Stop A/B Testing Your Way to Nowhere

I had a coach recently tell me she was split-testing her content captions to see which hook drove more engagement.

She had 847 followers.

I get why it feels productive. The marketing world has told us that optimization is sophistication. That data-driven decisions are the mark of a serious operator. And that's true. At a certain scale.

She was falling into the same trap that so many coaches fall into - they are trying to apply optimization tactics to a dataset that doesn't yet exist.

A/B testing requires volume to produce a signal. If you're sending an email to 400 people and splitting it two ways, you're drawing conclusions from 200 responses. That's not data. That’s not enough data to form a signal. That's noise dressed up as insight. The same applies to your content, your offer positioning, and your DM scripts. If you don't have enough reps in the system, any pattern you think you're seeing is mostly fiction.

The phase that this coach, and most of you reading this, are in requires you to have one job: maximize output.

That means creating more content, not better content. It means sending more emails, not more refined emails. It means having more conversations, not more optimized conversations. You need volume first because volume is what generates the data that actually tells you something true.

Always maximize before you optimize.

Think about what happens when you publish 2 posts a week for a year. You've got 100 pieces of content to look at. You start to see what people actually respond to, not what you assumed they would. You learn your own voice by doing it badly a hundred times before you do it well. You build an audience big enough that when you do start testing, the results mean something.

Mr. Beast, the famous YouTuber, is famous for saying, “Don’t ask me about better hooks, thumbnails, SEO, or thumbnails until you’ve done 100 videos because they’re all going to suck, but you’ll at least know what you suck at.”

None of that happens if you're agonizing over whether to use a question or a bold statement in your opening line.

There's also a skill component here that optimization completely ignores. Writing captions, being on camera, running a sales conversation, sending a cold outreach email. These are skills. And skills are built through repetition, not refinement. You can't think your way to being good at them. You have to do them badly, repeatedly, until your body figures out what your brain can't plan for.

The coach who posts 3 times a week for a year, even if the content is rough, will be a dramatically better communicator than the one who spent that same year trying to engineer the perfect post. One of them has 150 reps. The other has 12 really polished ones. There's no version of that story where the 12 wins.

I spent a lot of time in my early years trying to optimize things that weren't ready to be optimized. Tweaking pricing before I had enough sales conversations to know what objections actually sounded like. Refining my onboarding process before I had enough clients to stress-test it. It felt like progress. I was doing work. But I was polishing something that hadn't been built yet.

If you want to win in the long term, you have to be willing to put out imperfect work at volume and let the market respond. Not waiting for the right camera setup, the perfect caption, or the ideal email sequence. Put in the reps and treat every piece of output as a data point.

Your early content isn't a portfolio. It's a practice environment. The goal is reps, not results.

There's a version of this that becomes an excuse, so let me be clear about the line. Maximizing doesn't mean being careless. You still show up prepared. You still put real thought into what you're saying and who you're saying it to. The difference is you're not holding things back, waiting for them to be perfect. You publish, you observe, you adjust. That cycle, repeated at volume, is how you build the feedback loop that actually teaches you something.

When in doubt, SEND IT!

When you're sitting on 10,000 email subscribers and 50,000 followers, absolutely start testing. Run the experiments. Squeeze efficiency out of every variable. Hire someone to manage the analytics. That's where optimization pays off because the signal is clean and the stakes are real.

Until then, the most sophisticated thing you can do is show up consistently and create at volume. The data you're trying to optimize from doesn't exist yet. You have to build it.

Most coaches ask "how do I do this better?" before they've asked it enough times to know what "better" even looks like.

What would change about your output this week if you stopped trying to get it right and started trying to get it done?

Keep Raising the Bar,

Paul Oneid MS, MS, CSCS