Pretotyping
Pretotyping is a set of techniques for validating early ideas in the market.
This post accompanies a session I gave in Product World 2021.
Here’s a recording of the session: Pretotyping at Next Insurance
Resources:
Bonus:
Here’s an example of another Pretotype technique, called YouTube, which I really like.
In 2013 Amazon published its Amazon Prime Air video. It was a fake movie about delivering packages in 30 minutes using drones. Even though it was fake, it created a lot of buzz, and enabled Amazon to learn what customers are looking for and what they are afraid of — take a look at the comments of the video. By the way, I believe it covered its production costs, as it was published a day before Black Friday, became viral, and reminded people about Amazon at this critical time of the year. And they didn’t even pay any ad fees for it!
In 2015 they published another hilarious video that answers many of those comments. At the time of writing (2021) the service is not yet available as far as I know, although in 2016 they did publish a video about experiments they are doing.
Conclusion
Pretotyping is a set of techniques to enable quick experimentation and validation of ideas. It is cheaper than Prototyping. This enables you to test bold ideas that may have been otherwise removed from the table in early stages, without giving them the opportunity to introduce disruptive concepts.
