Bolstered by such favorable expert opinions and carefull financial jections, Tom quits his job and spends 3 months and all his savings vriting a full-featured and highly-polished version of HoneyTextBot. Tom is a great developer and has an excellent sense for design, so the app looks beautifiul and operates flawlessly. The first version can send lovely little text messages in over 20 languages! To cover all bases and pre-empt any competition, Tom decides to develop and launch his app on all the major mobile platforms (Android, iPhone, Blackberry) simultaneously. Tom launches HoneyTextBot and ... .. not much happens. Nobody seems interested in Tom’s beautifully crafied app. Not even his friends. Of those two dozen friends — 70! of whom of told him they'd buy and use HoneyTextBot — only three of them actually buy it, and only after Tom reminded them several times. Afier a week, two of them uninstalled it from their phones and the third forgot it was even there. What happened? How could it be that an if that elicited such positive opinions turned out to be such a flop? How did Tom’s 70%-will-buy projection turn into 0.0002%-actually-bought? Well, that’s what happens when you make your decisions based on what you “learn” in Thoughtland. In this case, Tom’s Thoughtland-based analysis gave him a false pos' tive. While dwelling in Thoughtland Tom was misled into thinking that his it was the right it. Thinking he had the right it, Tom quit his job and spent three months developing the full-blown app — three versions of it. Tom didn’t just skip the pretotyping phase, he even skipped the proto- typing stage. He went straight from idea to what I call a productype. Productyping is the evil twin of pretotyping. If pretotyping can be summarized as: “make sure you are building the right i before you build it right,” productyping can be summarized as: “build it right even if you are not sure you are building the right it.”What was Tom thinking? He is a smart guy. Why did he invest even one penny in creating more than one version of HoneyTextBot? Why did he even bother to internationalize it and provide support for multiple languages? What happened is that, buoyed by such positive opinions, Tom ignored The Law of Failure. He assumed success and decided to go all out, all at once. This, unfortunately, happens a lot. When our own infatuation with our it is combined with false positives from Thoughtland it’s hard to resist go- ing for it. Besides doesn’t “going for it!” sound good? Doesn’t it feel good to say it and do it? Isn’t that The American Way? Yes. Yes. Yes. It feels good — make that GREAT ~ at first. Overly optimistic individuals, by the way, are not the only ones who fall for this trap. Seasoned professionals at major companies fall for it just as often; they go from Thoughtland to productype in one fell swoop. Productyping is the way most new products are developed. Productyping is the reason why most failures are slow, painful and expensive failures.Get It The Hell Out Of Thoughtland ASAP All its — wrong its and right ifs — are born in Thoughtland. But, as we’ve seen, spending too much time in Thoughtland can often lead us into prematurely abandoning potentially good ideas or over-commiting and over-investing in potentially bad ideas. In other words: + Do nothing with it + Go for it (productyping) As we know, chances are that our it is not the right it, but the place to make that determination is not in Thoughtland but in the real world where, instead of subjective opinions, we can collect actual usage and market data. We must not let our it fester in Thoughtland, we have to get it out of there as soon and as cheaply as possible. And that’s where pretotyping the third and best way to deal with the beast of failure — comes in: + Give it a try (pretotyping)CHAPTER FOUR Pretotype It 38Enough preambles, justification, explanation and definitions. Time to get to the meat of this book — the actual creation and testing of preto- types. First, I’ll introduce you to some basic types of pretotyping, then we'll look at ways to test them and finally I'll combine everything we’ve learned into a few complete examples. A Hodgepodge of Pretotyping Techniques Some day, if this book turns out to be the right it, I will invest time and effort to create an extensive, well-structured, formal and official-looking taxonomy of pretotyping techniques. At that time, I will give each tech- nique a fancy name, describe ideal usage scenarios and provide plenty of examples. But since this version of the book is still a pretotype, what you'll be getting is more of a hodgepodge of just a few different ways you can pretotype your ideas with a rough explanation of when and how to use them. Here’s a quick summary of the techniques we'll talk about: The Mechanical Turk — Replace complex and expensive comput- ers or machines with human beings. The Pinocchio — Build a non-functional, “lifeless”, version of the product. The Minimum Viable Product (or Stripped Tease) — Create a functional version of if, but stripped down to its most basic func- tionality. The Provincial — Before launching world-wide, run a test on a very small sample. The Fake Door — Create a fake “entry” for a product that doesn’t yet exist in any form.The Pretend-to-Own — Before investing in buying whatever you need for your if, rent or borrow it first. The Re-label — Put a different label on an existing product that looks like the product you want to create. Feel free to use, abuse, misuse