The Entrepreneur’s Impulse: Rapid Prototyping

Posted on March 26, 2012 by instituteB

There is an impulse as an entrepreneur to build a perfect sandcastle, complete with flags, moats and drawbridges, before showing your friends how cool it is. Then they trample your poor little castle as they dash to check out the really cool beached whale right next to it.

Enter Rapid Prototyping: The practice and discipline of taking immature, partially-completed ideas and showing them to your intended market long before you’ve added the flags and drawbridge. The idea here is that bringing a product to market is actually a conversation, not a monologue or one-time offer. This conversation is fueled by giving people an experience of what you have in mind as a product. There’s really no better way to accomplish this than to give something very close to the real thing, but rough around the edges.

For example, as of late in one of my companies, we have been developing fashion accessories out of recycled materials. Whereas it would easily cost $20,000 to manufacture one of our accessories with at-scale machinery with all of the details worked out, we found a way to do it for less than $1,000. The relationships we activated and the machinery we used are not meant to scale up, in fact they’re not designed to. However, the outcome was about 10 prototypes which let us cruise trade shows with these secret weapons in our pockets to start conversations with. Those conversations ultimately led to interested buyers and investment capital. Truly with about $1,000 worth of prototypes we activated about $250,000 in value.

Sometimes perfecting and further developing a product or service are a form of procrastination because the more difficult and scary action would be to go start pitching and gaining resources with the unfinished version. The problem with the perfection approach is that the product and it’s value exists only in our limited interpretation of reality, which is always incomplete and vastly simplified. What if you made a tea cozy but fashionistas in Soho decided it was the most pimp hat to hit the market in years? What if you create an iPhone app and sink all the money into design only to discover that the usability stinks? What if someone completely unrelated to your market offers a layperson’s slice of brilliance that takes your product to the next level?

The point is: it’s impossible to ready a product or service for market without continual and copious input from the market. Given that the cost of continual remaking of products can be prohibitive, the rapid prototype exists as the roughly-hewn form that is cheap to produce but communicates 80% of where you’re headed. Of course you need to protect yourself from idea theft, and there ways to do this. Becoming a conference or trade-show-going ninja with the hot prototypes in the pocket (or on the iPad) can create gobs of value for very few dollars spent. Ultimately it allows us to remain as lean and mean as our ideas.

Guest Blogger: Joey Hundert, Executive Producer of Sustainival. Sustainival has been designed to become the world’s premiere Green Carnival & Festival, bringing in all of the coolest stuff that you can possibly imagine. See Joey’s full bio here.