Prototypes are the key to moving your venture faster and farther.
In a world where it’s increasingly feasible for anyone to build anything, it’s no longer about hitting traditional startup milestones like minimum viable products (MVPs.) It’s about how fast you can iterate to achieve product-market fit.
Chances are, if you’re clinging to the MVP launch model, it’s slowing you down. Minimally viable as they are, MVPs require a significant early investment of ever-limited time and resources before their concept has been put to the test by the most important decision maker: the end user.
Prototypes, on the other hand, are lightweight, quick builds that give target users something tangible enough to react to, offer insights, and get excited about. They’re also reasonably likely to get trashed. However, with the almost nonexistent barriers to building, a disposable but testable prototype is one of the best ways to vet technical feasibility and user desirability quickly.
Our take? We’d rather produce and share a slew of prototypes that target users can test and critique at each round, resulting in exponential improvements and laser-sharp focus on the problem we solve for them.
Where Prototypes Win Every Time
If you’re looking to learn as much as you can, as quickly as possible, explore the route of prototypes about your product-user relationship. It might just lead to your first sale.
Prototypes and their iterations can come to life in days or even hours
To build at light speed, our development toolkit is constantly evolving and heavily influenced by an ever-changing AI ecosystem. Our engineering team now spends 80% of their time deep-diving into the latest low-code, AI, and custom development tools, looking for the most effective mix to accelerate our building process. The other 20% of their time is using those tools to develop and iterate on new products rapidly.
This research into leading development tools has enabled even our non-engineers to start rapidly experimenting with prototypes. This means our researchers can start validating product opportunities before they ever pull in our product team for an actual build.
Prototypes are ideal for deep user learning
While MVPs might offer a more ‘built-out’ experience, they can’t beat how quickly we can get deep into the user experience via prototypes. This rapid build and react cycle keeps our discovery and product teams firmly grounded in users' needs to identify the gold functionalities and drop the features that don’t resonate.
With 10x the experimentation of a traditional MVP build, we can test many novel combinations of product elements and use cases to hone in on what suits our users best. And because we can cut to these deep learnings sooner, we’re identifying gaps and failures faster so we can pivot sooner.
Prototypes sell
Getting past the mental wall of a ‘presentable’ product or MVP doesn’t just come with the reward of learning, it also gets buy-in at the earliest possible stage from potential clients as we discovered when building early versions of Agentech. By inviting buyers in early with prototypes in sales conversations, you establish trust in your development process and get sales prospects excited at the opportunity of becoming a design partner.
Digital Intercepts: A Case Study in Rapid Prototyping
We’ve realized that the rapid development of and learnings from prototypes enable our team to develop a much stronger product-market fit at the same time it would take us to create one MVP. While prototyping isn’t necessarily cheaper, it lessens the risk of investing time and resources into a solution that may or may not hit the mark for real users.
In our discovery work around conversational AI, for example, we recognized an opportunity for an AI researcher. We envisioned a conversational survey assistant embedded in digital experiences that could ask real-time users about what they’re experiencing. This tool would provide incredible insights into customer decision-making through what feels like a neutral conversation.
We wanted to know if it would even work before we planned and teamed an entire discovery and development project. To validate that this opportunity was worth the investment of resources, we wanted to identify the lightest weight way to start testing a rough model and gathering early indicators of potential.
After learning with these off-the-shelf tools, we rapidly launched a prototype we implemented on gitwit.com and began testing obsessively. We incorporated learnings and feedback for a month, often making tweaks in real time. By September, we had a prototype that wowed a design partner. Then another, and another.
Our new default is prototyping, and we’re making it easier than ever
Now that we’ve seen the power of the prototype in our past few ventures, we’re moving full speed ahead on expanding this process. With the help of our in-house recruiter, we’re building our team’s skill set around the idea that the more of us there are who can make it, the better our venture products will be.
We’re currently hiring a front-end prompt engineer for Prelude, our deathcare venture, who would help us turn conversations about ‘nice to have features,’ etc., into actual, interactive prototypes in minutes to accelerate the build and feedback progress.
We haven’t completely cut ties with the MVP. There will be times when what you're building is large and complex, and a full MVP is required, but most times, rapid prototyping will help you create healthy habits around building, checking in with target customers, and building some more. This keeps you right where you should be – in the middle of your customers' problems that you're trying to solve.