or confuse any of these techniques. Combine, refine, re-define and add to them to your heart’s content. If you come up with an interesting pretotyping technique or suggestion let me know about it (asavoia@[Link]); describe it and suggest a name for it, and I might just include it in future versions of the book or feature it on my blog (pretotyping. [Link]). Now a few more words on each technique.The Mechanical Turk This pretotyping technique borrows its name from the famous Mechani- cal Turk chess-playing “machine” that was touring the world in late 18" century. People were led to believe that the “Turk” was a mechanical contraption (an automaton) programmed to play chess. In reality, inside the box there was a small, but talented, chess player making the moves by manipulating the mannequin. ‘A Mechanical Turk pretotype is ideal for situations where you can re- place costly, complex or yet-to-be-developed technology with a hidden human being performing the functions of that technology. The IBM speech-to-text experiment is a perfect example of this tech- nique: Developing even a high-quality speech-to-text engine would have taken years and a huge investment, but a human typist, hidden in another room the same way the chess player was hidden inside the Mechanical Turk contraption, easily simulated that complex functionality.The Pinocchio This pretotyping technique was Inspired by Jeff Hawkins’ wood block Palm Pilot pretotype and has been named after the wood puppet who, af- ter being visited by the Blue Fairy, becomes a real boy. A Pinocchio pretotype is best suited for situation where things like size, shape, weight, portability, etc., are important and where one’s imagina- tion can be used to fill in the blanks — much the same way Hawkins’ pre- tended that his wood block had the functionality required to schedule appointments, store phone numbers and keep notes. The Minimum Viable Product (or The Stripped Tease) The term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was introduced and popular- ized by Eric Ries, the creator of The Lean Startup movement and one of my personal heroes. As the name suggests, this technique involves creating a working preto- type — an actual product — but with features and functionality stripped down to the bare minimum in order to: “... collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." Since they involve some actual, if basic, functionality, MVPs typically require more work than Mechanical Turk or Pinocchio pretotypes. But an MVP can be developed much more quickly because it dispenses with all non-critical features. An MVP for an online family diary application, for example, should only support text entries (and perhaps uploading of pictures), but it should not bother to provide support for different text fonts, uploading of videos or different types sharing. Such features may be nice, and even required, for the success of the final product but should only be added once initial testing indicates that the online family diary is the right it. Note: As I mentioned before, I learned about Lean Startups and MVPs a few months after I'd been talking about pretotypes and building them. During a 2workshop, I built a “Stripped Tease” (my name at the time) pretotype for a mo- bile app and someone said to me: “Hey, how is this different from Eric Ries’ MUP concept?” I did not have a good answer at the time. But after learning more about MVPs and Eric Ries work, its clear that MVPs and pretotypes (as well as the overall Lean Startup methodology) are all focused on helping crea- tors, innovators and entrepreneurs avoid the same basic mistake: investing a lot of time and money to develop products for which there is no market ~ or not enough of a market to justify the investment. If you are interested and intrigued by pretotyping and this book, then you must buy, read and follow Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup. It's a proper book and something everyone should read, whether they work in a startup or a Fortune 500 company The Provincial In many cases, the major costs associated with a product are not in de- veloping the basic functionality, but in scaling the product to support and make it useful for a large number of users. A Provincial pretotype pro- vides the core features of the intended final product, but limits its scope (and scale) to support a small subset of the ultimate target market. As always, this is best explained with an example Let’s assume that Sandra has an idea for a mobile application that helps people find restaurants that serve only organic food. Let’s call Sandra’s it the Organic Eater Helper. One of the most expensive and time consuming aspects of this app would be the creation and maintenance of a national database of restau- rants that meet the requirements of serving only organic foods. There may be thousands of such restaurants across the country, and to include them all, and write the code to automatically keep the list up to date, Sandra would have to do a lot of work — unnecessary and wasted work if it turns out that the Organic Eater Helper app is not the right it. A Provincial pretotype would be developed as follows: Sandra should start by focusing on a particular city or county — ideally this is where she 8already lives. Since there will probably be only a few organic restau- rants in the area she selected, the development of the application is greatly simplified. Sandra can hardwire the names and location of the restaurant