As the year comes to a close, we here, at Experiment Nation, take a look back at some of the highlights from the last 12 months. Sure it’s a bit of a humblebrag, but it makes us feel good and we love feeling good.
We found our focus
While we always wanted to connect the community, we finally formalized it in the following vision statement: “Connect the world’s Experimenters through content. Give every Experimenter a voice.” Having this vision written down has helped us make decisions in terms of what events to run, and what kinds of content to produce – and ultimately where we want to take Experiment Nation in the future.
We welcomed more Experimenters to the Nation
Not only did we turn 2 years old, we now have well over 1,600 followers on LinkedIn, very close to 1K newsletter subscribers, and hundreds of Slack members (and don’t think we’ve forgotten about our 39 – mostly real – YouTube followers we have – you matter too!) . Thank you all for joining the community, we would be no where with out you! As an added bonus for us, in recognition of how great of a community you are, we won a 2021 Experimentation Culture award for Community for a creating a “place not only for experienced experimenters, but also for beginners.”
We held fun events!
Hundreds of you participated in our Jargon/Buzzword Tournaments. In case you missed it, “A/B Testing” was this year’s most liked buzzword while “Growth Hacking” was this year’s most disliked one.
We also held our very first conference. We had an amazing lineup of speakers from all over the world – from 10 countries in fact. With over 30 sessions, close to 40 speakers, and strong representation from women and people of colour, we showed the world that we were better together by showcasing lessons from a wide variety of perspectives. If you missed it, signup to our newsletter. We share a recorded sessions every 2 weeks.
We interviewed a lot of Experimenters
We interviewed dozens of Experimenters from all over the world (e.g. France, Brazil, Netherlands, Canada, United States, New Zealand, Isreal, etc.) for our new Podcast! Check out some of our recent episodes:
We added new features to ExperimentNation.com!
We added a Merch store so Experimenters can show off their Experimentation Attitude by sporting some snazzy gear. Newsletter subscribers get 10% off!
We created a job board so Experimenters can find their next opportunity.
We also partnered with CRO Memes! We look forward to sharing their great content here and collaborating on new stuff in 2022.
We also created a Tool Finder so Experimenters can share and find great tools to help make their jobs easier.
We killed a few things from ExperimentNation.com and are rethinking others
As we all know, not every idea pans out. We tried a bunch of stuff in 2021, learned a ton, and are bringing back ideas to the drawing board.
- Kudos – We wanted community members to give each other regular encouragement and motivation. We still think the idea has some merit, but we haven’t cracked the nut yet.
- Event Calendar – Honestly, there are a LOT of great event calendars out there already. We’d rather you subscribe to those as ours was often out of date and not really in line with our vision.
- YouTube – We still haven’t figured this one out either. The production costs are pretty high and it’s tough to coordinate guests’ timezones. We are not abandoning this channel, but we’re still figuring things out.
- The Weekly Buzz – John and Bithika did a great job with this in 2021, but the effort involved, considering their busy schedules, was just too great. We recently replaced this with a “Ask the Experiment Nation” column in our newsletter. If you’d like to submit a question, submit it in our Slack channel (newsletter subscribers get access).
- Podcast Shows – We explored a ton of formats and worked with many panelists, hosts, and guests this year. We’ve gotten a little traction here and there – but it definitely is a long game. All that said, we know we have to do a better job in promotion, bringing new voices to the shows, and creating localized content. In the meantime, you can now play our recent podcasts in our sticky episode player in the footer below.
Looking forward to 2022
2022 is shaping up to be an interesting one for Experiment Nation as well. Here are some of the things to look forward to:
- Giving Experimenters more of a platform by having GUEST HOSTS for our Podcasts, and our bi-weekly newsletters
- We will be holding another conference – hopefully even more diverse and inclusive than the last one.
- We will definitely be holding another worst CRO Jargon tournament
- We are working on new partnerships to bring you even more interesting content
- We are exploring a video series with Andra Baragan where we ask Experimenters to tell us how they got started in the field. It should be fun!
- We’re proud sponsors of Speero’s Experimentation Program Maturity Audit. Speero’s experimentation program audit is a classic program management tool, meant to ask great questions to help find gaps in the efficiency or effectiveness of, in this case, experimentation programs. Fill in the audit for free and you’ll get your results at the end!
- And finally, we will be releasing a CRO salary report in early 2022 so you all can get paid fairly. Contribute today!
With that said, we wish you an amazing 2022 – thank you for coming along with us on this crazy ride.
Cheers,
Rommil Santiago
Founder, Experiment Nation
Connect with Experimenters from around the world
We’ll highlight our latest members throughout our site, shout them out on LinkedIn, and for those who are interested, include them in an upcoming profile feature on our site.
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