The UK's Liveliest Small Business Newsletter
Old archive | New site
|
|
Brick No132: The Power Of Prototyping
By Matt Weston, Thursday 17 February 2005 A Spoonful of Saccharine The first episode of BBC2's US import, The Apprentice, aired last night. Donald Trump fronted the NBC version. Sir Alan Sugar fronts ours. If you didn't already know, Sir Alan also puts his name to a small business column in The Mirror every Monday. A Spoonful Of Sugar, it's called. Readers write in, Sir Al gives his Agony Uncle advice. And he's well qualified to do so. He's self-made: AMSTRAD stands for Alan Michael Sugar Trading. And from humble beginnings, selling aerials out of an East End van, he's built a £700m global empire. (Oh, and in just 10 years, he transformed Tottenham Hotspur from mid-table also-rans into mid-table also-rans.) Every time I've seen the column, admittedly not for a while, at least half the letters have been from inventors. Inventors with patent problems, inventors who've been scammed, and inventors who want AMS to give their prototype the once over. Either they are the only letters Sir Alan receives, or the only ones he knows how to answer. If you read The Mirror you probably think you need to be an inventor to start a business. You don't, of course. But we can all learn from inventors, and in particular their mastery of a technique that many of us ordinary small business owners skip. Namely: the power of prototyping. "A One-Sixteenth Baked Test Of An Idea" Prototyping is the process of quickly putting together a working model. The operative word: process. You don't just build a prototype. You test it on the public, you get feedback, you make changes, and you repeat the process. It works for inventors. Tom Peters: "At Sony, the "Mean-Time To Prototype" (the elapsed time between the glimmer of an idea and a one- sixteenth baked test of that idea) is a scant five days. "[And, Thomas Edison], the Greatest Inventor of All, went through some 9,000 experiments before he finally landed upon the right design for his incandescent bulb. "Did he see his first 8,999 experiments as failures? Hardly! Each of those earlier "prototypes" was . . . a Brilliant and Unequivocal Demonstration of something that didn't work . . . in other words a Clear Victory!" The rule to remember is Act, Don't Wait. The best way to get something to work isn't to procrastinate at the drawing board: it's to quickly build and test a prototype. But prototyping isn't just for inventors and their inventions. You can use it as a technique for just about anything: products, websites, adverts, sales pitches, packaging, market research, business plans. Take, for example: (1) An Innocent Story. Summer 1998: the founders of Innocent Drinks had their first few recipes, but were nervous about giving up their day jobs. So they used prototypes as market research. They bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and set up stall at a little music festival in London. They put up a sign: "Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?" and two bins, "Yes" and "No" for empty bottles. At the end of the weekend, the "Yes" bin was full. They went in the next day and gave up their day jobs. Would they have learnt that at the drawing board? (2) The Housebuilder's Bible. >From 1980 to 1994, Mark Brinkley worked as a chippie, builder and developer around Cambridge. In 1994, he started taking three days a week off to write "The Housebuilder's Bible", AKA An Insider's Guide To The Construction Jungle. Publisher's sniffed at it: "absolutely no way", "far too specialised". So MB decided to self-publish, and sell direct by mail order and at self-build exhibitions. The first -- prototype -- print-run: DTP-ed on an Amstrad PCW and Apple Mac, a few hundred copies run out on a DocuTech machine (a sort of upmarket photocopier). Within a couple of months he had to do a reprint: they sold off the page in the self-build mags, and by the hundred at the exhibitions. And each year has seen 30% more Bibles sold than the last. Now on its 6th edition, "The Housebuilder's Bible" boasts an Amazon sales rank of 224, which makes it Amazon.co.uk's best-selling self-published title. (I have the 2002 edition, a brilliant book). (3) Prototyping Google AdWords. Last November, Google gave me a license to print money (see http://www.businessbricks.co.uk/brick115.shtml Brick No115 . . . How To Claim Your £20 Google AdWords Voucher). BTW, if you weren't on the list at the time, or were buried under something heavy, the good news is I have some more codes. Just drop a blank email to voucher@businessbricks.co.uk The way to make AdWords work, isn't to spend hours crafting the perfect ad. Instead you write, test, and tweak dozens of "one-sixteenth" baked prototype ads. Test the headline, the keywords, and the message. After all, you only pay when you get a click (as little as 5p). When you find something that really works, you hone in and repeat the process. BTW, to really get Google AdWords to work, I highly recommend Andrew Goodman's report. (4) Paper Prototyping. Things come to life when you put them down on paper and show them to people. Within a few days of us first talking about the BusinessBricks.co.uk redesign, Andy and Noam, had produced a couple of paper roughs, mocked up in Photoshop, and printed out on A3. I reckon this quick first-step saved us a couple of months of to and fro. See this book. (5) Prototype Business Plans. As I said when I unveiled "Your Favourite 8 Business Books" just before Christmas, the best chapter in "Anyone Can Do It: Building Coffee Republic From Our Kitchen Table" is on business plans. Why? Because it includes Sahar and Bobby Hashemi's first, flawed, prototype business plan. Sure, it took 19 rejections before they raised money for start up. But each rejection allowed them to build another better business plan. Quickly. By the time they got to pitch number 20, most other start-ups would still be at the drawing board. And, as Tom Peter's put it: "Did [Thomas Edison] see his first 8,999 experiments as failures? Hardly!" Richard Reed interviews Sahar in the latest Better Business magazine. Subscribe here. Bric-A-Brac (1) Now we have The Apprentice, it seems Dragon's Den was just a warm-up act. But many thanks to William Lee, who sent me his Betamax copy of the last episode. Will's site. (2) More telly. Jane Thorogood called me this week. JT is working on Channel 4's new series of Risking It All, to be aired in September. C4 have "promoted" it from 9pm to 8pm, as the last series netted over 3m viewers. And Jane tells me that the stars of the first season, Naz and Mark of Real Burger World (see Brick No60) are in the throes of opening up another 2 eateries. If you'd like to star in the next series, fill in this form or tel 01273 648396 Remember to sign up: back to top |
|
|
Link to us | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | ©2005 Business Bricks Ltd
Designed by Mint Digital