A few weeks ago I asked some of the other 500 Global mentors what they’d recommend reading on startups. I got a lot of great advice – many of the books I’d already read. A few I’d never heard of and they were the first that I bought.
One of these was Pretotyping.
It was an absolute joy to read as Alberto was writing about many of the things that I preached over the years. I called it stupidly simple MVPs.
Imagine that you are an investor. A bright young chap comes to you with an idea that could change the world. (Yep, let’s yawn).
The chap, who was Singaporean or Malaysian, had read about flexible video screens and how there was a possibility that they could be woven into t-shirts.
So he connected the dots. T-shirt with Video screen + advert + 8 billion people = $$$$$$
The problem was that he didn’t have the technology and he didn’t have the money to create the technology.
So he needed an investor.
The sums he’d done meant he was looking for $ 2-4 million just to get a product to a proof of concept stage.
What do you think his chances would have been with a VC?
I thought they were slim too.
Working on the pitch deck was unlikely to lead to great results.
The key thing was…
Is this a stupid idea?
or
Does it have legs?
How can we test this in the few hours that we had?
Because it was hackathon or similar we’d been given some free t-shirts.
I scouted for some masking tape and a pair of scissors.
Then we cut a hole in the t-shirt, tape the iPad behind it and downloaded a coca-cola advert to play on repeat.
We used the Coca-Cola advert because Coke we knew it worked – Coke had a big marketing budget and great production quality.
Then it was off in a taxi to the local mall.
The entrepreneur walked around – feeling uncomfortable – as the advert blared out from his chest.
That told us something but it wasn’t the experiment.
The real experiment was the two people who shadowed him. One counted the number of people who looked at the screen. The other tried to count how long they watched.
In a busy Asian mall on a Saturday afternoon, it bombed. Nobody cared. A few people glanced, no one commented, vision didn’t linger.
The cost of the experiment was a few hours and an event t-shirt.
The benefit – the entrepreneur didn’t waste months/years of his life pursuing something that didnb’t work.
I have no idea what he did after that – I certainly didn’t see him back in the mall the next week with an improved version – so I guess he took the failure as the kiss of doom.
This is what prototyping is all about. How can we get the simplest faster possible test of the idea in front of people so that we can validate it early?
When do you use it?
Frankly, as soon as you have an idea – try prototyping it. DO NOT waste any time building anything before you do!
If you can’t spend some more time thinking about it, read Alberto’s book, or call me!
