What I know about pretotyping: Karina Sotnik

Karina Sotnik explaining the benefits of pretotyping. (Image
via Wharton School)

For Karina Sotnik, Silicon Valley was just the
beginning of where she is today. She lived the classic dream of
working for startups and taking them public.

Her home was next to the HP Garage and she often
drove by Steve Jobs’ NeXT Inc- the company he started after being
forced out of Apple.

Sotnik is now a serial entrepreneur, a
consultant and mentor at academic incubators including UPstart at
University of Pennsylvania, Accelerlife (Scandinavia) and ITMO QD
(Russia).

She is also a champion of preotypying (not prototyping) and was
recently in Dubai to run the first ever pretotyping workshop at The Cribb. She sat with
Wamda to explain the concept and why every entrepreneur should run
a pretotype before launch.

There is a fundamental difference between
pretotyping and prototyping. When you prototype you
explore whether the product can be built. When you pretotype, you
test whether the product will be used. The whole premise is that
you don’t write any lines of code.

For example, when design studio Upwell wanted to
test the validity of a new product – a lightswitch
that also held your belongings – they went into an Ikea store,
wearing Ikea uniforms bought from eBay, and watched as people
interacted with their product. They saw how many looked it and how
many were willing to pay for it. When prototyping a product, you
ask “can we make money from it, can we build it and do people want
it?” Pretotyping reverses the order.

Pretotyping isn’t a new thing.
It has been done before but was never systematically seen as
a good approach to test new ideas. In pretotyping, you have to fake
the product to take it to the market.

Faking it does not have a positive connotation.
But you can fake it just enough to gauge market interest very
quickly. There are many techniques to do it – you put a beautiful
web front with no backend, like Zappos did. The 1980s IBM Speech to Text test example is the
perfect illustration. If they had not done the pretotype, it would
be a very typical large company scenario where a lot of money and
time would have been put into a product no one wanted. So, you can
fake it to see what people like and if they even like it in the
first place.

VCs and investors should look at giving entrepreneurs
money for pretotyping. When working with investors and
entrepreneurs, you cannot just go with opinion. Focus groups give
you opinion. What we measure with pretotyping is initial and
ongoing level of interest, which make up the key data points. It’s
targeted at the company so instead of showing opinion and passion
to potential investor (which is also important), you show data. VCs
should adopt prototyping as one of their tools in their tool
box.

Pretotyping does not replace prototyping. It is
just a step before prototyping.

Pretotyping is not just for products and
startups. It’s easy to think of a website or a mobile app
for pretotyping, but it can be used across businesses. It can also
be for anyone who goes on to larger organizations who can then use
it start a new service.

Dubai currently has the right symbiosis for
young early age startups. I was very impressed by
the workshop participants. They were smart, passionate
entrepreneurs who were ready for the technique. It was not just
additional material for them, they were ready to implement the
technique.

For
entrepreneurs in MENA and everywhere, I’d say start in your
backyard. It’s very attractive to come to the hub of
it all. For instance, people have this idea of Silicon Valley as
the only place for tech in the US, but it is overly saturated. So
look at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etcetera. Unless you have
to be in the hub for strategic partnerships, start local, get your
own traction going and show you have a market even if you are not
in the hub.