button text, but those are fine-tuning tweaks for extra tenths of a percent.

We want to get you some big wins fast. Here are some N of one areas to help get big results now:

• Your email subject lines — You can spend six months crafting the perfect emails, but if your subject lines aren’t compelling
• Your email opt-in offer — Are you giving away a throwaway offer or something valuable worth paying-for. If you wouldn’t pay real cash for the offer you give, it may be time to boost the offer.
• Your email marketing — Why do your subscribers join your list? They want a transformation from their current situation to a new one. They want valuable email content that benefits them. Not an advertisement that makes you feel good. We send email to establish a long-term relationship, not a quick one-pump sale.
• Your website format — Your site should have a single purpose. Whether that’s to educate, sell, collect names, or promote your work, start with your purpose and adjust your site to feed the sole purpose. For many creators email is the key. Changing your homepage to a welcome-mat style (with your sign-up offer at the top) will increase your sign-ups by double digits.
• Your hook — Your hook is the headline of your offer, your business, and your email opt-in. You’ll have multiple hooks throughout your work. Your hook is the reason people click your ad, one your email, read more about your offer, or ignore you and keep scrolling. Test your hooks frequently and watch the data.
• Your offer — Maybe there’s something wrong with your offer. Maybe your price doesn’t match the perceived value of your work. Maybe you haven’t done your research and your offer doesn’t match what your customers want. Your product/work may be fine, but the way you package said work can make or break the sale.
• Your story — Customers want to believe in the products and services they purchase. Our buying habits represent part of our identity. If your story isn’t strong enough (where you come from, why you do what you do, why your different than any other option) then you’ll have a hard time getting customers to imagine your work in their lives. Sometimes all it takes is re framing your current story to 10X your customer impact.
• Your price/value ratio — Price is a relative. As long as the buyer feels she get more value in return for the price paid, you’ve got a much better chance at making a sale. Sometimes price requires a bigger value anchor. Other times you may need to add additional services or add-ons if you want to keep your price at its current level. You can be a premium-price leader, but you’ve got to deliver the value to command premium prices.

We need you to be your own laboratory

We want you to make the experience better for us — to help us imagine your work in our lives. Your first test (or your tenth) may not succeed, but you’ll learn new insight from each change.

We tweak. We wait. We re-test.

Test one big item at a time. Act like a scientist in a lab. If you change too many variables at once you won’t know which change made the difference. You may find your results in direct contradiction to the common assumptions.

Keep meticulous records.

We don’t want to waste time testing the same variable more than once. Be sure your dataset is large enough to predict the same result on a large audience.

You are your best test subject.

There’s nothing more custom than the right formula for your business and your customers. No amount of popular wisdom can compare to the hard-data you’ll discover as you become an N of one.

We’re waiting for you.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +428,678 people.

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