Once you have some business ideas, your brain invents some weird stories.
It insists that you rapidly build and fund these businesses before someone else can “steal your idea”.
It sounds so wise – and the next thing you know you’re writing business plans and cementing in all the details before anyone can try to outpace you.

But there’s a problem: a business idea isn’t a singular thing.
There are so many tweaks and iterations you can make, and there’s a good chance that 80% of those iterations won’t work.

So by writing up that business plan, you’re locking into your favourite version of your business idea.
The longer you talk about it, the less you’ll want to adjust or rethink the plans.
You’re going all-in on an untested model.
Fingers crossed you guessed correctly.

Luckily, there’s another option: what if we started making things and tested them as we went along?
What if we could learn from our experiments along the way, spotting issues quickly and doubling down on what customers really appreciate?
What if our tests were fast, cheap and honest, so that we were never risking very much and could afford to try things that might not work?
This is the world of prototyping and pretotyping, and it can save you a lot of time and stress.

What is Prototyping and Pretotyping?

You’ve probably heard of prototyping – the process of making working versions of an idea in order to learn from them and demonstrate your concepts.
When you can see it and interact with it, the strengths, weaknesses and gaps in the idea become clear, allowing you to immediately make changes to the design.
Prototypes are not always cheap and can take some time, but they’re cheaper and faster than building a large batch of the wrong thing.

That’s where Alberto Savoia and the pretotype come in.
Alberto coined the term pretotype; an extremely early test of a business idea, which involved minimal cost and commitment, designed to measure customer feedback and enthusiasm.
It’s a chance to test the desirability of an idea; to see if the very concept is intriguing enough for a customer to take even the smallest next step.

For example, you could make cheap pretotypes with Canva and Instagram ads.
Let’s say you’re interested in teaching personal finance to stay-at-home mums in your area.
You can mock up several posters or Instagram ads on Canva, each with a different emphasis.
e.g. different headlines, different imagery, different price points, different types of product or service.

You can then run 3-4 of those ads to the same audience on Instagram, or the same ad to 3-4 different audiences, spending as little as $5 per ad per day.
Instagram will then push your ad to several hundred of your target audience per day, tracking how many engage with each ad and take an additional action.

After 3 days, you’ll have an initial sense of which audiences respond to different versions of your idea, and might even have some customers signed up for the next step.
If nobody bites, you’ve saved lots of money on a bigger campaign, which would have featured the wrong message, the wrong target audience or both.
If a few people bite, you can run a pilot or create a proper prototype solution.
If a lot of people bite, you can accept payment and use those funds to build the real thing.

The same approach works on email, at a pop-up booth, on a landing page, in other forms of advertising, or even B2B sales meetings.
You create a façade, and measure when/where there is interest in the real thing.
The façade either saves you money or confirms your optimism, and generates interest that can help shape the design of your business. 

Is A Prototype Or Pretotype A Scam?

Fortunately, there’s no scamming involved – prototypes and pretotypes are made with integrity, but without letting people know how new the idea might be.

A scam would be making a promise, which you know not to be possible, with the intent of deceiving people out of their money.
On the other hand, when a promoter announces that a band is coming to your town, then they have to cancel the show due to low ticket sales, that’s a disappointment but hardly a scam – you only pay if the show goes ahead, and they were happy to do the show if there was enough interest.

You get to decide how you’ll treat people, and if you decide “I will treat people incredibly well” then you turn this into a good experience for them.
e.g. preselling tickets to a small event as a pretotype, then if you need to call it off, give them a full refund plus a box of donuts sent to their workplace.
You can call them up or send a personalised message, promising to put them at the top of the list for the next event.
If they’re disappointed, that’s a great sign – it means people want what you’re designing, and serves as ongoing inspiration for your work.
If you’re not telling lies and not taking/spending their money, it’s hard to go wrong.

A Conversation You Have With Your Ideas

Tom Wujec said “Prototyping is a conversation you have with your ideas”, and so the aim is to keep the conversation moving.
Conversation is a great metaphor because you get to speak the ideas into existence (making the pretotype), listen to the replies from the room (feedback), absorb their perspectives (ideation), then coming back with more thoughts or questions (iteration).
Eventually, you have tangible progress, shaped by several rounds of putting out ideas and adjusting them based on what people show/tell you.