directly in the app instead of having to write code to poll a central database with thousands of restaurants and only return the ones closest to the user’s location. In addition to simplifying and accelerating the development of the preto- type app, the provincial approach will also simplify and accelerate San- dra’s marketing and testing effort. Instead of advertising the app nation- ally, she can focus on a smaller region and save a lot of money and still learn whether or not her app might be the right it. The Fake Door Pretotype The name of this technique comes from a presentation by Jess Lee, co- founder and VP of Products for Polyvore. Great name. Thank you Jess! With a Fake Door pretotype, the only requirement is to create an “entry” point for a potential product (or new feature). The product (or feature) does not have to exist at all. In Jess’s words: “In a web product, what this means is that you pretend that a feature exists and you see if any- body clicks on it.” Fake Door pretotypes are useful for determining the level of interest for anit. On the Internet, a Fake Door can be implemented as a link, a button on a web page, or a web ad for your it. Let’s assume that Sandy is thinking about writing a book on squirrel watching (a worrisome variation on the already worrisome and mysteri- ously popular hobby of bird-watching.) Before she invests months of precious time away from her actual squirrel watching pursuit to write The Complete Squirrel Watcher, Sandy can use a Fake Door pretotype todetermine the level of interest in such a tome by creating a web ad something like this: ‘The Complete Squirrel Watcher. The only book for serious squirrelers Only $9.98. Click here for more information. She can then pay for Google AdWords to serve her ad on squirrel-related websites or whenever people search online for “squirrel watching.” We'll elaborate more on this particular example in the Putting It All To- gether chapter — I am sure that you, and the dozens of squirrel watchers out there can’t wait. The Pretend-To-Own Some its may require a major upfront investments, in such cases, it’s critical that you pretotype the idea by borrowing or renting those expen- sive items. A new business that requires a physical store, for example, should not commit to a 5-year lease until they are sure that the idea is viable. In- stead, they could try to get a 3-month deal on some un-leased space or — even better — arrange to squeeze their display inside another store that may attract the same type of buyers. The idea for a new green car rental company that only rents electric cars should be tested by either renting or borrowing a few electric cars for a few weeks —not buying a fleet of them upfront. You get the idea. Be a cheapskate until you know you have the right itEthical Considerations Unless you are a borderline psychopath, some of these techniques may bother you from an ethical standpoint. it really right to create a “fake door” for example, just to see if people click on it? I thought about this quite a bit and came to the following conclusion: Wrong its are responsible for huge amount of waste. They waste the time of the smart people who develop them as well as the money and natural resources that should have been used to build something better and more useful. Time, money and resources invested in wrong its are time, money and resources stolen from right its. Think of all the products you’ve bought and used only once or twice be- fore throwing them away and regretting the purchase. Think of all the unsold products that end up in landfills. Pretotyping can save you, and your potential customers, from wasting a lot of time and money on wrong its. Use your judgment and sense of ethics when developing and testing pre- totypes and you should sleep well at night.CHAPTER FIVE Test ItPretotypes are created for one reason, and one reason only — to help us determine the level of interest and people’s reaction to our it. The data we collect with the pretotypes will help us determine if our idea is the right it. The only effective way to know if an it is the right it is to test it. Not in Thoughtland, parading an abstract idea and collecting subjective opin- ions, but in the real-world with a concrete pretotype used to collect data from actual users. Data Beats Oj At Google we have a couple of important core beliefs: “data beats opin- ions” and “say it with numbers.” But what kind of data should we collect with our pretotypes and what numbers should we “say it” with? It’s impossible to come up with a fixed set of metrics that will apply equally well to all its. The success of a book, for example, is typically measured by how many copies it has sold, and a movie by its box office receipts. The success of a web-based service such Google GMail, on the other hand, is best measured not by how many people signup a GMail account, but by how many people use their account regularly (e.g., 7- day active users.) While there isn’t a universally applicable set of success metrics, there are some common guidelines that can, with some modifications, be ap- plied to most its. Since this is a pretotype version of the book (see section on MVP), I will only introduce two basic but important and useful metrics: Initial Level of Interest and Ongoing Level of Interest.Initial Level of Interest (ILI) The first metric you should try to collect on any it is what I call the Jni- tial Level of Interest or ILI. The ILI metric is a simple ratio: ILI = number of