Sample frameDay 281·Innovation · Testing

Morning. There's a cheaper question than can we build this, and hardly anyone asks it first.

Innovation.

Pretotyping

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

For the thing you're planning to build this quarter, what's the smallest and most embarrassing version you could put in front of a stranger this week — a sign, a page, a form, you doing the work by hand — and what would you need to watch them do before you'd believe the demand is real? If you can't picture that version, it is usually because you'd rather not find out yet.

The idea

Day 29 handed you the minimum viable product: the smallest thing you can build to test the riskiest assumption. Alberto Savoia's argument is that a cheaper question sits underneath it, and that a build of any size arrives too late to ask it. Savoia was an engineering director at Google in its early years and later its innovation agitator; he set the case out in a free ebook, Pretotype It, in 2011, and expanded it into The Right It in 2019. It starts on an unwelcome observation: most new products fail in the market, and they fail after being built competently, on time, by capable people. The failure isn't execution. It's that the thing was never wanted. So Savoia splits the question in two. A prototype answers can we build it, and on his reading an MVP is still a build, so it answers that one too. A pretotype answers would anyone use it, and it is meant to be answered first, in days, with nothing built at all. Jeff Hawkins famously carried a block of wood, cut to the size of the handheld organiser he was thinking of building, in his shirt pocket for weeks, tapping at it with a chopstick to learn whether he'd reach for such a thing often enough to justify the build. Most people test an idea by describing it instead, which is why they get such encouraging answers: being encouraging is free.

The framework

01
Name the behaviour you're actually betting on.
Savoia's instrument is a sentence with a number in it: at least X per cent of Y will Z, where Z is something a person does, not something they think. Then shrink it until you can run it this week. If the bet is that fifteen per cent of small accounting firms will pay for a monthly briefing, the scaled-down version is that six of the next forty small firms who see the page hand over a card. Both can be proved wrong, and the small one can be proved wrong by Friday. A hypothesis with no number in it can't fail, which is exactly why it is so comfortable to hold.
02
Four ways to fake it before you build it.
The Pinocchio: a non-working stand-in you carry and use as if it were real. The fake door: a page, a button or a price for something that doesn't exist yet, measured by how many people push it. The Mechanical Turk: you doing by hand, invisibly, the work the software would eventually do, so the customer gets the experience while none of it is built. The one-night stand: running the whole service manually, for one customer, once, and watching what actually breaks. Each of them buys the same thing — behaviour instead of opinion, this week, for almost nothing.
03
Your own data, and the number that makes it a no.
Savoia's evidence standard has two halves, and people skip both. The data has to be yours: collected from your own market, by you, this week — somebody else's success with a comparable product is the most expensive borrowed evidence there is. And both thresholds get fixed before you run: six of the next forty is a yes; two of the next forty is a no; and a yes only counts if the person parted with something real, a deposit or a diary slot or a card.
04
The fake door has to be honest.
There's a version of this that does you real damage: taking money for something that doesn't exist, or letting people walk away believing they've bought a product that isn't there. Don't. When someone pushes the door, tell them immediately that you're testing whether to build it, thank them, and offer them the front of the queue when it's real. The honest version costs you almost nothing in signal and hands you a list of the people who wanted it most. Test demand in public by all means, but never leave a customer holding a receipt for something you can't deliver.

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