Pretotyping from "The Right It"
The art and science of testing your new product idea and collecting your own real customer data with minimal resources (time, money, reputation, etc.).
Why am I writing this?
My previous post was about using different methods to test your new product or idea before building an MVP.
After reading my previous post, a good friend of mine recommend the book The Right It, which focuses on the concept of “pretotyping”.
Pretotyping is about using scrappy and creative methods to test your product idea in order to get real customer data with the least amount of resources (time, money, reputation, etc.).
With pretotyping you can quickly learn whether the market wants your product idea.
If customers want your product: proceed with an MVP.
If not: iterate, pivot, or abandon.
The pretotyping techniques listed in The Right It build upon my previous post and provide a more rigorous categorization of techniques.
I’m writing this post to consolidate my learnings from this section of the book.
There is a lot more content in The Right It beyond the techniques listed below.
I highly recommend reading the full book!
Pretotyping techniques
The Mechanical Turk Pretotype
Ideal for situations where you can replace costly, complex, or yet-to-be-developed technology with a concealed human being performing the functions of that supposedly advanced technology.
Real world example: IBM speech-to-text experiment
Developing a good enough speech-to-text engine would have taken years and a huge investment from IBM.
So IBM set up a mock workstation with a computer box, a monitor, and a microphone. Customers would speak into the microphone and the corresponding text would appear on the monitor.
The computer box in the room was actually fake. In the room next door, a skilled typist was listening to the user’s voice from the microphone and typing what they heard into a computer.
IBM learned a lot from this experiment including:
People’s throats would get sore after a couple of hours.
So much talking created a noisy work environment.
It was not suitable for confidential material.
Many customers who were initially impressed by the promise of speech-to-text technology, changed their minds after using the device for a few hours even with near-perfect system performance.
The Pinnochio Pretotype
The act of pretending that a mock-up version of your product is functional and using it as such for an extended period of time.
Real world example: The PalmPilot
Before building an expensive prototype, PalmPilot’s founder, Jeff Hawkins, wanted to validate some assumptions about the device:
Would he use it?
What would he use it for?
How often would he use it?
So he carved a block of wood to match the intended shape of the device, shaved down a chopstick to make a stylus, and used transparent plastic sleeves to simulate different screens.
He carried the block of wood in his pocket for several weeks and pretended that it was a functional device in order to gain insights about how he would use it.
For example, if someone asked for a meeting, he’d pull out his wooden block and tap on it to simulate checking his calendar and scheduling a meeting.
From this experiment, Jeff learned that he found the device useful for four main functions:
Address/contact book
Calendar
Memo
To-do list
It may seem trivial that a product’s inventor finds their own product useful but this is actually an important point to validate.
The Fake Door Pretotype
You can get quality data on how many people would be interested in your product by putting up a front door (e.g., an ad, a landing page, a brochure, a storefront) to help you pretend that the product exists when, in reality, you have nothing to offer yet.
If not enough people “knock” on your product’s front door, then you can go back to the drawing board and review your idea and hypotheses.
Real world example: Wired magazine.
The founder of Wired, Kevin Kelly, started the business with $200. He bought an ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine that advertised a catalog of budget travel guides for $1.
This early interest in the travel guides was enough evidence to convince him to publish a real magazine.
Real world example: Robinhood
Robinhood used the simple landing page below to get an initial waitlist of nearly 1M users!
CAVEAT: one should not use this pretotype technique with certain product categories (e.g. medical devices).
Consider the ethical implications of promising a product that doesn’t yet exist.
The Facade Pretotype
The Facade Pretotype is almost identical to The Fake Door Pretotype except when potential customers knock on the door, someone answers and the customers may even get precisely what they were looking for.
Real world example: CarsDirect
Bill Gross, the founder, wanted to build an online car-selling service. Before making a major investment or even having a single car in inventory, Gross did the following:
Put a site up on a Wednesday night.
By Thursday morning, they had four orders.
On Friday, they shut the site down because they had to fulfill these orders.
To fulfill these orders, they bought four cars at retail and delivered them to the four customers at a loss.
Despite making a loss, Gross validated that customers were willing to purchase cars online with their credit cards and have the cars delivered to their homes.
A Facade pretotype requires more investment and commitment than a Fake Door, so why would you choose it over the Fake Door?
Using The Fake Door Pretotype might be unethical or downright illegal e.g. if you pretend that you have a cure for a disease.
You can learn a lot more about your potential business.
Gross and his team not only validated the demand for the service but in the process of delivering actual cars to the customers, they learned about the necessary financial and legal paperwork required and about the back-end process associated with each sale.
Collecting real customer payments is more compelling evidence for investors than waitlist sign-ups.
The YouTube Pretotype
Movies and videos help us vividly envision products that don’t yet exist.
You can share videos with your target market (using YouTube or another video platform) to collect data about the market’s interest in your idea.
