Q&A with the Community
Our community is full of innovative thinkers, so it goes without saying that we get a lot of great questions on the ins and outs of pretotyping and experimentation. Here’s a few brilliant questions we’ve had pop up recently…
Question 1: “What role does credibility play in pretotypes? How do you reflect the impact of branding/credibility in your pretotypes and experiments?”
Answer:
“...we get this often with enterprise clients. The short answer is that brand helps scale out the reach of the value prop[osition] but does not help test the validity of the proposed solution. We’ve tested this extensively because, of course, nobody believes that is true 😉
When we test on a fake but credible-looking high-quality pretotype, the results are very similar to when we have validated the idea and eventually test on the actual brand.
*this excludes obvious products or services where you must have a brand for regulatory or legal reasons, like financial services products, for example.”
Read more of the conversation here.
Will having an established brand with a secure following help your experiment? Yes, but only in terms of outreach and having a larger data pool to work from.
Will it help validate the idea any more than a non-existent brand? Nope! Whether you’re established or not, the people still know what they do and don’t want to invest in—so it doesn’t matter if you’re in the FAANG crowd or a self-starter; you must test to get the data, and big-name branding does not equal success in every product.
Question 2: “What will it take for a corporate [business] to do 1000 pretotypes per year?”
Answer:
“One of our customers, a large energy utility company in Australia, is targeting 2000 [pretotypes] this year after doing 1000 last year. It takes focus and rigour and a dedicated, politically savvy team.
It was hard to get going. I trained around 80 of their new Energy team, and we spent a huge amount of time with risk and governance to ensure we didn’t break too many things 😉”
Read more of the conversation here.
One thousand pretotypes in a year is absolutely doable, but you need to put in the effort and have the resources available. But, just because you might not be able to do 1000 pretotypes this year doesn’t mean you won’t be able to in the future. Set a goal, and every year you can up the ante in increments. At the end of the day, the important thing is Experiment Velocity – your rate of experimentation. If you focus on month-on-month improvements, the rest will take care of itself.
Question 3: “How do you pretend to collect payments while pretotyping?”
Answer:
“We never ask for payment info on a fake door. Once we have some early validation with some version of a ‘Buy’ button, we progress to a facade or a method where we actually have some lightweight version of the product or service should we want to test drop-off or get skin-in the game. In Australia, it’s illegal to collect or ask for payments if you don’t have a product or service, so it’s super risky to do this.”
Follow up: “What if you don't actually collect a payment? … [I] observed crazy drop rates when asking to actually pay from the previous step.”
Answer:
“Your call, but think how it feels to the customer. You get their credit card details and then tell them it’s not real. It’s a fine line between pretotyping and feeling scammy, especially with money. Time, not so much. BUT DATA>OPINION and OPD<YODA, so what do I know 😀”
Read more of the conversation here.
The sky is the limit when it comes to pretotyping, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t exercise caution. When you're testing your products, always have the customer in mind, especially when money is involved. Put yourself in their shoes: how do you like to be treated when investing in a product? Skin in the game is a precious commodity for validating your ideas, so designing experiments that respect your customers is key.
Those are our top three, but there’s so much more where that came from—here’s some other questions with fascinating insights.
Want to become part of the conversation? Join our community here and then jump back to these links so we can hear what you have to say.
For those seeking investment…
For the devil’s advocates amongst us…
For the SaaS strategists…
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While we’ve got you here, check out some of our other blog posts for more insights into all things pretotyping. Thanks for being here!