The conversation needs to move at the right pace – too fast and you ignore what people are really telling you, too slow and you don’t get anywhere.
A pretotype is like your opening line or initial question, setting the scene and testing whether anyone actually wants to continue this type of conversation.
Once people start to buy in, you can start to commit to more sophisticated prototypes.
These might be miniature events, physical products, a tangible mock-up, a wireframe of an app, a demonstration video or a crowdfunding page.
There’s some substance here, more than the pretotype, but without the cost of a full production run.

The prototypes will be different based on what you wish to test.
Desirability, Feasibility and Viability are good lenses – you might design different prototypes based on what you want to learn.
e.g. Desirability might be a polished, empty shell of your idea, whereas Feasibility might benefit from an ugly but functional prototype, and Viability might involve a proposal or contract to see if customers will spend $X for a particular collection of features and benefits.
It’s also important to test one thing at a time – testing a new product on a new audience at a new price point sounds efficient, but if it does poorly will you blame the product, the market or the price tag?

The Value Of An Early “No”

Finding out that you don’t like something is great (in the long run).
It’s not a great feeling in the moment, but discovering that you don’t enjoy certain tasks or aren’t keen to run a certain business for several years is actually a blessing.
Yes, it’s great when prototypes and pretotypes tap into huge demand and generate serious money, but it’s also good when an idea can be explored and changed before you’ve made a big commitment.

You might find that your industry isn’t what you thought it was, or discover some new things about yourself and how you like to work.

If that’s the case, then any costs involved in prototypes and pretotypes will be money well spent.

Types Of Prototype

There are three main categories of prototype:

Physical prototypes – objects and tangible items that can be held, carried and demonstrated, even if they aren’t strictly “functional”.
e.g. in old American TV shows where high school students have to carry around a toy baby or sack of flour for a week to experience the toll of parenthood.

Digital prototypes – visual representations of a website, application or service, sometimes simulating motion (like swiping or clicking).
This allows you to give the appearance of complex coding by linking to simple landing pages or using menus that go to placeholder pages.

Experience prototypes – creating a service or event that simulates how customers will feel in the “real thing”.
A bit like a display home or apartment, where the rooms of a future building are re-created in a sales office.

You might notice that each of these takes a bit of work, not necessarily with expensive materials, but by cleverly simulating more complex features.
e.g. making a paper version of an app means drawing each page and arranging them in the relevant order, which takes a bit of trial and error.
That’s the tradeoff – they require a lot of forethought and careful design; if you make it too ugly or abstract you won’t get customer’s honest responses.
It’s a bit like selling an empty box – your work is going into making the outside of that box as compelling as possible, but you don’t need to fill the box with what’s promised quite yet. 

Prototypes and Pretotypes vs Minimum Viable Products

These are easily confused, but there is a crucial difference:

·      A prototype is a tangible version of your idea

·      A pretotype is an intangible version of your idea

·      An MVP is the first version that can actually solve the customer’s problem

So that MVP can sometimes be a working prototype, if it does the job.
A MVP can be ugly or unpolished, but it has to work.
For that reason, MVPs usually take longer to create, requiring more resources and design time.
In short, a pretotype is unlikely to be a MVP, and a working prototype can sometimes be a MVP.
Prototypes have to represent functionality, whereas MVPs have to contain some functionality.

Testing Philosophies

Diego Rodriguez Telechea said;

“As you make a prototype, assume you are right and everyone else is wrong.
When you share your prototype, assume you are wrong and everyone else is right.”
This is such a helpful approach, and describes a mental gear-shift that keeps you strong and flexible.
You want to stay strong when designing, to avoid doubt from creeping in and undermining your vision.

Invention comes from either doing things others haven’t thought of, or tried and failed, or deemed impossible, all of which are forms of disagreement.
You want to stay flexible when testing, being willing to value the view of your customer over that of your own.
When customers and users give you honest feedback, that trumps your viewpoint, even if you hate what they’re telling you.
As Rob Fitzpatrick says “They own the problem, you own the solution.”

Test Structure

It’s good to see how customers interact with a pretotype or prototype, but there needs to be some sort of metric in order to draw meaningful conclusions.
e.g. how many customers took a next step (# email signups, # pre-orders, # second meetings, # links clicked),
One of the best structures for these experiments is The Test Card; four prompts to help you craft effective tests.

These are:

We believe that…
It’s important that we state our most critical assumptions, rather than letting them hide beneath the surface.
There are a lot of assumptions you can test, and we want to focus on those that are crucial to the model, i.e. the business won’t work if this assumption is wrong.

