The PalmPilot pretotype next to the product.
Mock-ups and nonfunctional prototypes are quite common in innovation, but the act of pretending that the mock-ups are functional and using them as such (especially for an extended period of time, as Jeff Hawkins did) is rare. Remember, pretending is an important part of pretotyping.
You Say Proto, I Say Preto
The PalmPilot story illustrates one of the key differences between pretotyping and prototyping that we previously discussed. The picture below is an example of what any red-blooded engineer has in mind when the word prototype is mentioned:
A PalmPilot working prototype on display at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.
As one of those red-blooded engineers myself, I love building prototypes. I can’t wait to fire up my oscilloscope and my soldering iron. But I’ve learned to wait before investing a lot of time building a working prototype.
Remember that the primary purpose of prototypes is to answer such questions as:
Can we build it?
Will it work as intended?
How small/big/cheap/energy-efficient can we make it?
These are important questions. But experience and a ton of evidence tell us that most of the time we can build it, we can make it work as intended, and eventually we’ll be able to optimize size, energy efficiency, and so on. In other words, we should be confident in our ability to build it and make it work as intended.
The primary purpose of pretotypes, on the other hand, is to answer such questions as:
Would I use it?
How, how often, and when would I use it?
Would other people buy it?
How much would they be willing to pay for it?
How, how often, and when would they use it?
The answers to these questions will help us answer the most critical question of all: Should we build it?
With that out of the way, here are two more examples of the Pinocchio pretotype in action.
Example: Smart Horn
Your car horn is a blunt tool for communicating with other drivers. If you are like most people, you use your horn for several different purposes while on the road. A hooonk! can mean any of the following:
“Move your butt!” to a driver who takes more than a millisecond to start moving after the light turns green.
“Thank you,” to a driver who lets you pass on a two-lane road.
“Hi, Bob,” to your friend Bob driving by.
“You got a death wish, you moron?” to a pedestrian who runs in front of you.
And the all-purpose “You #$%^&*!”
Enter the Smart Horn, a four-button horn that can accompany each honk with a programmable message—so you don’t have to stick your head out the car window to yell it. For example, you can program it with the following: “Move it,” “Thank you,” “Hi there,” “Watch it,” and “You @#$%^&*!”
There’s no question that such a horn can be built. But would people use it, how would they use it, and how often? You can do what Jeff Hawkins did and begin by pretotyping it for yourself—to see if you would use it. The simplest way to do that is to put four stickers, each one with a different label representing a different horn sound, on your steering wheel and then drive around for a couple of weeks pretending that those stickers are working buttons for the Smart Horn. You might discover that, as tempting as it sounds, having your car yell “You @#$%^&*!” to a group of leather-clad motorcyclists would not be such a good idea.
If you are mechanically or electronically adept, you can easily upgrade from stickers to buttons that count how many times you’ve pressed them, which will make your data collection more precise. With some persuasion, you might also convince your family and friends to pretend along with you. Ask them what messages they’d like on their Smart Horn, put stickers on their steering wheels, and ask them to keep track of how often they actually use them.
Example: Smart Speaker, or Voice-Controlled Assistant
At the time I am writing this, smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod are a hot and competitive new tech category. I could not have predicted how successful smart speakers would be in the market, but after I heard that such devices were in the works, I predicted—with confidence—that I would buy and use at least three of them a couple of years before the first one was launched. I made this prediction using the Pinocchio pretotype.
I took a can of pinto beans and put some black masking tape over it to make it look high-tech. I named my Pinocchio pretotype “HAL” (after the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey), set it on my living-room coffee table, and began pretending that HAL was functional. I would say to it:
“HAL, what will the weather be like today?”
“HAL, remind me to call my mom in one hour.”
“HAL, play some Led Zeppelin.”
“HAL, wake me up at 5 a.m. tomorrow.”
Of course, the can of beans did not respond to my commands. I would have checked into a mental institution if it had. But the simple act of pretending that it could have carried out my requests provided me with valuable YODA and insights on where, how, and how often I would use such a device. I learned, for example, that I would want at least three such devices: one for the living room, one for the bedroom, and one for my study. After a few days of interacting with my pretotype, I discovered that, in addition to a volume knob, I wanted it to have a “Stop Listening” button—just in case those pinto beans were listening to my private conversations. I also determined that, ideally, the microphones should either be sensitive enough to register a soft command or have a “whisper mode,” so I would not wake up the entire household at 5 a.m. by yelling, “HAL, is it going to rain this morning?”
The author’s bean-can pretotype of HAL next to Amazon’s Alexa.
Within a week of pretending, I was convinced that such a device would definitely be The Right It for me and that it had a very good chance of being The Right It for millions of people, and thus a market success. When Amazon announced the Echo in 2015, I was one of the first people in line to buy one, then a second, and then a third. Not only that, but when I first saw a photo of the Echo, I just had to smile at how closely it resembled my can-of-pinto-beans pretotype.
