The Salt Test is coming

I am excited to announce that after three years of writing, my book ‘The Salt Test’ will soon be available to purchase on Amazon.

The full title is ‘The Salt Test: How to take an innovative product from idea to scale’.

Who is the book for?

It is designed for anyone who is looking to build an innovative technical product. This includes start-up founders and corporate innovators. It is for anyone who has an idea and wants to know where to start, how to take a product to market, and how to give it the best possible chance to achieve scale.

Why is it called The Salt Test?

Legend has it that if you wanted to work with the great inventor, Thomas Edison, you would have to complete a gruelling interview process. It included several stages. If you were fortunate enough to reach the final step, Edison himself would invite you down to his cafeteria for lunch.

While this may sound very casual and informal, this lunch was the final test. Edison was watching for something very specific. He wanted to know what you would do with your salt. Would you add salt to your food before you tasted it, or would you taste your food first?

If you tasted your food first, you would pass. If not, you would go no further.

This may sound trivial, but Edison had his reasons. He believed that you should never take an irreversible action based on an assumption, without verifying that assumption first. In other words, you should never add salt to your food before tasting it first.  

Innovation, by its very nature, is full of assumptions. The risk of falling into the Assumption Trap, where you treat your assumptions as fact, is therefore high. I personally believe that this is one of the primary reasons innovative products fail. We invest money and resources on unproven assumptions, and unproven assumptions have a high probability of failure. 

By understanding this, and addressing it, innovative products have a significantly better chance of success. That is the core theme of the book – how to successfully take an innovative product from idea to scale by continuously identifying and testing assumptions, step by step.