Building Sollos: Growth Experiments
4 min read
Growth Strategy, Go-To-Market, Marketing, Experimentation, Venture Building, Sollos, Startups
Before committing to a full launch, we treated growth like product work. Small experiments helped us understand who the product resonated with, and why.
Pressure-testing a go-to-market plan?
Once the product and brand were in a solid place, we moved into go-to-market. Not a big launch, but a series of controlled experiments designed to answer some basic but critical questions.
Who would this resonate with? What would they respond to? And how much might it cost to reach them?
The only way to answer those questions properly was to treat growth like product work. Build, test, measure, refine.
Working with BCG’s growth team, we designed a set of low-risk experiments. Multiple landing pages. Different audience segments. Variations in messaging, tone, and emphasis. The goal wasn’t scale, it was signal.
Because the project was still in stealth mode, we couldn’t test under the Sollos name. So we created a complete “stand-in” brand for the experiments, similar enough to feel plausible, but distinct enough to protect what we were building. Rob Ryan designed the identity and collateral so the ads and landing pages looked credible, not like placeholders.
We then pushed simple ads across a range of platforms with clear calls to action. Learn more. Sign up. Try it. The product itself didn’t need to exist yet. What mattered was behaviour, what people clicked on, how long they stayed, and what it cost to get them there.
Some messages performed better than expected. Others didn’t land at all. We tracked everything and started to build a picture of what might work at scale. These early tests also gave us initial benchmarks for acquisition cost and conversion, which later shaped commercial discussions.
Patterns emerged quickly. Some audiences responded strongly to the science. Others were more motivated by sleep, stress, or focus. Another group leaned into the fact that the experience was built on music from artists they already knew and trusted.
That insight mattered. It allowed us to refine the narrative, adjust emphasis, and plan the next wave with far more confidence than we would have had otherwise.
Growth experiments aren’t about guessing the answer. They’re about removing assumptions early, while the cost of being wrong is still low.