The world we live in today is moving at an extremely fast pace. One day something is hot, and the next, people have moved on to something else. What this means for entrepreneurs is that we have to become more agile and flexible to adapt to the changing times. Working on plans that will take years to roll out have become riskier and we have to switch to getting our products or services in front of the customer as soon as we can. This is where rapid prototyping comes in. This is the process of taking an idea or concept and executing it by using as few resources and as little time as possible. For instance, if you want to start a restaurant that serves a few specific dishes you should initially set up a small delivery service to get feedback, or you may want to create a web service to help entrepreneurs manage their personal finances; you could also start off with a couple of seminars where you share information about what your service does and get feedback.
A successful prototype will mimic the core functionality of the product/service without spending months and a lot of money developing the actual product/service. This means taking all the fancy trimmings off and just focusing on building a very functional working model. Rapid prototyping is not restricted to just coming up with new product/services. One can use it to test out new marketing strategies, sales pitches, new meeting formats or just about anything that can use some tweaking. It may appear really straight forward when reading this post that rapid prototyping makes sense and specially so in the world today. However, most entrepreneurs are perfectionists in some way or other, I know I fall squarely in this category, and I was quite apprehensive about rapid prototyping for many years. I wanted to get it just right from the start. Let me tell you that it cost me a lot of time and money with less than the stellar results that I had expected.
Flash forward to today and I am all for doing pilot tests and testing the waters before I devote a lot of time or resources into a particular project. Not only has this made things a lot easier to make decisions regarding the development of the product/service, it has also enabled me to get feedback faster. If you are planning on launching a new business, I strongly suggest that you begin rapid prototyping your concept first. Strip it to it’s core and showcase it to your customers. Get their feedback, ask them whether they will pay for it, and if they would, how much. Once you have all this information, you will find yourself in a much better place to make a decision to move forward or not.