Testing Your Ideas with Pretotyping

Recently I finished The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed — a great book by Alberto Savoia, a former Director of Innovation at Google.

It's a great read because it gives you the tools you need to easily test whether the idea you have is actually a good idea. Instead of working on an MVP (a la Lean Startup), the idea is to work on a 'Pretotype'.

An example of a Pretotype is a smokescreen test (i.e. you set up a landing page for a product that doesn't exist yet), but there are many more Pretotypes.

I really enjoyed it, and while the core ideas of the book are similar to many other startup books (that you need to focus on a problem first (not a solution) — and that you need to stop theorizing and start actually testing your hypotheses and assumptions), it's still quite enjoyable and useful.

Check out my book review of The Right It, and if you've read it — I'd love to discuss how/if you've used pretotyping in practice.

Personally, for a new project I'm working on, I've created a 'Market Engagement Hypothesis', and am now trying to test it with a small group of users. So I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of the tests.