The Right It

2019, Alberto Savoia

Great book on figuring out product market fit. Alberto shares with us his system of “pretotyping” (instead of prototyping) to figure out if your idea can survive in the market before you waste too much time on it. I love how his examples are funny. You follow along learning his techniques while having a lot of fun at the same time.

Notes:

Make sure you are building the right it and make sure that you really care about it before you build it right.

• Make sure you are building the right it before you build it right.
• Most new products will fail in the market even if competently executed.
• No amount of design brilliance, engineering prowess, or marketing fireworks can save a product that is the wrong it from the jaws of the beast of failure.
• Your only chance of success is to combine competent execution with a product that is the right it .
• Data beats opinions.
• You need to collect your own data.
• To count as proper yoda your market data must come with some skin in the game.
• Many people will buy less than fresh sushi if we make it cheap enough.
• At least 20% of packaged sushi eaters will try second day sushi if it’s half the price of regular packaged sushi.
• At least 20% of students buying packaged sushi at coups cafe today will choose second day sushi if it’s half the price of regular packaged sushi.
• Success can be a disaster too

Pretotype workflow

1. Idea
2. Market engagement hypothesis
3. XYZ hypothesis
4. Hyper zoom
5. Pretotype
6. Prototype

Protypte VS Pretotype

Prototype

1. Can we build it?
2. Will it work as intended?
3. How small/bug/cheap/efficient can we make it?

Pretotype:

1. Would I use it
2. How often and when would I use it?
3. Would other people buy it
4. How much would they be willing to pay for it?
5. How often and when would they use it.