actions taken / number of opportunities for action offered Where: number of opportunities for action offered represents the number of people who have been offered an opportunity to take some posi- tive action associated with your pretotype, number of action taken represents the number of people who have actually taken you up on that opportunity. As always, an example should help to make things clear. Adam is a nudist and occasional skydiver and he is so passionate about his two “hobbies” that he’s thinking of quitting his job as an accountant (especially since they won't let him work in the buff), buying a plane and starting the world’s first nude sky-diving business: Birthsuit Skydiv- ing. Before Adam resigns from his job and buys that Cessna, it would be a terrifically good idea (to put it mildly) for him to see what the level of interest in his idea is. Is nude skydiving the right it? We know that there are many nudists and many skydivers, but how many nudists would like to skydive and how many skydivers would like to jump from a plane with nothing but a parachute? Here’s what Adam should do to deter- mine the level of interest. There are online forums for both nudists and skydivers, and let’s assume that Adam is already a member of at least a couple of them.Adam could write the following post in the local nudist forum: Fellow nudist, Lam renting a charter flight for a nude skydive. The cost is $100 per jump. No skydiving experience necessary, and I promise you won't land in a field of cactii. The first jump will be a month from now, Saturda May 315t in Santa Barbara. To sign up please send me an email with the names and number of nudists in your party, and I'll respond with the details Space is limited, so first-come, first-served will apply Adam A cool thing about online forums is that most of them show you how many people have read each post. This gives Adam the first number he needs (i.e., the number of people who have read his post and had an op- portunity to act by sending Adam an email telling him that they were in- terested.) Let’s assume that a week after Adam posted his message, he sees that 1,490 people read his post (this is the opportunity for action offered number) and that he has received 2 emails replies saying that they wanted to sign up (this is the number of actions taken). The ILI in this case and for this group would be: 2 / 1490 = 0.0013 or 0.13%. Not very encouraging, but also not too surprising since most people (in- cluding nudists) are naturally reluctant to jump from a perfectly good plane. At this point Adam can send the two responders a message saying that he’s sorry, but due to a lack of interest the nude parachuting event has been cancelled. Before abandoning his idea, however, Adam should post a similar offer on the local skydiving forum. Something like this: Fellow skydivers, aren't you bored of the same old, same old, types of jumps? To make things interesting, I am renting a charter flight for a nude skydive. The cost is $100 per jump. I promise you won't land in a field of cacti, but on a nude beach — imagine the surprise! The first jump will be a month from now, Saturday, May 31% in Santa Barbara. Ifyou want to signup please send me an email with the number and names of people in party, and I'll respond with the details. Space is limited so first-come, served will apply Adam Let’s assume that after a week, 898 skydivers had read his post and 112 replied that they wanted to signup. The ILI in this case would be: 112/898 = 12.5% — much better. Now we are talking. With this simple Fake Door pretotype and ILI metric, and less than an hour worth of “work”, our nudist skydiving friend Adam has already collected some very valuable data: Skydivers are a much better target market (by a factor of about 100) for his idea than nudists. The ILI for skydivers is pretty high, over 10% with 10,000s of skydivers in the US this number is good enough to pursue the idea further. A percentage of the skydivers who replied said that they were very inter- ested and were ready and eager to sign up. This is a very strong right it signal ILI data is very powerful and easy to interpret and act upon when used for comparisons with similar ILI. In Adam’s case, ILI data unambigu- ously indicates that skydivers are a much better target market than nud- ists. It’s much harder to know, however, if a given ILI is good enough to proceed. For some ifs, an ILI of 12.5% might be considered great, for others it might not. While it’s important and easy to collect data and calculate the ILI, interpreting it will usually require some judgment and domain/market knowledge. Things are looking good for the Birthsuit Skydiving idea but, as we'll see ILI is just an early indicator of right it potential. Let’s investigate what Adam should pretotype and measure next.Note: I have a sneaky suspicion that there might be FAA regulations against nude skydiving. Since this book is a pretotype, I did not investigate this mat- ter at length. And, just to be sure, I am neither endorsing nor suggesting that nude skydiving is a good idea — so don't try this it at home. But if you do, don't blame me for giving you the idea or send me photos of you doing it Ongoing Level of Interest (OLD) ss does not necessarily depend on repeat bus a book or an arcade-style game app), a good result based on an Initial Level of Interest (ILI) may be enough to proceed to the next step. But there are many its where success does depend on repeat pur- chases, return