Quality trumps quantity, right? Well, not necessarily.
Let me start with a short story first.
Some time ago someone asked a question on Quora about why Keras (a deep learning framework) is so good at various machine learning competitions. There’s a website with many different Data Science & Machine Learning competitions (Kaggle), and at the time Kaggle was winning most of them. Someone on Quora wanted to know why, wanted to learn The Secret.
Here’s what the author of Keras replied:
In machine learning competitions, those who win are rarely those who had the best idea from the start, and simply implemented it, submitted their results and forgot about it.
Developing good models requires iterating many times on your initial ideas, up until the deadline; you can always improve your models further.
Your final models will typically share little in common with the solutions you envisioned when first approaching the problem, because a-priori plans basically never survive confrontation with experimental reality.
So winning is not so much about how good your theoretical vision is, it’s about how much contact with reality your vision has been through.
You don’t lose to people who are smarter than you, you lose to people who have iterated through more experiments than you did, refining their models a little bit each time.
The whole answer just begs to be put on a poster and hanged on the wall, but let me focus on the most important part:
You don’t lose to people who are smarter than you, you lose to people who have iterated through more experiments than you did, refining their models a little bit each time.
This is the mindset shift you need to embrace. Quality is good. But it’s a numbers game. The more times you try, the greater your chance to evolve, improve, evolve again, improve again, and strike gold. Even if you have started with an inferior quality at the beginning.
It’s true for machine learning, for growing your business, and for conversion optimization.
It’s not either quality or quantity.
It’s speed. Iteration. Fast failing and fast learning. Adaptability.
Just ask Darwin. It’s not the strongest who survives. There’s a reason why dinosaurs are dead, and cockroaches are practically indestructible as a species.
So let me translate this into “conversion speak,” for clarity.
Test, test, test. As much as possible, as often as possible, as quickly as possible. Don’t obsess about each test being perfect. Analyze the results, learn from them, adapt, and test again. Fail more. Fail better. And the quality will come. The more contact with reality your ideas have been through, the better your next idea, and the closer you are to winning.
It seems logical and it’s easy to agree with this. But it’s harder to put into practice. To stop obsessing about making everything perfect, and to truly start prioritizing speed.
And if you need help with failing more, and failing better, that’s just what I do.