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Everyone wants a million-dollar idea, but turning brainwaves into money takes more than just imagination—it helps to have a proven method, too. Like most kids, I learned the scientific method in school, so when I started my first business, I took an approach I was familiar with: testing my business hypothesis, analyzing my results, and refining until I found a solution. In the process, I learned to love solving business challenges through product innovation, which led me to found Influence Mobile, develop our flagship product, and turn a simple idea into millions.
As a leader, I still use the same scientific approach to developing innovative products. To be competitive, we must always be innovative, which means we must look for new problems to solve. Such innovative solutions often require us to make improvements we have never tried and raise questions we may not know the answer to. Even as we approach the unknown, we always have a tool to draw conclusions for better-informed decisions – the scientific method.
Related topics: The Scientific Method for Entrepreneurs: 6 Steps to Long-Term Success
Observe, question and hypothesize
To fully execute a million-dollar idea, you first need to have a clear goal in mind. The first bright idea often comes from its own scientific process: observing a problem to solve and asking questions about the best way to solve it. At our company, we recently discovered that push notifications were a key revenue driver and asked ourselves, “How can we engage long-term users of our app and increase their push notification adoption and retention?” Our traditional strategy focused on early engagement and day one ROAS, so this was our first major investment in expanding the engagement window.
To navigate this new terrain, we were guided by the scientific method: we observed end-user behavior and preferences, compared this to previous experiences, and asked ourselves how we could increase engagement based on this data. Based on our market knowledge and what we know about our users, we hypothesized that people would respond well to a game with monthly collectibles and winning opportunities and attractive giveaways. We also came up with several other hypotheses, but when we compared them with our existing data, we settled on the one that seemed most effective in leading us to a solution.
Related: How do you bring innovations to market?
Experiment and refine
To turn a product hypothesis into a revenue stream, we need to test it and refine it into its most effective form. After developing our game and the aspects we predicted users would like, we built a small prototype and shared it with a few hundred players. Again, we observed their behavior and asked more questions: How did they interact with the game? How many push notifications did they accept?
Notably, 90% of players enabled push notifications and 6 out of 10 players opted to receive the maximum number of 10 notifications daily. Almost 40% of players who traded tokens opted to haggle rather than letting the trade happen automatically. This high push notification adoption and community engagement brought new challenges for us, but the initial feedback was promising.
Still, no product is perfect from the start. That's why the scientific method requires continuous experimentation. In product development, that means rapid, frequent testing to confirm our theories or get immediate feedback to refine the approach. After our initial testing, we rolled out the game to larger and larger groups, surveyed players, and identified areas that could be improved. Through user feedback and our own experiences, we realized that more gameplay options would appeal to different types of players, and refined our product to meet more user needs.
Related: The Ten Commandments of Business Innovation
Analyze data and iterate improvements
Each test generates more data to further refine, and each iteration brings the original idea closer to becoming a fundable product. Observe and identify key metrics that indicate the product's success. Then ask questions: How do we increase these metrics? Who are the right partners? What is the smallest version we can use for testing? Start as general as possible, then refine with each of the many iterations.
For us, push notification adoption had a direct impact on user engagement, so we observed and asked questions: Did players interact with the game as expected? Did they accept more push notifications? What did the data tell us about their preferences? We hired an experienced game development company, conducted surveys, and analyzed player behavior, engagement, and push notification adoption before and after the game launched. Our hypothesis was correct, but by analyzing the data and refining this metric, we revealed what worked alongside targeted areas for improvement.
Draw conclusions, start and learn
After several rounds of testing and refinement, we can draw conclusions about the best product that is most likely to be a million-dollar success. For our game, we concluded that competitive gameplay and personalized options would drive long-term engagement and adoption of push notifications. So we brought our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a larger audience, evaluated new data, and uncovered more problems. Here, too, we used the scientific method to observe, question, hypothesize, test, and refine our biggest opportunities for improvement.
The initial feedback gave us confidence, but we didn't stop there. Truly measuring retention and engagement is a long process. The MVP phase showed us the impact of scaling in real time, but the product is still in very early stages even after launching to tens of thousands of players. Much like our flagship app, which spent years testing and optimizing to reach over a hundred million in revenue, we will continue to collect data and make further improvements to ensure our game remains exciting and relevant.
The principles of the scientific method serve as a timeless guide to problem solving and idea innovation. This iterative process takes ideas through discovery and improvement, transforming them into sustainable growth and success. Whether developing a new app, launching a product, or improving an existing service, the scientific method provides a structured process that anyone can use to navigate innovation with greater confidence.
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