visits, or ongoing usage by the same group of people who were initially interested in it. This is particularly important if the run- ning of the business requires the upfront purchasing of some expensive equipment or committing to some significant recurring costs. Unlike the ILI, the Ongoing Level of Interest (OLI) is best represented by a time-based graph (or table) rather than by a single number. Each point/entry in the graph/table represents the level of interest at a particu- lar date. What you should be looking for in the OLI graph/table is a trend. Does interest fade to zero after a while? Does it drop a bit but then steadies at an acceptable rate? Does it go up? In the first case you probably have a wrong it, the second case could go either way and may deserves a bit more study, and the third case is a promising indication that you just might have a right it. As always, this is much easier to explain with an example. Let’s pick up where we left off with Adam and his nude skydiving business. In the case of Birthsuit Skydiving, Adam would be foolish to quit his job and buy that Cessna airplane just based solely on his ILI numbers. Even if more than 10% of all skydivers were interested in a trying a nude jump, if none of them come back for more this would be a short-lived business,Before making any major decisions (like quitting his job) or investments (like buying an airplane), Adam would be wise to check the Ongoing Level of Interest (OLI) in his idea. Fake Door pretotypes are great to test the ILI, but you need something more concrete and substantial to test the OLI. Most people will not con- tinue to open Fake Doors. The Pretend-to-Own pretotype would fit the bill quite well in this case. Instead of buying a plane, Adam should just rent one on an as-needed basis. Renting a plane by the day may cost too much to make it a viable long-term business option for Birthsuit Skydiving, he may even be losing a few hundred dollars each time. But until Adam is convinced that his nude skydiving idea is going to fly, it’s better for him to lose a few hun- dred dollars testing it, rather than drop tens of thousand of dollars up- front hoping that he has the right it. Remember The Law of Failure, even with a positive ILI result, the odds are still against Adam’s it. Let’s assume that Adam follows the pretotyping protocol, advertises the flights on his local skydiving forum every week and, over a period of two months, he runs 8 flights: one flight every Saturday. Here’s is OLI data after the two months: Flight # Signups Revenue Profit/(Loss) 21 $210 -$40 20 $250 $0 28 $280 7 $170 $70 $30 $0 $0 $1,100Sorry Adam! Things were looking good for a while — you even man- aged to make a small profit on your third flight — but I’m afraid that this nude skydiving thing may not be the right it. A high ILI is great, but if the success of your it depends on ongoing us- age, you should test the ongoing level of interest if there are significant investments associated with your it. In Adam’s case, pretotyping is sug- gesting that Birthsuit Skydiving may work well as a fun hobby or side activity, but at this time it would be unwise for him to quit his job, buy a plane and try to make a living with it. Pretotyping saved the day — and saved us from the risk of having a nude parachutist landing in our back- yard.CHAPTER SIX Put It All TogetherFinally all the pieces are in place, so we can go through a couple of ex- amples of creating and testing pretotypes, and making decisions based on them. As you go through the examples, don’t be surprised if you can come up with different ways to pretotype and test these ideas, there is no single best approach. I'd be surprised if you can’t think of other ways of approaching the same pretotyping challenges. Example 1: The Complete Squirrel Watcher Let’s build on our example from the Fake Door pretotype. As you might recall, Sandy is thinking about writing a book on squirrel watching. Since she would have to invest months of precious time away from her actual squirrel watching pursuit to write The Complete Squirrel Watcher, it would be a good idea for her to pretotype the book. In Sandy’s case, since the success of a book is primarily determined by how many people buy it (i.c., it does not really depend on repeat pur- chases) all we need is a pretotype to find out the Initial Level of Interest (ILI). Fake Door pretotypes are ideal for this. And here’s how Sandy could go about it: For $10, she can buy [Link] domain and create a landing page that says: Fellow squirrel enthusiasts Thank you for your interest in “The Complete Squirrel Watcher”. Zam hard at work on the book, but it's not quite ready for publication To reserve a copy at the special pre-order price of $9.98 send an email to: iwantthebook@thecompletesquirrelwatcher:com and I'll let you know as soon as the book is available. The price will be $9.98 In the meantime, happy squirrel watching and don't forget your rabies shots!Sandy (Squirrelgirl) Watson Sandy can then craft a web ad, for example: Do you like stalking squirrels? For a few dollars, she can place the ad on websites dedicated to squirrels or have it show up when people use a search engine to search for any- thing related to squirrels. When people click on her ad, they are redi- rected to her website. This Fake Door pretotype would cost less than $50 and take just a cou- ple of hours of work requiring minimal technical skills. Once this pretotype is in place, Sandy can let the