The Fake Door Pretotype
The name for the Fake Door pretotype comes to us courtesy of Jess Lee, who at the time was CEO and cofounder of community-based shopping site Polyvore. Thanks, Jess!
The basic concept behind the Fake Door pretotype is that you can get some data on how many people would be interested in your idea by putting up a front door (e.g., an ad, a website, a brochure, a physical storefront) to help you pretend that the product or service exists when, in fact, you have nothing to offer quite yet. If you can’t get enough people to knock on your product’s front door (i.e., to show interest in your idea), then you go back to the drawing board and review your ideas and your hypotheses.
Early in his legendary and influential career, Kevin Kelly, bestselling author and founder of Wired magazine, used this approach to test the market for his first business idea, a catalog of budget travel guides. This is how Kelly describes it in Tim Ferriss’s book Tribe of Mentors:
I started my first business with $200. I bought an ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine advertising a catalog of budget travel guides for $1. Neither the catalog nor the book inventory existed. If I hadn’t gotten enough orders, I would have returned the money [from any order], but it all worked out by bootstrapping.*
Ads in the back of magazines seem so quaint these days, but this happened in the early 1980s when those relatively cheap ads were one of the few ways a small-time entrepreneur could reach a target audience.
Around the time Kevin Kelly was experimenting with the market for travel guides, I was busy finishing college and learning computer programming. When the IBM PC was launched in 1981, I saw a unique opportunity for putting my newly acquired programming skills to good use by writing video games, which were bec
oming very popular in those days. With a $5,000 investment from my father (Thanks, Dad!),* I bought one of the first IBM PCs ever produced and launched my first business: a one-man video-games company.
I named it Heigen Corporation, because I thought that sounded big and impressive. Some of my games, especially Ramsak, a primitive PacMan-like game, were successful. But other titles, like BitBat or XO-Fighter, produced disappointing sales. Unfortunately, unlike Kevin Kelly, I did not have the foresight to invest a few hundred dollars to test the market interest for each game before investing two to three months in developing it. I did not realize it at the time, but that was my first exposure to the Law of Market Failure and the importance of making sure that you are building The Right It before you build It right. Had I known about the Fake Door pretotyping technique, I would have done things differently.
Before developing a full game with multiple levels, I would have created some static screenshots and brief descriptions for several possible games. Then I would use those screenshots to compose and publish “coming soon” ads for each of them. The ads would encourage people to mail us a letter with a self-addressed stamped envelope (email did not exist then) to receive a $5 discount coupon and to be notified when the game was available. Let’s say, for example, that I was considering four new ideas for my next game:
Lost in Bitland: A maze adventure with puzzles.
Digi Kong: Stealing bananas from a giant monkey.
Pixel Racer: A racing game.
Tapeworm: I’ll skip the description for this one.
I would create and publish similar ads for each game and, a few weeks later (that’s how long it took in the pre-internet days), I would be able to compare the results:
Game Number of Responses
Lost in Bitland 127
Digi Kong 15
Pixel Racer 255
Tapeworm 3
I was rooting for Tapeworm, but “data beats opinions.” I would get busy working on Pixel Racer first, put Lost in Bitland next in the queue—and scrap plans for Digi Kong and, alas, for Tapeworm. At the same time, I would publish additional ads for Pixel Racer in several other magazines, since I had data that those ads would generate a strong response and be worth the investment.
Two or three months later (I was a fast programmer in those days) the people who were interested in Pixel Racer and Lost in Bitland would receive a letter with the promised $5 discount coupon, announcing that the Pixel Racer game was available for purchase now and that Lost in Bitland would be released in a few months. What about the people who were interested in the two other games? I would send them a letter explaining that, regretfully, we decided not to publish Digi Kong and Tapeworm, and as a form of atonement I would include a free copy of Pixel Racer.
I can imagine many of you cringing a bit at the trickery involved with this technique. Good. It means that you have a working ethical compass. I also cringe a bit every time I present it. The Fake Door pretotype is both my most favorite and least favorite technique: most favorite, because it’s so darn efficient and effective; least favorite, because it contains an element of deception. Because of that deception, one should not use this strategy with certain product categories (e.g., medical devices or services), and use it with extreme awareness and consideration of ethical issues with all types of products and services.
I also recommend being generous with the people who knock on the door. Give the people who give you YODA something valuable in return for their trouble—this way you get a win-win-win situation, as I did in this example. Think about it:
The people who were interested in Pixel Racer and Lost in Bitland win, because they are going to get the games they wanted—and a $5 discount on top of that.
The people who were interested in Digi Kong and Tapeworm are not going to get those games. But they still win, because I am sending them a free copy of one of my other games. I suspect that, for most of them, the surprise of receiving a new game (a $29.95 value) for free will more than make up for not being able to pay to play a game called Tapeworm.
