Wide Aperture, Then Coalesce
Keep considering many ideas — including ones that look bad — and test cheap versions until the signals converge on one
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Droege's idea-selection process: hold a deliberately wide aperture on candidate ideas for as long as possible, including ideas that seem bad at first, and keep digging or cheaply testing versions until the evidence coalesces on the winner. He explicitly disclaims being 'the smartest person in the room' and lets many small experiments do the deciding.
Origin
Jason Droege's method for choosing what business Uber should enter, which produced Uber Eats after ~15 tested versions of adjacent ideas.
Core principles
- 01Ideas that look bad at the start may be wrong-looking, not actually bad — keep digging to find out
- 02Stay open far longer than feels comfortable; narrow only when everything coalesces
- 03Cheap real-world tests beat armchair judgment about what will work
- 04Let signals across many attempts, not a single hunch, pick the winner
- 05Global/broad launch surface can be an asset when testing which idea pops
How to run it
- 1
Hold the aperture open
Maintain a very wide set of candidate ideas for as long as you can, deliberately including ones that seem bad, and resist premature narrowing.
Pro tip Adopt it as a standing philosophical principle so you don't collapse to the obvious idea too early.
- 2
Run cheap real versions
Instead of debating, launch small, low-cost tests of each candidate to see whether a 'bad-looking' idea is actually bad or just misjudged.
Watch out Skipping basic research on a category (e.g. what a convenience store really sells) will make a test fail for the wrong reasons.
- 3
Read the signals until they coalesce
Compare results across all the tested versions and commit only when one is clearly 'popping off on all signals' and the unit economics work.
Pro tip Speed of the early signal is itself information — a winner often shows up almost immediately.
Watch out Don't force convergence; wait for the evidence to actually point one direction.
In the wild
Droege's team tried convenience-item delivery vans (10 trucks, 250 SKUs in DC — 'crickets'), grocery, and point-to-point delivery, roughly 15 versions in all, before food delivery clearly popped on every signal with workable unit economics.
→ Uber Eats launched in Toronto Dec 2015 and did ~$20,000 in sales within two hours, confirming the coalescing signal; it grew to ~$20B in 4.5 years.
Common mistakes
Dismissing bad-looking ideas without digging
An idea that seems bad at the start may just be misjudged; closing the aperture early means you never test whether you were wrong about it.
Testing without doing the category research
The convenience-van test flopped partly because they 'hadn't really done the research on what convenience stores really were' — no cigarettes, beer, or slurpees meant no traffic, so the test failed for reasons unrelated to the core idea.
Is it for you?
Best for
Teams inside a resourced company scanning many possible new business lines
Not ideal for
Focused startups that must concentrate all resources on a single bet and can't afford parallel experiments
From the transcript
“I keep a very, very wide aperture on ideas for as long as I can until I'm like, okay, everything is coalescing”
“you just keep digging and see if you're right that they're bad or you're wrong”
“we tried like 15 versions of all these things before we eventually just said okay the food delivery thing is just popping off on all…”
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Jason Droege