ad run for a month or so, after which she can analyze the data provided from the online ad service. Assume this is the data generated by her pretotype: People who have seen the ad: 23,402 People who have clicked on the ad: 634 People who sent an email saying to buy the book: 230 There are a couple of interesting ILI ratios here. The first is an indication of how many people who go to squirrel pages or search for squirrel are interested enough to click on an ad for a book on squirrel watching. This first ILI can be calculated as follows: ILI 1 = number of clicks on ad / number of ad impressions (i.e. how many people have seen the ad)In this case, ILI] = 634 / 23,402 = 2.7% This is not great, but not too bad either. The second ILI ratio gives her the percentage of people who, after click- ing on the ad, are interested enough in the book to send an email to Sandy: ILI2 = number of emails / number page visits to the landing page In this case, ILI2 = 36% (230 / 634) This is very encouraging, a whopping 36% of the people who visit Sandy’s [Link] web page send her an email to reserve a copy of the book. Of course not all of them will follow through, but this is still a very good number. Now comes the difficult decision. Should Sandy go ahead and write her book based on this data? That depends a lot on her expectations for the book. The data indicates that the book is unlikely to land a spot on The New York Times’s best- seller list — not enough people seem that interested in squirrels. But that was never Sandy’s expectation. For her, becoming an authority on the subject and selling a few hundred copies of her self-published book each year — enough to pay for her squirrel watching gear expeditions — would be good enough. In that case, the data from her pretotype suggests that The Complete Squirrel Watcher will probably the right it for enough people to make Sandy happy. Example 2: Bob’s Rate This Plate App For this example, let’s assume that Bob is a nutritionist who wants to create a mobile app that analyzes a photo of a meal and returns a nutri- tional analysis and some kind of score from “A: Healthy and nutritious” to “F: Junk food”? Let’s call this if the Bobs Rate This Plate app.Bob talks to friends and many other people about this app, and most of them tell him that it’s a great idea and that they would definitely use it. Fortunately, Bob has heard about Thoughtland and knows how mislead- ing opinions can be. He does not know for sure how many people would use such an app or be willing to pay for it. Would users even remember to stop and take a photo of the food before they start digging in? Would they use it a few times — just for fun — and then never again? Bob also realizes that developing an actual working software system to automatically analyze a meal based on a picture of it would definitely take a lot of work and money ~ and it may never get to the point where it’s good or accurate enough to be useful (a problem similar to the one one faced by the IBM team with their speech-to-text idea.) There are a lot of open questions that have to be answered and expensive technology to develop. This it definitely calls for some pretotyping. First step: Fake Door and Pinocchio pretotypes By now, you should not be surprised that, as a first step, I would recom- mend for Bob to build some kind of Fake Door pretotype to measure ILI (see previous example for how to do that.) Let’s assume that the ILI data is encouraging. However, Bob’s vision for, and definition of, success for this app requires not only initial inter- est, but ongoing usage (i.e., a promising Ongoing Level of Interest). If what the app requires is cumbersome or awkward to do people may not stick with it. Heck, would Bob himself stick with it? Would he remem- ber to take photos of his food before he starts eating it? Would he be embarrassed to do it in front of people, especially in a restaurant? Would he only take photos of his healthy meals and conveniently forget to record that banana split? If we don’t believe and don’t use our it ourselves, how can we sincerely convince, or expect, other people to do that? To answer this question, Bob should follow Jeff Hawkins’ Palm Pilot pretotype example and de- velop a Pinocchio pretotype to test the idea on himself. Since Bob al-ready has a smartphone with a camera, he does not have to go out and build a wood-block like Hawkins did. He can simply pretend that his phone’s camera app is the app he wants to build and fill the blanks with his imagination. If Bob discovers that, after a few of days of using his Pinocchio preto- type, his initial enthusiasm for the idea starts to wane and he takes fewer and fewer photos, then he might have a problem. Of course, he could try to explain the failure away, “this app is not for me, it’s for my clients, I already know what I should eat, I don’t need it.” He might be right in this particular case, but he should still be concerned about it. The “I won’t use it, but others will” argument is a giant red flag with “wrong if” written all over it: not something to be dismissed lightly. However, to continue our example, let’s assume that Bob quickly be- comes so used to taking photos of his food before eating that it becomes a habit for him and he does it consistently and automatically. Not only that, but when he does it in front of other people, they ask him about it and say that they would love an app like that for themselves. He also starts to post his photos on an online album