How Alder’s Razor can help you focus on what matters in your startup

1 in 5 startups fail due to aimlessness.

As a startup founder, you face countless decisions and unknowns — all day, every day. It can be overwhelming, and it can lead to bouncing around from item to item. You’re busy every day, but never making any progress.

As a student of the metacognition of innovation and entrepreneurship, I’m always looking for tools and mental models to help startup founders be more successful.

One of the best tools for focus is called Alder’s Razor:

What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.

It was coined by Australian mathematician Mike Alder in the May/June 2004 issue of Philosophy Now, though he called it “Newton's Flaming Laser Sword”, because it is "much sharper and more dangerous than Occam's Razor".

While Alder was mocking scientists’ propensity for dismissing philosophy out of hand as an non-meaningful pursuit, it’s a perfect rule of thumb for the empirical world.

Startups are empirical pursuits.

In an early-stage startup, we have a lot of assumptions, but very few facts.

That’s why we’re constantly talking about hypotheses, experimentation, build-measure-learn loops, and the acquisition of data. Yet, so much time in so many startups is spent discussing things we can’t resolve, or aren’t ready to resolve.

Alder’s Razor can help us focus.

You can break everything you’re debating into two categories: that which we can verify with experiment and that which we can't. Your job is to verify the former — and ignore the latter.

For example:

• If we have no users, spending any time figuring out retention is a waste of time.

• If we don't know where our customers are and how to find them, it's a waste of time to toy with copywriting.

• If we have no mechanism for bringing traffic to our website, it's ridiculous to try to optimize the landing page.

• If we don’t have a validated product yet, it’s a waste of time designing a logo.

I could go on and on.

Next time you’re stuck pondering a decision in your startup, ask yourself if it can be resolved with experiment. If it can’t, you’re wasting your time.