I’m a continuity direct response marketer.  My 10,000 hours were spent testing hypotheses about lists, creative, offers, products and fulfillment methods by doing thousands of univariate and multivariate tests.  Each test was, essentially, a small bet of $500 to $50,000.

I failed 99.8% of the time and am perfectly ok with that.

The reason is that those hypotheses ended up with winning ideas that ultimately generated millions of customers and billions in revenue.

I thought small bets was normal and right way to do things.  “Go big, or go home” didn’t make sense to me except when it was time to roll out one of those proven winning hypotheses.

Lo and behold, Peter Sims recently wrote a great book, Little Bets, that validated everything I learned in the world of old school direct response marketing.

So what’s a great book got to do with coffee?

Mark Suster’s recent blog post Why You Need to Take 50 Coffee Meetings is essentially saying the same thing as Sims’ book.  Make those little bets by talking with a bunch of new people.  Get a diversity of ideas and experiences, which you can do without a lot of investment in time or money.

Then, when you got the chance, you’re ready to Go Big (and not have to Go Home).

Takeaway: Test a lot of hypotheses.  Talk with a lot of people.  Get out of the office.  Get into the marketplace.