so he can keep track of eve- rything he has eaten and mails them to a nutritionist colleague so she can give her feedback on his diet. This is a good sign. Bob now knows that he'd use the app himself on an ongoing basis and he found it useful enough to “implement” a couple of new “features” (i.e., posting the pho- tos on an online album and sending them to a colleague.) His first two pretotypes tested well, the ILI was good and his personal OLI was also very good, now it’s time to see if enough other people would use the app on an ongoing basis. Bob needs to get an idea of what the OLI is and the Fake Door pretotype won’t work for that, nor would a simple Pinocchio pretotype (the Pinoc- chio requires a lot of pretending and imagination about the intended fea- tures and functionality, they are great for convincing the creator of the idea who can fill those blanks, but not so good for collecting data from other users.) What Bob needs is a simple, but functional, pretotype. Un- fortunately, Bob is a nutritionist and not a programmer. Before investing 60in hiring a programmer, is there a faster and cheaper pretotype he can create that will still give him some OLI data? You betcha! Super-cheapo, low-tech, Mechanical Turk pretotype Since Bob is a nutritionist and he has over 500 clients, he can ask a few of his clients (say, 50 of them, about 10%) if they'd be interested in par- ticipating in a one month experiment. All they have to do is to take a photo of each of their meals before they start to eat and email that photo to him. In return, at the end of each day, Bob will send them an email with an nutritional grade along with some comments and suggestions on how to improve their diet. Nothing too fancy or time consuming; some- thing along these lines: Dear Mary, Thank you for helping me test Rate This Plate: Here are your ratings for today Breakfast: F (eggs and bacon, c'mon you know better than that.) Lunch: B (salad good, blue cheese dressing bad) Dinner: A- (chicken and veggies looked healthy, but you get a minus for that buttered bread) Please try to eat some fruits and veggies for the next few meals. Sincerely, Bob Let’s say that 30 (out of 50) of Bob’s clients agree to do the experiment (ILI = 30/50, or 60%). At first, Bob is disappointed, even though this ILI is high, he was hoping that all of his clients would agree to join — or at least 80-90%. After talking with the clients who declined the opportu- nity to join experiment, he learns a few things that he hadn’t thought of. Many of his clients, for example, don’t have a mobile phone with a data plan, so they can’t email photos to him. And a few clients felt very un- comfortable sharing actual photos of their meals with him — or anyoneother person — but they’d be OK if their meals were analyzed by a com- puter. Good things to know and keep in mind as he progresses. When the experiment starts, Bob sends his 30 volunteer clients instruc- tions on what to do (i.e. Take a photo of your everything you eat and mail it to bobthenutritionist(@somedomain,com) and, as the emails with photo start coming in (~80/day) he rates the meals and sends his emails with their grade and a nutritional analysis. A lot of work, but since he’s not a programmer, it was faster and cheaper for him to do it this way. After a month of running the experiment, Bob has a pretty good OLI ta- ble: Week Active Photos (out of 30) received 28 234 24 198 22 168 22 172 As it always happens, some people who said they would participate didn’t send even one photo and, as time passed, some other volunteers dropped off. By the end of then month, however, he still had over 2/3" of volunteers actively submitting photos. This is encouraging. Even more encouraging, a lot of the users are sending him requests for new features and functionality: “Hey Bob, can you send me my average GPA?” “If I forget to take a photo can I just send you a description of my meal?” “Can you send me a menu for each day that will guarantee me an ‘A’?” Some, on the other hand, complain: “Bob, I don’t have good phone re- ception in our cafeteria, it sucks that I have to go outdoor to email you the photo — while my food gets cold.” When you don’t hear from users, chances are that they are either not us- ing your product, or don’t care enough to send feedback on how to en-hance it or improve it. Getting feedback, good or bad, is a great sign. They care enough to suggest or complain. Things are looking good for Bob: strong OLI and lots of user feedback Bob’s Rate This Plate app might just be a right it. There is still a little issue of revenue and profitability. Bob wants to make a business out of it. Would the people who have been using the app for free be willing to pay for the service? How much would they be willing to pay: $10/month — perhaps even $30/month? By now, I am sure you know how he would answer that question. He still has 450 cli- ents to experiment on. He can ask 100 if they would sign up for the service at $10/month and another 100 to if they’d sign up at $30/month and them measure the ILI and OLI for both. Only a couple of clients signed up for the $30/month service but, sur- prisingly, 42 of his clients signed up for the $10/month service — more than he could handle manually. It was time to invest in automation. Un- fortunately, he realized that the technology for automatically analyzing a meal based on just a photo was at least a few years away. But he found out that he could train college students who, for $15/hr, would