I gave a talk to the full team last Monday.
Forty-seven people — mixed in-office and remote, all-hands format. The topic was one of our core values: Experimentation.
I chose experimentation because it costs something important in every breakthrough attempt and effort – RISK. Something that would still hold when a client leaves because we tried something that didn’t work. With that comes, new learnings Something the team could actually act on, not just writings on a wall.
Why experimentation, not innovation
I started by asking the team: why experimentation instead of innovation?
Innovation is abstract. You can say you have it and never prove it. Experimentation is concrete — you either ran the test or you didn’t. You either changed the approach or you didn’t. It’s behavioral. It’s traceable.
The harder question I put to them was this: which values are you willing to suffer for? Not which values sound good. Which ones will you defend when they cost you something?
I told them: no process at SEO Hacker is sacred. No system, no client interaction model, no cultural norm. All of it is subject to challenge and change. That’s not chaos — that’s how a company that’s been around for 16 years stays alive.
My own story as the evidence
I gave them my origin story to make the value land. I failed 28 units in college. My father spent over ₱500,000 on units I failed during the years I was wasting my time, attention and brain. I got obsessed with DOTA, skipped class, failed my thesis proposal three times.
I tell this story because it’s the most honest example I have of someone who tried things, failed badly, paid a real cost, and came out the other side learning something.
I didn’t have a plan. SEO Hacker survived because some of what I tried worked — not because I knew what I was doing at 22.
What the audience told me
I asked the team to raise their hand if they’re naturally risk-tolerant — if they’re the kind of person who leans into uncertainty.
Out of 47 people who attended SEO Hacker’s structured meeting that day, about four hands went up.
The rest — 43 out of 47 — are naturally risk-averse. Which means most of the team defaults away from experimentation unless the environment makes it safe to try.
Most of my team plays it safe. That’s fine. It just means the environment has to do the work that their instincts won’t.
If I want experimentation to be a real operating value and not just a poster, I have to build an environment where 43 naturally cautious people feel safe enough to try something that might not work. That means I can’t react badly to honest failures. It means I have to model it myself.
The thing I wanted them to leave with
I’ve built teams, lost teams, and rebuilt them. The pattern I keep seeing is that the companies that stop experimenting start dying — slowly, quietly, in ways that don’t show up on the scorecard until it’s too late.
The companies that stay alive are the ones that treat current success as a baseline, not a ceiling. That take what’s working, learn from it, and keep moving.
I told the team: we’re building something that has to outlast me. It has to be able to survive a bad year, a market shift, a technology disruption — all of which we’re already living through.
The only way to build something like that is to make experimentation part of the bone structure. Not a one-time initiative. Not a value you revisit at the annual planning session. Something you do every week, on every project, in every team conversation.
The honest admission
I also told them something I don’t say often enough: I know this is harder for some of you than others. If you’re not wired for risk, asking you to experiment is genuinely uncomfortable. I’m not asking you to pretend you love uncertainty.
I’m asking you to trust that the company will catch you if the experiment fails — that we’ve built enough of a foundation to absorb the cost of trying and getting it wrong.
The ones who take that risk are the ones who move the company forward. By God’s grace, there are more of them than the room suggested that morning.
