Pretotyping
A few years ago, I wrote a short essay called Stop Innovating!, about how companies pay lip service to innovation but don’t actually do it. Today I’m going to give you a sharp tool that helps you find customers fast and build the product after you do.
Do the hardest thing first
It’s based on my principle of “Do the hardest thing first.” When you solve that, go to the next hardest thing and do that. At Google X, this is referred to as the “Monkeys and pedestals” problem.
Most companies start with some technical or management or fudraising exercise, but in most cases, the hardest thing to do in business is to convince someone who could really benefit from a new product or service to try it. Making the sale is the hardest thing, so why not do that first?
What is Pretotyping?
What’s the hardest part about creating a successful product or service? If you’re Elon Musk building rockets, it might be the product itself. But for us terrestrial business beings, it’s almost always making the sale. One of the hardest things to do in the world is get someone to change his/her habits to try something new, especially something that would really benefit that person.
So — why not do the hard part first?
Pretotyping is the art of not building a product and then trying to sell it the product anyway, even though it doesn’t exist. In other words, find out what it takes to sell a fake product that doesn’t exist. If you can sell it, then you can build it! If not, you’ve failed cheaply and have plenty of cash left for another try. Since 99 percent of ideas don’t become successful products, pretotyping is a fast and lean way to try the idea without building the product and see if the market will buy it. It’s far more effective than focus groups and questionnaires, because you are actually asking people to buy.
Too many start-ups and “innovation teams” build a minimum-viable product and then try to figure out how to go to market. More often than not, they end up making a lot of changes because the market doesn't confirm their assumptions. Far better to go to market and see whether people will buy before you go to the trouble of building it. You’ll “burn” a few customers this way, but it won’t be that many, and if you have something they want, they’ll forgive you for not taking their money.
The term pretotyping came from Alberto Savoia, who coined it at Google, though people have been using the concept successfully for decades. In the 1980s, IBM wanted to learn whether people would dictate to a computer. So they put potential customers in front of a word processor and gave them a microphone and let them talk. In a nearby room, they had an ultrafast typist writing the words and following the instructions on a duplicate screen. By doing this cheap experiment, IBM learned there were many points of resistance and awkwardness in speech-to-text and wisely didn’t invest much in it. Still, today, many of those issues (or misperceptions of them) plague the text-to-speech software industry.
Today, pretty much all seed-stage investors, and many pre-seed, want to see traction. If you don't have traction, you have almost no chance to get their money. Why not work on traction first? After all, if you have traction, they will take a meeting with you, and if you "just need to build the product," that's not a barrier. No product is not a barrier. No sales is a barrier. Wouldn't you rather spend $20k and 4 weeks building a successful sales funnel than $50-100k and months of your time to build a prototype that no one knows if it will sell?
Example: Intuit
At Intuit, which sells payroll software, they noticed that a lot of people sign up for the software on Fridays, when payroll is due. They had a meeting to discuss the idea of adding a new feature for “Cut checks now, then set up the database and other options later.” The idea was killed in the meeting. So the next Friday, an engineer put up a button on the web site that said “Cut checks now! Get your payroll done in minutes, then set up everything else afterward.” And on the other side was a page thanking people for their interest in this feature, saying it’s not quite ready, but please leave your email address and they’ll notify you when it is available. The response was surprising. More than 50% of visitors clicked that button rather than the standard offer. So they built it and it was a big success.
Ten pretotype models
There are many forms of pretotyping. Savoia lists ten:
The Fake Door - put the item on the menu and see if anyone orders it.
The Facade - put up a website for your new product (no product).
The Pinnochio - create a dummy of your product and convince people to buy it.
Mechanical Turk - use (cheap) humans behind the scenes to fake the product's logic and actions.
YouTube - make a vision video with a call to action and an offer.
Provincial - run a quick-and-dirty market test in a small part of the market.
The OneNight Stand - pop up a website or a physical stand and sell a "limited time" offer of a product that doesn't yet exist. See who goes for it.
MVP - use no-code or low-code and hack up a quick product in a few days, create a marketing campaign, see who buys.
Infiltrator - use an existing (online or physical) store with traffic to place your dummy product and see who "picks it up."
Impostor - put your logo on a slightly modified version of a competitor's product and see if you can sell it.
Pretotyping Consultants
LaunchPeer - they work with startups
Exponentially - Leslie Barry is one of the big names in pretotyping. He is available here on our platform
Horizon - They work with enterprise clients on fast innovation in Europe
Tekyz - Hyperfast development for startups
Pretotyping resources
Pretotyping.com — Alberto Savoia’s web site
Pree.to — an online community from Copenhagen
The Pretotyping Manifesto — video of a talk by Alberto Savoia