However, make sure that you’re collecting more than just views, likes, and comments:
The key is to combine your video with a way to collect skin in the game from customers e.g. direct them to your landing page to pre-order your product.
Real world example: Google Glass
Before Google Glass was ready, the team made a video showing what the world would look like through Google Glass.
The video, posted on YouTube, garnered much hype and the team turned this buzz into real customer data by offering viewers the opportunity to join the Google Glass Explorer program.
To qualify for the Explorer program, customers had to:
Post a message on Twitter using the #IfIHadGlass hashtag and describe what they would do with Glass if they had it.
Pay $1,500 for their Google Glass and travel (at their own expense) to a Google office in SF, LA, or NYC for fitting and training.
Despite the onerous qualification process, many people followed through (lots of skin in the game from customers).
Unfortunately, the initial wave of interest was followed by a wave of criticism e.g. many bars and restaurants banned the use of Glass for fear of secretly recorded videos.
Worst of all, most customers stopped wearing Glass once the hype died down.
This is a great example of how initial levels of interest and commitment are necessary but not sufficient for product success.
You need repeated use and continued engagement.
Real world example: Dropbox
Dropbox’s first promo video is a great example of a simple yet powerful promo video illustrating Dropbox’ value prop. The video helped Dropbox’s post go viral on HackerNews and helped them find their first evangelist customers:
The YouTube pretotype is often combined with another pretotyping technique for even better results.
The Pop-Up Stand Pretotype
The main characteristic of this pretotype is the lack of a long-term commitment or investment - just enough time to collect sufficient data to make an informed decision.
Real world example: Virgin Airlines
In the early 1980s, Richard Branson had booked a flight to the British Virgin Islands to meet his girlfriend for a vacation.
When his flight was canceled, he decided to create his own pop-up airline: Virgin Airlines.
Charging $39 for a one-way ticket to BVI, he rounded up a bunch of other passengers who had also been bumped and sold enough tickets to fill a chartered plane.
Encouraged by this successful experiment, he returned from his vacation and bought a plane from Boeing thus upgrading the one-flight pretotype to a one-plane pretotype.
Real-world example: Airbnb
In 2007, Airbnb cofounders, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, could not afford the monthly rent for their SF residence.
To make some quick cash, they rented out three air mattresses in one of their apartment’s rooms and included a home-cooked breakfast in the deal.
They bought the airbedandbreakfast.com domain, created a simple one-page website, and advertised it on Craigslist.
A few hours later, they had two men and one woman signed up for their one-night-plus-one-breakfast deal, paying $80 each.
After the first guests left, Joe and Brian realized that this could be a big idea.
Real-world example: Tesla pop-up showroom
Opening up an auto dealership is not only costly but it’s a long-term commitment to one particular location.
To expose its cars to new geographical markets and test the level of interest in those markets, Tesla built a portable pop-up showroom consisting of two modified shipping containers that could be easily trucked to different locations in a matter of hours.
In order to collect skin in the game from customers, Tesla charged a $5,000 deposit to place a pre-order.
Using the data collected from this experiment, Tesla determined the optimal locations for their new showrooms with minimal upfront commitment.
Before making a long-term commitment, validate your hypotheses with a short-term experiment.
The Infiltrator Pretotype
The Infiltrator technique involves sneaking your product into an existing sales environment (e.g. physical or online store) where similar products are normally purchased to gauge interest from customers who likely already have a high purchase intent.
Real world example: Walhub
Justin Porcano, founder of Upwell Design, had an idea for a new switch plate. A switch plate is that rectangular piece of plastic or metal that goes around a light switch to protect the wall from finger smudges.
His innovative switch-plate, Walhub, has hooks that you can use to hang keys, umbrellas, flashlights, or anything else that might need to be readily accessible.
To validate his idea Justin infiltrated an IKEA store and put his product on display in several of the store’s rooms with official-looking IKEA product labels and price tags.
As a clever touch, he renamed his product from Walhub to the more Swedish-sounding Wälhub to make it even more realistic.
From this experiment, Justin learned:
Whether customers would stop to check out the product.
How many customers would put a Wälhub in their blue IKEA bag.
Which location within the store (e.g., kitchen, living room, garage) resulted in the most interest and sales.
Justin and his team filmed the whole experiment and posted an entertaining short video on YouTube.
The Relabel Pretotype
With a minor tweak to an existing product’s appearance, we can test the market’s interest in a new product.
For example, by putting a different label on an existing product, you can pretend that it’s something other than what it is and see if people are interested in the new product.
Conclusion
The list of pretotypes in my previous post and from The Right It are by no means exhaustive.
There are an infinite number of pretotyping techniques not to mention:
Coming up with your own, unique techniques.
Combining two or more aforementioned techniques.
Tweaking an aforementioned technique for your particular product experiment.
As entrepreneurs, we are only limited by our creativity, resourcefulness, and drive.