How is it going?

Welcome to another episode of hashtag growth here on Seeking Wisdom.

Today I'm super excited to talk about why a control group matters.

So these are for, this is for all of you people out there that are running growth experiments

or doing any kind of experimentation in your product or service and want to know is that thing

working.

I think it's an incredibly important thing that I very much discounted when I moved over into growth.

At the beginning, I was like, nah, we don't need control groups.

Like, that's super stodgy, and it's going to slow us down, and it's going to be a total pain.

And boy, I very much learned how incredibly important they are if you actually want to measure

success of something working or not working. This was probably the very first lesson that I learned

when I moved into growth. I read all the blog posts out there about experimentation and all that. And some people

talked a little bit about control groups. And I think what was missing was how critical they really are.

So I want to just define a control group. So let's think about being a kid at a science fair.

I actually, we use this example in another episode.

If you're trying to prove that black cloth is hotter in the sun, what would be really bad

is to measure the temperature of a thermometer yesterday and then wrap it in cloth today

and measure it and say that you have evidence to say that it was hotter today, right?

The thing is, it's not going to give you good results because you're missing the impact of a

gigantic variable, which is the weather, right? And I know that this sounds probably really

primitive and kind of silly to be talking about, you know, such a basic thing from the concept

of growth. But it's so, so easy to get into a mindset where you say, all right, we're going to

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