The car test

Max Martin has written 25 Billboard number ones. More than any songwriter alive.

And every one of them had to pass the same final exam. Martin burns the nearly-finished track, gets in a car, and blasts it down the Pacific Coast Highway with the windows down. Wind, traffic, engine noise, glare.

If the chorus still grabs him at 60mph, it ships. If it disappears into the road noise, back to the studio.

Metallica does the same thing. Band members take rough mixes out to their cars, because that's where actual fans will hear them. The studio has $100,000 monitors. Fans have a Honda.

The car test

Your work will never be experienced in the sterile, perfect, distraction-free room where you made it. It'll be seen on a cracked phone screen, on a bus, by someone with 47 other tabs open.

Chris Rock built his Netflix specials the same way, testing material in tiny New Jersey comedy clubs for months, watching where real crowds went quiet.

"Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving." — David Ogilvy

So take your landing page, your reel, your pitch deck, and test it where it will actually live. Read it on your phone in a loud café. Play it with the sound off.

The lab lies. The car tells the truth.

— Dan

P.S. What's your version of the car test? Mine: watching someone scroll past my post at full speed.