It can be uncomfortable to test these at first, but that’s also why they have to be validated, especially when they seem “obvious” to you.

To verify that, we will…
Now things get real.
How will you prove that this assumption is true?
We want to design a demonstration, proving our intuition to our team (and ourselves).
This test should be cheap to implement, and not require a huge amount of effort, ideally in under two weeks.

And measure…
Most people want to run the test but only go by gut feel, “vibing it out”.
Measurement is essential, it helps us separate a good response from a great response.
We also want to ensure that we measure the most crucial indicators, e.g. measuring how many people sign up rather than the number of people who say positive things.

We are right if…
Our natural temptation is to “shoot the arrow and paint the target around it”.
This is unhelpful, as it may justify a mediocre market response, or let us retroactively claim that our earlier targets were unrealistically high.
For these reasons, it’s worth setting the pass/fail criteria in advance, then sticking to your guns.

A lot of people find these challenging, but they are invaluable for understanding why you’re running a test in the first place, and how you can avoid faulty reasoning and bad data.

Money Well Spent

Pretotypes require tiny budgets and a lot of creativity – you could make several for under $100, but will need to be clever in how you frame your offer.
Prototypes might need more money ($400 - $2,000) depending on what you can do yourself, and a decent amount of creativity too.
This might cover ads, a designer, a website, a physical prototype, a space for a trial event, etc.
It’s often better to stress less about the amount of money and more on the Return On Investment – what you get back in insights and pre-sales is far more important.
e.g. spending $1,000 on a “failed” experiment might save you spending $10,000 and three months on making the wrong thing, and is therefore a big win for your work.

Case Studies – Sylvia and Rebekah

Sylvia and Rebekah are both social entrepreneurs who have built their own businesses, and are now exploring new business ideas.
Sylvia dreams about starting a TV station dedicated to small/medium business owners (SMEs).
Rebekah wants to publish a book on interesting people who work in the Environmental Sciences field, in order to inspire students to follow that career path.
Each entrepreneur has an expensive hurdle built into their goals – obtaining a TV licence is heavily regulated, and publishing a book is expensive.
How might they each design prototypes or pretotypes that advance their learning and create some traction, without spending much money or taking too long?

Sylvia might:

·      Mock up a TV guide for her future station, showing the titles, descriptions and times of the programs. This could be taken to customers for feedback, to see which shows have the most appeal or intrigue

·      Create a YouTube channel with videos she’s filmed, potentially based on the shows that customers circled on the mocked up TV guides

·      Practice scheduling a week’s worth of programming, using existing media and shows that match her audience’s interests

·      Create social media accounts promoting the style of content, or using short-form videos to test the interest in different topics and formats

·      Take a schedule to advertisers to see how much interest they have in advertising to this specific customer segment

·      Create a website with links to relevant content for SMEs to browse, tracking their time on the site and what pages they are drawn to.

·      Host a podcast series on these topics
 

Rebekah might:

·      Publish a blog featuring interviews with people who work in Environmental Sciences

·      Launch social media accounts that post on the lives/work of the people that inspire her

·      Host a careers event at local schools, which interview people with interesting careers in Environmental Sciences and possibly other fields.

·      Write the first 3 chapters of a potential book, and make them available for her target audience for feedback

·      Design 3-5 covers and titles for the book, with varying styles and emphases, to see what resonates with readers and prospective publishers

·      Create a community of students and industry practitioners, who could be a source of content as well as appreciative consumers of content

In both cases, the entrepreneur has the ability to use readily available channels (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, podcasting platforms), and can validate the interest of their target audience (the mock-up TV guide or the in-person careers event).
They can also start making short-form content (videos, podcasts, book chapters, blogs) to learn about what resonates with customers.
Some of these are pretotypes that just test the idea of the solution with a customer, others are prototypes that involve creating real content and measuring customer engagement.
That’s the difference between “People indicated that they’d watch this content” and “People watched it, enjoyed it, and learned how to…”.

You can probably think of some more options for each list, but the theme is clear: founders have the ability to start making progress immediately, if they’re willing to start making things and prevent any perfectionism from creeping in.

Just Start

Now your job is to pick a starting point for your first/next prototype – and you can start wherever you like.
Prototyping and pretotyping is a habit, once you start using this process it’s likely that you’ll keep in going.
Websites are often a good starting point, as you can make them from home and with minimal expense; at the very least could you make a landing page or mock-up landing page for your business opportunities?