Many of you might be familiar with this famous meme: "More you fuck around, more you find out." However, the issue seems to be that this fucking around is happening at the prototyping stage rather than at the pre-prototyping phase, leading to a rapid depletion of funds. Besides personally, I believe relying on mere opinions from around rather than on market 'data' for pre-prototyping is problematic.
So, pre-totyping is essentially the stage of validating an idea to determine if it's the right fit. For example, McDonald's considered whether to add McSpaghetti to their menu. They went ahead and included it, telling customers who ordered it that it wasn't available yet and offering fries instead, thus collecting data before launching it in certain countries - I saw McSpaghetti myself in Vietnam.
Another interesting experiment was when IBM was contemplating integrating Sound to Text in their computers in 1970s. They set up a faux demonstration where people spoke, and their words were instantly displayed on a screen - except, it was actually a person typing out their words on the other side. People were amazed, but when asked if they'd use the feature, they said probably not. So, IBM dropped it. This reminds me of the early development of Remember, a business card storage solution in Korea, similar to LinkedIn. Initially, the founder had to manually transcribe each business card into text. Now, it's evolved into a thriving service for professionals and recruitment.
This brings me back to a service I was developing at previous company, http://swalo.ai, which I would have never started if I had known about these experiments or cases beforehand. The essence of Pretotyping is in questioning whether something should be built at all. This reminds me of collections of failed services by Google and Microsoft:
🪦 The Google Cemetery - https://gcemetery.co
🪦 The Microsoft Graveyard - https://microsoftgraveyard.com
If such events occur in small startups, it's immediate death. So, I'll introduce the four Pretotyping strategies proposed by Alberto Savoia, who first advocated for the concept of Pretotyping.
Think globally but test locally! It's great to have ideas targeting a large market, but you should start experimenting locally, right around you.
Test as quickly as possible. Humans tend to procrastinate out of fear of facing failure. Don't hesitate; just do it.
Test as cheaply as possible! This reminds me of Steve Jobs' presentation method, emphasizing not to turn a simple idea explainable in one slide into a ten-slide presentation. Focus on explaining with the simplest words and images, without the need for elaborate diagrams and lengthy speeches. A prime example of this approach is @Dropbox, which gathered over 70,000 people on their product waiting list with just a 2-minute demo video before launch.
Twist and turn your idea as much as possible before quitting. This one I find particularly important. Most ideas aren't great from the start. The revolution of no-code tools @notion wasn't what it is now initially. It was similar to airtable, a productivity enhancement tool, but it evolved based on continuous user feedback focusing on users' complaints about not wanting to learn multiple tool.
My curiosity in these matters peaked recently because I wanted to create something for @Farcaster. I prefer someone else making trivial decisions for me, like choosing the color of a shoe to buy. If people vote on Farcaster's Frame, I can just follow their recommendation without much thought, and validating their choice with a proof earns me $DEGEN tips, ideally. (hi @degentokenbase)
This idea essentially boils down to others making annoying decisions for me, so implementing a voting feature would be tough; hence, I might as well decide for you. I considered making the channel, but just tag me with your dilemma on Farcaster or Twitter, and I'll decide for you! https://warpcast.com/shubit
