Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Pawel Brodzinski's avatar

Palm pretotype wasn't even an equivalent of a landing page with a "sign up" button or another call for action. Jeff Hawkins didn't even check the thing with potential customers. Yet he found a clever way to validate some key assumptions behind the idea.

After all, if he (the person hyped for the idea) wouldn't stick to it, no one else would.

Having said that, I think that the lines between a pretotype and a prototype (and a prototype and an MVP, too) should be blurry.

I like this frame:

- What's your total budget for an MVP?

- Now, what can you do for 10% of that?

This typically gets people to such low budgets that it completely rewires their thinking. 10x smaller doesn't leave a space for cutting a few features, but sticking with the approach ("let's build it"). It necessarily requires a different approach altogether.

Then we start talking about how to validate the assumptions behind the product idea *without* building anything, or by generating some expendable stuff with AI.

In my experience, at least 50% of such early experiments disprove the original business hypothesis. That is a huge win. We invalidated the idea for dirt cheap.

Expand full comment
Chintan Zalani's avatar

I have learnt about pre-validating ideas and putting together quick landing pages to test them. This is a great guide breaking down the concept—I really like the ring to the word "Pretotyping." Indeed, this is even more relevant in the build-an-app-overnight AI age.

Would you recommend going by industry standard CTR/lead conversion metrics for judging the success of a pretotyping test? I know you say "Make a Hypothesis," but optimistic founders would definitely go overboard with this! Any thoughts on realistic benchmarks?

Expand full comment
7 more comments...

No posts