It started with a sticky note.
Back in the early 2000s, a team of engineers at a small tech company needed a way to track their tasks. They hacked together a simple board, using sticky notes to organize ideas into columns: “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done.” It wasn’t flashy, but it worked.
That scrappy little experiment? It became Trello—one of the most popular productivity tools in the world.
Stories like this are everywhere in tech: Massive successes that grew out of humble, small-scale experiments. Yet, in a field obsessed with moonshots and disruption, we often forget the power of starting small.
The Myth of the Big Idea
When people think about tech innovation, they picture billion-dollar ideas, bold visions, and dramatic breakthroughs. And while those moments make headlines, the truth is that most great ideas don’t start out big.
Take Twitter, for example. It began as an internal side project called “twttr,” created during a company hackathon. Airbnb? It started as two people renting out an air mattress in their apartment to make some extra cash.
What these success stories have in common isn’t grand ambition—it’s small, low-risk experiments that uncovered something bigger.
Why Small Experiments Lead to Big Wins
Big ideas often feel overwhelming. They’re expensive, time-consuming, and carry a high risk of failure. But small experiments? They’re agile, affordable, and fast.
Here’s why they work:
- You learn faster. A small experiment lets you test an idea quickly, without waiting months (or years) to find out if it works.
- You minimize risk. If your experiment fails, the cost is low. If it succeeds, you’ve got valuable data to scale up.
- You uncover surprises. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from unexpected results—things you wouldn’t have discovered without testing.
In a way, small experiments are like open-source projects: They allow you to build iteratively, adding layers of functionality as you go.
Tech Giants and the Power of Small
Even the biggest players in tech rely on small-scale experimentation to drive innovation.
- Google: Famous for its “20% time,” which encourages employees to dedicate a portion of their workweek to side projects. Gmail and Google Maps? Both started as small experiments during this time.
- Amazon: Jeff Bezos once said, “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.” Prime, Alexa, and even AWS grew out of small-scale tests.
- Netflix: Before it became a streaming giant, Netflix tested the waters with a DVD rental service. Their shift to streaming was a calculated experiment—and a game-changer.
These companies didn’t start with fully-formed products. They started with questions: What if we tried this? What happens if we tweak that?
How to Build Your Own Small Experiments
You don’t need a massive budget or a team of engineers to experiment like a tech giant. All you need is a willingness to start small and learn as you go. Here’s how:
- Start with a question. Every experiment begins with curiosity. What problem are you trying to solve? What assumption do you want to test?
- Build a minimum viable product (MVP). Create a basic version of your idea. It doesn’t have to be polished—it just needs to work well enough to gather feedback.
- Test in the real world. Share your experiment with a small audience, whether that’s friends, colleagues, or a niche user group.
- Analyze and iterate. Use the feedback to refine your idea, then test again. Each cycle brings you closer to something great.
When Small Becomes Scalable
Here’s the beauty of starting small: It gives you room to scale up.
Stripe, now a giant in online payments, began as a simple tool for developers. Its founders didn’t set out to build a fintech empire—they focused on solving a small, specific problem: making it easier for developers to accept payments.
By the time Stripe gained traction, its foundation was rock-solid. Starting small didn’t just reduce risk; it created a scalable framework for growth.
Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be Big—Just Bold
In a world that celebrates moonshots, it’s easy to feel like you need a groundbreaking idea to make an impact. But the truth is, most of tech’s biggest wins come from bold, small-scale experiments.
You don’t need to build the next Tesla or revolutionize AI to innovate. You just need to start—on a sticky note, a prototype, or an idea scribbled in the margins of your notebook.
Because in the end, big things don’t start big. They start with a question, a test, a single step.
What small experiment could you start today? It might not feel like much now, but give it time. You never know where it might take you.
