The Test-Before-You-Quit Ladder
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Thom Elliot's answer to 'should I quit my job to start this?' is neither 'burn the boats' nor 'wait until you're ready'. It's a ladder of progressively more public, more costly, more real tests of the same idea, run alongside income until the evidence justifies leaving. He and his brother ran it themselves: a pizza dinner party for fifty friends, then a lunchtime pitch outside his old advertising agency, then a paid one-night event, then a market stall — while Thom picked up freelance advertising work to stay solvent. Each rung tests two separate things at once: whether anyone wants the product, and whether you actually enjoy the work of making it. His closing advice to would-be food founders is the same rung logic: do one weekend market before you commit, because you might hate it.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Keep an income stream while you probe
Don't throw everything in on day one. Thom quit advertising for the Italy trip but came straight back into parallel advertising work to fund the early testing period, while his wife's salary covered the rest.
Pro tip A side income buys you the ability to say no to bad early deals rather than taking every event to survive.
- 2
Cook for a friendly crowd first
Run the smallest possible version with people who already like you. For Pizza Pilgrims that was fifty mates at a dinner party — enough volume to feel the operational strain, zero commercial risk.
Watch out Friends will tell you it's great. Read the operational data, not the compliments.
- 3
Take it to a semi-public, low-stakes audience
Next rung: strangers who are still soft. They parked the van outside Thom's old advertising agency and served lunch to people who had a reason to show up but no reason to be polite about the product.
Pro tip Pick an audience where you can watch them eat and ask what they thought on the spot.
- 4
Pay to trade once
Put money on the line for a single, bounded event — Thom describes paying roughly a hundred quid to do a one-night gig. Once there's a pitch fee, you find out whether the unit economics survive contact with real costs.
Watch out A single paid event is a data point, not a business. Don't sign a long pitch commitment at this stage.
- 5
Do one full shift of the actual grind
The final rung tests endurance, not demand: a full weekend market Saturday, loading in, trading, packing down. Thom's advice to anyone who fancies a burger van is to do exactly this before quitting, because the fantasy and the Tuesday-in-the-rain reality are different jobs.
Pro tip Do it on a bad-weather day. That's the version of the job you're actually signing up for.
- 6
Decide on the evidence, then go early
If the rungs come back positive, commit — and commit young. Thom argues the longer you wait, the more mortgage, kids and fixed worldview crystallise around you, which makes the identical bet a genuinely bigger risk.
Watch out Don't use testing as permanent procrastination. The ladder has a top; the point is to climb off it.
In the wild
Before Pizza Pilgrims existed as a business, Thom and his brother invited fifty friends round for a pizza dinner party to see how it went and whether they enjoyed it. That went well, so the next rung was driving to Thom's former advertising agency, parking up and doing lunch for the staff. Then a paid one-night event for about a hundred pounds. Only after those rungs did they commit to the van, the market stall and the daily trade — and Thom kept taking advertising work in parallel through the early period rather than cutting his income off entirely.
→ Validated demand and their own appetite for the work before taking on fixed costs; the business reached a £10-a-day Berwick Street pitch with the founders still solvent.
Asked what he'd tell someone in a corporate job dreaming of a burger van, Thom doesn't tell them to quit. He tells them to go and do a weekend market for one Saturday and see if they enjoy it, because they might hate it. The same rung logic he used on himself becomes the entry filter he recommends to others: a single day of the real job costs almost nothing and answers the question that a business plan cannot.
→ A cheap, honest read on whether the person wants the business or just the idea of it.
Common mistakes
Quitting on day one to prove commitment
Thom is explicit that you don't have to throw everything in at once — you can start testing the fences while employed. Dramatic resignation adds financial pressure without adding any information about whether the idea works.
Only testing demand, never testing enjoyment
Every rung is a double test. Plenty of people find the product sells and then discover they hate driving a van into Soho at 6am. Thom's framing is 'see how that goes' and 'see if you enjoy it' — both, every time.
Apprenticing for a decade instead of testing
Thom rejects the idea of working at Pizza Express for ten years first. He doesn't think it would have set him up better, and argues long industry experience makes you follow the herd and refuse to deviate when the market tells you you're only 60% right.
From the transcript
“Let's get 50 mates around for dinner party and do pizza and see how that goes.”
“You don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
“if you if you want to start a food business, go and do a like a weekend market for one Saturday and see if you…”
From the episode
“I Quit My Job And Built A $10M Pizza Business” - Thom Elliot Founder of Pizza Pilgrims
Thom Elliot