do almost as good a job as he did. He ran the numbers and realized that he could make a nice profit of $4/patient each month. After a few months running the service for his patients and making a profit, Bob decides to go big — his it was the right it. He hires a devel- oper to create a custom app (instead of the clumsy email-based preto- type) and trains more students to handle the load. Bob’s Rate This Plate app was the right it, and because of it there are quite a few more healthy people out there. Don’t you love a happy ending?CHAPTER SEVEN Now Go Make ItEven though we've gone through a lot of material very quickly, and I’ve subjected you to some rather wnuswal examples, | hope that I was suc- cessful in answering the following questions + What is pretotyping? + Why is it important? + What are some of the pretotyping techniques that you can use? + What data to collect and what metrics to use with your preto- types? Now it’s your turn! Tam sure you have quite a few its you want to try. Pretotyping will help you in two ways: + If your it has been held captive in Thoughtland for a while, preto- typing should make it much easier for you to get started. Ignore the naysayers and get off your butt. Pretotype it and see what happens. +If you are getting ready to take a big risk or make a big invest- ment in your it, pretotyping will help you get started more quickly. It will also provide you with valuable data that will ei- ther give you more confidence that your it is the right it, or it will help you realize that you should make some changes to your if, or pursue a completely different it In all cases, feel free to keep in touch with me (asavoia@[Link]) to let me know how it’s going for you and if I can help you in any way if you decide to give pretotyping a try. May you find your right if, and if you see the beast of failure, please tell it Alberto said “Hello!”CHAPTER EIGHT Bonus FeaturesIs this book the right it? Over the past two years, I have given dozens of presentations and dem- onstrations on pretotyping to thousands of people. I’ve practiced preto- typing for my job and I have started to help other people and organiza- tions successfully pretotype their own ideas. The overwhelmingly positive reaction to pretotyping has surprised me. People love the idea, they understand how and why it works, they want to know more about it, and — according to what many have told me — it has dramatically changed the way they think about pursuing and invest- ing in new ideas and innovations. I have strong evidence that, when pre- sented and explained live (usually with plenty of examples and hands-on demonstrations), pretotyping is the right it. Many people, intrigued by the concept of pretotyping and wanting to learn more about it, have asked me to write a book on the subject. Writ- ing a book, however, is no easy task (at least not for me) and one that re- quires a significant investment of time, energy and concentration. On top of that, most published books fail in the market — they are wrong its. That's why I decided to treat the idea this book as an it — an idea to test — and to pretotype this if (i.e., pretotype the idea of a book on pretotyping —a pretobook.) Instead of spending months writing, editing, perfecting and polishing hundreds of pages (and sacrificing trees for a hefty book that few might read), I gave myself a few days to create a written version of my preto- typing presentations and workshops. The result is the slim book (or eBook) you are reading now. Hopefully, the core idea, message and practice of pretotyping will be able to shine through my somewhat clumsy writing, poor organization of the material and painfully obvious lack of professional editing. If a book on pretotyping — at least one written by me — is the right it, even this version with a few rough edges, should achieve some level of success and popularity. Of course, I’d love to see if succeed wildly, but I know the odds are against it.The Pretotyping Manifesto Make sure you are building the right it before you build it right innovators beat ideas pretotypes beat productypes data beats opinions now beats later doing beats talking simple beats complex commitment beats committeesAbout the Author Alberto Savoia is Director of Engineering and Innovation Agitator in Google’s Ads organization where, among other things, he led the devel- opment and launch of the original Google AdWords. Prior to Google he was Director of Software Technology Research at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, and co-founder and CTO of two soft- ware development tools start-ups (Velogic Inc., acquired by Keynote Systems and Agitar Software, acquired by McCabe.) Alberto’s thought leadership in the area of software development tools and innovation has been recognized with numerous awards, including: + The Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award (2005) + InfoWorld Top 25 CTOs Award (2005) + InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award (2005, 2006) + Software Development s Jolt Award (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) + Sofware Development Magazine Productivity Award (1998) + Java Developers Journal World Class Award (1998). Alberto is a frequent and sought after keynote speaker and author on the topics of innovation and software development tools. To date, his pres- entations on pretotyping and innovation at Google have been seen by several thousand people. You can contact Alberto at: asavoia@[Link]