A more daring Examine?

    To boldly go where no Examine has gone before.

    Hi,

    Here are some of the adjectives people use to describe Examine:

    • objective
    • neutral
    • nerdy

    Here are the types of adjectives that aren’t used:

    • opinionated
    • forceful
    • daring

    If someone described us as opinionated, I’d be mortified. Forceful? Ehhh, not sure. But daring? That might not be so bad.

    We’re generally not very daring. We have about 30 researchers quietly putting in the work, day in and day out, and we don’t really raise a fuss or brag about ourselves.

    In the public eye, Examine isn’t super well known (yet!), except when we’re mentioned on a hugely popular podcast or our analysis is cited by a major media source (see here for a partial list).

    For a split second, it can look like Examine is kind of a big deal. But then we kind of recede into the background. Why is that? And should we change at all?

    One big reason: we don’t follow the controversy

    There are dozens of controversial topics that we don’t spend much time on. Here’s why:

    First, we concentrate on analyzing what works and what doesn’t based on randomized controlled trials. There are few to no human trials on some of the most controversial topics, so our analysis for those would be more mechanistic and less useful.

    Meanwhile, we have hundreds of trials we still need to cover for Examine pages that need updating. There’s only so much time to go around.

    Second, commenting on controversial topics and garnering attention that way doesn't contribute to our main focus: the Examine+ membership.

    But maybe we’ve gone too far in this direction.

    A more daring Examine?

    Daring thing #1: The Examine podcast

    People love podcasts. We thought about launching one nearly every year for the past few years, and kept shunting it away as a non-core use of time. Not very daring of us! That should change in the coming months. The podcast is intended to be a more free-flowing space for conversation about a variety of topics, including controversial ones. Stay tuned.

    Daring thing #2: Our social media

    We’ve posted regularly over the past few years, but too many of our posts are text heavy, kind of dense, or visually boring.

    That’s not good, because more and more people are exposed to nutrition news and advice from social media.

    We’re on the cusp of a big revamp in our social media strategy. I don’t expect that most readers of this email use social media as their main nutrition information source, but I hope that you find our new formats useful and perhaps even legitimately engaging!

    Daring thing #3: Move fast and break things?

    We think a lot about new features and products before they launch. Specifically, I get scared and can go overboard asking the team for feedback or looking for potential pitfalls.

    But there’s a fine balance in that method. If you spend a lot of time amalgamating other people’s opinions and looking for potential pitfalls, you can lose trust in your intuition and progress can slow down. Sometimes intuition is right and sometimes it’s wrong, but you can’t know until you test it out a time or two.

    Intuition test number one is about to start, and it’s a biggie.

    I’d like for Examine to build a big new project “in public”. We’ll give very specific updates as to what’s going well and not well, and iterate on the inevitable mistakes we make along the way.

    We’ll proceed more quickly than usual, spending more time on action and less on internal discussion of what we should ideally do. Mistakes and feedback will abound, but hopefully we get it out the door quicker, with more real-life user experience to sharpen it.

    The idea is too half-baked to get into now, but it’s pretty darn exciting. Hopefully I’ll be emailing Examine+ members later this year with a beta invite.

    So there’s two medium sized things and one big thing: how’s that for a more daring Examine?

    Sincerely,

    Kamal Patel

    Co-founder, Examine