I win by not wasting my time and money creating and advertising games that not enough people are interested in.
Fun fact: I am not much into playing computer games, but I really enjoyed designing and developing them. Once I graduated from college, however, I got out of the computer-game business even though my games were selling well. Why? Because my dad (and investor) said, “Computer games are just a fad. If we stick to them, we will never be a big business. The next program you write should be some kind of business application.”
I could have developed Super Mario, but instead I developed Supermailer, a mailing-list manager. Ever heard of it? Thought so. Contrary to my father’s opinion, today the video-game business is bigger than either the movie or the music business, with several game companies worth billions of dollars. They say “Father knows best.” Perhaps. But not when it comes to predicting market success.
Let’s walk through a couple more examples of Fake Door pretotypes in action, beginning with a brick-and-mortar example.
Example: Antonia’s Antique Bookstore
Imagine that, on a bleak December day, you are wandering weak and weary on a busy downtown street, when you walk by a door with a sign that announces the opening of a new antique bookstore.
As a book lover, you can hardly contain your delight. With visions of volumes of forgotten lore—perhaps a first edition from one of your favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe—you gently rap on the door: knock-knock.
No answer. You knock again. Still no answer. You knock a third time. Nothing. No telltale sign of anyone behind that door. “The owner must be napping or perhaps can’t hear my tapping,” you say to yourself and, a bit disappointed, you walk away.
Without realizing it, you’ve just taken part in a Fake Door pretotype and provided Antonia with a valuable morsel of YODA.
You see, Antonia is seriously thinking of quitting her job as a book editor and opening an antique bookstore in that neighborhood, but at this time there isn’t a single book for sale behind that door—let alone a full bookstore. In fact, there’s nothing behind that door but a vacant piece of real estate. Antonia doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on traditional market research for her bookstore, but her Market Engagement Hypothesis is that if she opens the store on the right street and advertises it with a big sign, a lot of people will discover it as they walk by, and after that word-of-mouth marketing will do the rest.
For this plan to work, she determines that she needs at least 0.5% of people (1 in 200) who pass by each day to show enough interest to visit the store at least once. Before investing some serious capital to lease a space, buy inventory, hire staff, and so on, she wants to validate that hypothesis. So she invests $20 to make a sign, $2 on double-sided tape, and a few hours of her time testing the sign at various streets and locations that she believes will have the right kind of pedestrian traffic (i.e., a decent percentage of bookworms). After taping up her signage, she sits across the street with a notebook and keeps track of:
How many people pass by the door
How many of those people notice the sign
How many of them stop and knock
How many times they knock (the more they knock, the more interested they must be)
The age, gender, and other relevant characteristics of each knocker (e.g., middle-aged well-dressed male professional; female college student).
She runs her experiment on both weekdays and weekends to see if and how the amount and composition of the pedestrian traffic changes.
After a few days, Antonia has collected a lot of great YODA. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t support her market hypothesis—not even close. At one location she counted a grand total of 3 people knocking out of 4,000 people passing by (that’s less than 0.1% of the foot traffic). In another, she counted over 5,000 people and not a single knock.
Antonia is disappointed in the result, but she is also relieved that she was able to collect this data and test her
market hypothesis so quickly, with very little money—and without leaving her job. Pretotyping saved her from a potentially disastrous business decision.
Does this mean that Antonia should give up on her bookstore idea? No, not at this point. But it does mean that she cannot count on just a door sign to get people into the store—she needs to revise her MEH, and she may have to adjust her plan to include some advertising budget, at least at first. She also begins to wonder if, as much as she likes the idea of a physical bookstore, perhaps her idea for selling antique books would work better online. The Fake Door pretotype proved quick and effective in the real world, so she wonders if she can use it online. Of course she can, just like her friend Sandy, who is the squirrel aficionado in our next example.
Example: A Guide to Squirrel Watching
Sandy is thinking about writing a book about her passion: squirrel watching (a rodent variation on the already popular hobby of birdwatching). Sandy knows that most books fail in the market. So before investing months of precious time away from actual squirrel watching to write her tome, she wants to gauge the level of interest in such a book. An online Fake Door pretotype is a very effective way to do that.
First, Sandy buys the SquirrelWatching.com domain ($10). Then, using a free DIY website design tool, she creates a basic website. The site’s landing page consists of a mocked-up version of her book, along with a brief description of what the book is about, a short bio of the author, and a “Buy Now for $20” button. When people click on the “Buy” button, they are redirected to another web page that displays the following message:
Fellow Squirrel Enthusiasts,
Thank you for your interest in
A Guide to Squirrel Watching.
I am hard at work on the book, but it’s
not quite ready for publication.
If you want to reserve your first-edition copy,
enter your email in the form below, and I’ll let
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