Prototypes And Pretendotypes
(Thanks for reading, I’ve recently written a better, more comprehensive version of this article here)
Most people do not like uncertainty.
That’s an understatement – most people CANNOT STAND uncertainty, and go to great lengths to avoid it.
In the business world, this takes two main forms:
1. Planning your way out of uncertainty
2. Testing and iterating your way out of uncertainty
Business schools used to teach the former, but now there’s a strong (and evidence-based) shift towards the latter.
That’s because people who make things tend to learn more and learn faster than people who try to out-think the problem.
For example, let’s say you have a business idea, and you suspect it might be a winner.
Option 1 would suggest that you write a business plan – a longform document that details how each part of the business will work, how it will experience massive growth and success, and include a risk section where you magically prevent every possible issue from becoming serious.
You then take this business plan to funders and investors, who see your thought process and commit a large amount of money, so that you can start with economies of scale and can immediately satisfy lots of customers from Day 1.
Option 2 would suggest that you create some small tests and experiments, which you then use with real customers to gauge their interest.
You might run some ads, create a mock-up, host a pop-up, run an event, build a landing page, or even offer pre-sales to collect actual money.
These inevitably see mixed results – some go nowhere, some show signs of promise, some are wildly popular or intriguing.
You take insights from these tests, redesign the business and value proposition, then test them again.
Now have a think – how many people have you met who wrote a lengthy business plan and then build that business without failure?
Personally, most business plans I’ve written or reviewed have been full of half-truths, and you don’t know which half they’ll be.
In both scenarios, the business idea is probably based on some flawed thinking – maybe you’ve misunderstood your customers, have focused on the wrong value proposition, are using a clunky pricing model, or haven’t properly differentiated yourself from your current competitors.
Finding these out is painful, but inevitable.
When do you want to find out: at the start, throughout the journey, or once you’ve invested a huge amount into building the company?
This is why practical drafts and iterations are so useful – we get the painful truth in small, timely doses, so that we can learn from it instead of running from it.
And we might not even need to build anything…
Pretendotyping and Prototyping
You’ve probably heard of prototyping – the process of making working versions of an idea in order to learn from them and demonstrate your ideas.
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 Pretendotype (or Pretotype) come in.
A Pretendotype is a super 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 IG 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 IG, or the same ad to 3-4 different audiences, spending as little as $5 per ad per day.
IG will then push your ad to several hundred of your target audience per day, tracking how many engage with it 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.
Ethics
“But Isaac, doesn’t this feel like a scam?
Like, you’re not actually giving people what they want?”
I hear this a lot, and I appreciate where it comes from.
Fortunately, there’s no scamming involved.
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 Pretendotype, 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 Pretendotype), 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 Pretendotype 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 Pretendotype, 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?
Types Of Prototype
There are three main main categories of prototype:
Physical prototypes – objects and tangible items that can be held, carried and demonstrated, even if they aren’t strictly “functional”.
Like in 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 that box as compelling as possible, but you don’t need to fill the box with what’s promised quite yet.
Prototypes and Pretendotypes vs Minimum Viable Products
These two are easily confused, but there is a crucial difference.
A prototype is a tangible version of your idea, a Pretendotype is an intangible version of your idea, and a 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 Pretendotype 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 Pretendotype 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.
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.
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
Pretendotypes 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.
Personally, I’d 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.
Where To Next?
This article has described some principles and high level considerations for your Pretendotypes and Prototypes, now you’ll want more industry-specific tactics.
I’d recommend looking at tools like Marvel, Mockflow, Canva, or any modern mock-up platform and start experimenting.
I’d also talk to people in your field who have done this sort of practical testing, to learn from their experiences, mistakes and insights.
What worked in Silicon Valley in 2011 is not guaranteed to work for you tomorrow, so it’s worth diving in to more specific approaches, e.g. paper prototyping apps, running ads on different platforms, how to talk to your niche community, modern engagement metrics, and so on.
Three Good Books To Read Next
The Right It – Alberto Savoia
Testing Business Ideas – David J Bland and Alexander Osterwalder
The Mom Test – Rob Fitzpatrick
