The $100 Experiment
A cheapish way to find out if an idea is worth pursuing
Imagine you have an idea for a paid community for freelance copywriters. You spend three weeks thinking about it: the structure, the pricing tiers, the content calendar, the onboarding flow. You map it all out in Notion. You tell a few people about it. They say it sounds interesting.
Then you launch and six people join and no more. You run it for four months before quietly shutting it down.
Planning can easily become a substitute for testing.
A $100 experiment is one easy way to test.
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What the rule is
Before committing meaningful time or money to any new idea, you should be able to design a test that costs no more than $100 and tells you something you couldn’t know from thinking alone.
The rule has two parts.
First: if you can’t design the test, the idea isn’t concrete enough to pursue yet.
Second: if you can design it but won’t spend $100 to run it, you don’t believe in it enough to spend six months building it.
In other words, the test provides some friction to force you to assess the idea…before the test even begins.
The idea with making it $100 is that it’s a small enough amount to run without agonizing over it, large enough to require a little skin in the game. The principle holds at $50 or $500. It’s subjective to your circumstances. Whatever the number, it should sting slightly if you waste it.
Two types of test
Demand tests answer the question: does anyone actually want this?
You’re not asking people if they’d be interested. That question is useless. You’re asking them to do something that costs them something (time, attention, or money) to signal real intent.
A demand test for the freelance copywriter community might look like this:
Post a detailed description in three relevant online communities, include a waitlist link, and spend $80 on a short paid promotion in one of them.
If thirty people sign up in two weeks, you have a signal worth acting on. If three do, you have an answer.
The test doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to produce a result you couldn’t have predicted from your desk.
Pricing tests answer the question: will anyone pay this specific amount?
Founders consistently underprice early products because they’re guessing at what feels reasonable rather than finding out what the market will accept. A pricing test forces that question into the open.
You build a minimal landing page with a real price on it, not a coming-soon page. You drive a small amount of traffic to it ($100 on a targeted social post, or a direct email to a relevant list) and watch what happens. Low click-through on the buy button tells you something. A handful of actual purchases tells you more.
Pricing data from a $100 test beats any number of survey responses.
What a failed test tells you
Failing a $100 test is not a waste. It’s the intended outcome roughly half the time.
The goal isn’t to validate every idea. It’s to find out which ideas are worth the six months that would otherwise come next. A test that tells you no one wants something at the price you need to charge has saved you six months of building and the harder, quieter failure that comes at the end of it.
While a failed test feels like losing $100, it could be the cheapest way to save yourself 6 months of wasted work. If it saves you that, then $100 is a bargain!
The ideas that survive a $100 test are worth investing in properly. The ones that don’t weren’t ready or weren’t real. Either way, useful to know before you start.
Spend a few minutes on whatever idea you’re currently sitting on. Can you design a $100 test for it? What would it look like, and what would the result need to be for you to continue?
I’d be curious to hear what you come up with.
p.s. This doesn’t just work for business ideas. You can also use this for testing things like growth channels, product features etc.
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