Prototyping versus Pretotyping

Prototyping

Prototyping helps an organisation understand and test whether it has the internal capabilities to build a new product/service, with the required features, and those features satisfy the perceived customer requirements (in terms of functionality and quality). However, all this is predicated on the assumption that a market exists.

However developing a prototype -

• Is expensive (often costing thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars - or more),

• Takes a considerable amount of time to bring to market (months or years in some cases) - by which time you may

  • come to realise you got it completely wrong and there never was a market to start with, or

  • perhaps the market was temporary and no longer exists, or

  • it existed but has since (in the time you were building a prototype) evolved and moved on to the next 'shiny new thing' (likely not your new thing!).

Pretotyping

On the other hand, Pretotyping both challenges and supports the traditional prototyping approach but, instead, it starts by testing whether a market exists, and if so, conducts a series of experiments to measure which product/service features those people within the target market finds important enough that they are personally willing to transact with you through an exchange of something they value (e.g., paying money, providing their contact details, etc.). By exchanging something your customer values, it provides strong, real-world evidence (i.e., data which you have directly gathered - or YODA, as Alberto terms it) that they value your product/service offering strongly enough that they are willing to give something up in exchange.

Key takeaway… Pretotype it FIRST

So, a pretotype allows you to test if a market exists - and if there is none, then clearly there's no point wasting your time and money building a prototype! However, if a market does exist, and you have used pretotyping to validate that people are interested in your product or service, you can then consider prototyping!

Need more information?

For a few thoughts and advice on this, please refer our related blog post – How to know if a market exists for your new product or service? … by Pretotyping it first!