Small bets, big lessons
What Brisbane founders learned about growth at Pathfinder
What separates the businesses that scale from those that stall? At the Brisbane Business Hub's latest Pathfinder Early-Stage Growth Workshop, the answer wasn't more ideas or bigger budgets – it was a willingness to test before committing.
A room of founder-led businesses came together for the Pathfinder Early-Stage Growth Workshop Series, a structured six-month program designed to support early-stage growth businesses in Brisbane as they strengthen their strategic foundations, prioritise growth opportunities and build the capability needed to scale.
Facilitated by Dr Sam Bucolo of Spark Consultants, the session featured insights from Llew Jury, Chairman of Sprint Ventures and founder of AI agency Advancer, and Dr James Fielding, CEO and Co-Founder of Audeara.
Drawing on decades of experience across venture capital, digital, AI and health technology, the conversation focused on one of the most common challenges for growing businesses: how to bring a new product to market or evolve an existing one without over-committing before you're ready.
Break it before you build it
An experiment, in the business sense, is any low-cost activity designed to test whether an idea is worth pursuing before committing significant time or resources to it. It might be a prototype shown to customers before the product is built, a pricing model trialled before it rolls out, or a single marketing message tested before a campaign goes live.
The goal is to gather just enough real-world information to make a better decision. Or, as Dr James Fielding, who has built multiple ventures across medical devices, robotics and health technology, put it: “It’s a cheap way to solve a very expensive problem.”
For Fielding, experimentation is about getting the right data; not the most data. “We run rapid experiments; just enough to get stakeholders comfortable enough to say yes and buy the product at scale,” he explained. “It's about saying, ‘We don't know if it works yet. What do you need to feel comfortable? We'll deliver that.’”
For Llew Jury, the same principle is built into how his business operates week to week. “We call them test-and-learns,” he said. “If it doesn't work, throw it out.”
His model is built around small, repeatable tests; whether that's trialling new acquisition channels, refining messaging or tracking how customers are finding the business. His team is currently testing the shift from traditional search to AI-driven discovery, asking every new customer how they found them and adjusting in real time.
"What we do is break off one or two experiments every month,” Jury said. “If it doesn't work, you make the call and leave it behind. It's a constant test-and-learn.”
And when does he make that call? “Eight to 12 weeks, you throw it out,” he said. "You dust three to ten grand. You're not sitting on a hundred grand over six months. You're rapidly iterating, and if it's not going to work, you move on.”
Fielding runs a similar cadence on the product side. “Our tech team works on two-week sprints," he said. "If I want something tested, it has to be deliverable within that window, and if it doesn't work, get on with it.”
The mechanics are straightforward: small tests, clear intent, fast feedback. But as Dr Sam Bucolo noted, the hard part is being prepared to accept whatever the experiment tells you. “Experimentation is the easy part,” he said. “The real difficulty is having the ability to listen to it and feel comfortable that it may not work.”
Best tools: Loveable, Replit and Cursor are making it easier than ever to test ideas quickly. Instead of spending months building a full product, businesses can now spin up a simple prototype or landing page in hours – just enough to test whether an idea resonates.
When you assume…
Every business idea rests on a set of assumptions. That a customer wants it, that they'll pay for it, that they'll behave in a certain way, that it will drive growth. The problem is that most of those assumptions are never made explicit. They sit just below the surface, showing up as instinct or gut feel rather than something that gets challenged.
Before you can run a useful experiment, you need to surface those assumptions and decide which ones are worth testing first.
For Jury, most assumptions start the same way. Someone in the business has a hunch, built from experience, and everyone around the table nods along. The problem isn't the hunch. It's what happens when it never gets challenged.
“We're doing A/B split testing so we can give that data back to the leadership team and say, ‘Your hunch was right’, or, ‘Actually, here's some data that tells a slightly different story,’” he said.
That process happens alongside normal operations, with minimal disruption to the core business. It might mean testing two versions of a message, comparing acquisition channels, or trialling new ways of converting leads.
For Fielding, the most dangerous assumptions are often the most intuitive; the ones the team feels most confident about. “The biggest assumptions we've made are that we think the customer will like something about our product,” he said.
In practice, that meant building highly sophisticated technology around features the team believed would resonate, only to discover the market simply didn't care. “We had a great solution,” Fielding said – the problem was, the market hadn't asked for it.
And it went deeper than that. His team realised they'd made an even more fundamental assumption about who the customer actually was. “The first assumption we made was: we think this will be our customer,” he explained. “It turned out that if we wanted to help the hearing health industry, we needed to get embedded where the customer already lives.”
Correcting that assumption took years and significant investment. But it also unlocked the growth they'd been looking for. The goal, then, isn't to eliminate assumptions, because every business runs on them. It's to catch them early enough to test them cheaply.
Best tools: Pre-testing tools like HeatSeeker.ai allow businesses to validate messaging before it goes live. By testing variations of ads or positioning, you can gather real-world data on what resonates, before committing budget or rolling out a campaign. AI tools like PromptCowboy can help turn rough ideas into structured briefs you can actually test.
Don’t stop seeking validation
Validation is where the rubber meets the road. Running an experiment is one thing; deciding what's actually worth building off the back of it is another entirely.
For Fielding, validation starts with a simple economic question. Before committing resources to a new feature or direction, his team asks whether it will actually move the needle. “We have to ask, will we sell more by having that feature?” he said. “Say it costs a hundred grand to deliver. Will it make more than a hundred grand next year?”
If the answer is unclear, the case for building it usually isn't strong enough. More often than not, Fielding said, the better opportunity is already in front of you. “Overservicing your existing customers and making them repeat buyers is actually a far better use of everyone's time and energy,” he said.
But to overservice a customer, you first have to understand what they actually need. For Jury, that means getting close enough to find the opportunity sitting behind the initial request.
“Clients would come to us and say they needed SEO," he said. "But after you sat down and really got to know them, a lot of the time they never did SEO. They did Meta ads, or LinkedIn, or Google pre-roll. The ask and the answer were completely different things, and that client who came in for a five grand job could turn out to be with you for the next ten years. But you'll miss all of that if you don't sit and listen to what’s really driving them.”
Best tools: Simple feedback loops can go a long way here. Tools like Airtable or your CRM can be used to automatically capture insights from lost leads or non-conversions, helping you understand not just what worked, but why something didn’t.
The experiment never ends
The businesses that scale are the ones that keep asking questions. Experimentation and validation aren't a phase you go through only at the start of something new – they're a discipline, built into how you operate day to day, alongside your current customers, within your existing business.
“Experimentation is just part of your business,” said Bucolo in closing. “There are tools out there to do it. Don't be afraid of it. Get in front of your customers and ask them. They’ll tell you what you need to know, as long as you ask them the right questions.”
