Twenty bags before twenty thousand

A young man in Benha has a recipe for spiced roasted chickpeas that his friends will not stop asking for, and a plan to sell them in printed bags across the Delta. He has priced the machine, the printing run, a van.

There is a much smaller question he has not asked yet. Will a stranger pay for one?

He could find out this weekend. Twenty bags sealed by hand, a label written in marker, left with the corner shop near the station on the understanding that the owner keeps whatever they sell for. Within a week he would know something no spreadsheet can tell him: whether people pick it up, whether they come back, what they say to the shopkeeper when he is not there.

The cheap test will not always answer everything. Sometimes it does, though, and when it does it saves a year. If nobody buys twenty, there is no need to work out how to sell twenty thousand. If everybody does, he walks into the big decision carrying something better than his friends' enthusiasm.

We tend to skip the easy tests because they feel beneath the size of the dream. A shelf in one corner shop seems too small for someone who pictures a van. But the van, if it ever comes, will run on exactly what the corner shop can show him: one person choosing to pay for one bag, and then doing it again.

Large things are mostly small things that worked, stacked one on another. The first one is the one worth finding out about.