How 'random experimentation' is defining a new wave of entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are known as risk takers: people with a bold vision who go all in, investing their time, energy and money in a single idea. According to Dr. Mohammad Keyhani at the Haskayne School of Business, and recent graduate Dr. Zahra Jamshidi, PhD’25, a new, and often successful brand of entrepreneur is emerging who does not fit that description.  

Known as indie makers, these entrepreneurs (who are often "solopreneurs") are not characterized by betting all their resources in a single idea, hoping to beat the odds. Instead, they run a variety of quick, low-cost and low-risk experiments to see what works. 

"In contexts where uncertainty is extremely high and some rare ventures can, and do, achieve extreme success, entrepreneurship can begin to resemble gambling," says Keyhani, PhD. "Indie entrepreneurs are adopting deliberate experimentation strategies to manage this randomness."

Keyhani, associate professor of entrepreneurship and innovation, suggests there are several reasons why an emphasis on experimentation is appealing. It helps avoid the massive failures that sink many ventures when they go to market. It also allows startups to test ideas quickly and cheaply, without committing all their resources upfront. 

Random experimentation is not as aimless as the name suggests 

An approach reminiscent of scientific experimentation (hypothesize, experiment, test and adapt) is popular with lean startups. However, solopreneurs are adopting random experimentation as an alternative strategy.  

Rather than prioritizing theorizing and analysis, random experimentation emphasizes speed and volume. The more independent experiments an entrepreneur launches, the more likely they are to find one that leads to success.  

Even without investor capital, employees or external teams, some of the solopreneurs embracing random experimentation are, Keyhani says, “achieving exceptional results, reaching levels of profitability previously considered extremely rare, if not impossible to achieve as a bootstrapped solopreneur.” 

Harnessing the predictive power of random experimentation

In a recent paper in the Academy of Management Perspectives, Keyhani and Jamshidi took a closer look at successful examples of random experimentation as a strategic approach to entrepreneurship and propose a model which can be used to harness the predictive power of random experimentation.  

As Keyhani explains it, experimentation increases the likelihood of extreme outcomes, and the chances of a successful outlier can be precisely calculated if you know the statistical distribution of outcomes in your industry.  

“For example, if you are looking at the type of power-law statistical distributions that startup revenues have, for an entrepreneur who is able to run five micro-experiments instead of one, the odds of at least one 95th-percentile outcome rise from 5% to 23%,” he says. “When an entrepreneur or experimenter knows what kind of probability distribution they are dealing with, they can use the information in strategic ways.  

“Such experimentation is a workable strategy for dealing with the randomness inherent not just to entrepreneurship, but any other domain where we can experiment relatively easily and have some information about the statistical distribution of outcomes.” 

Entrepreneurship will always require vision, effort and dedication, but it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing gamble.