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Test Often and Fail Fast: The Art of Prototypes and Samples

Perfectionists Are Losers

A few years ago, I interviewed Ramit Sethi, a young, bright entrepreneur, on my radio show. At the ripe age of twenty-six, Ramit had already started a screamingly hot blog with a huge following (I Will Teach You to Be Rich, a personal finance blog for college students and recent graduates), gotten two degrees from Stanford, started a company (PBwiki), and struck two book deals.

So I asked Ramit a question that I have heard from many young people who want to start a business:

“What if people won’t want to hire me because I am too young?”

“Give me a break,” he said. “Perfectionists are losers.”

I laughed out loud at his bluntness, but immediately got what he was saying.

When you sit back and wait until you are perfectly prepared for an opportunity, it passes you by. What highly productive and successful people do is spend as little time as possible at the edge of opportunities, agonizing whether or not to move forward.

Instead, they jump in with both feet and sink or swim quickly. After lots of real-world experience, they fine-tune their understanding of the types of opportunities that will yield the most success and the kinds of situations that will best utilize their talents.

So if you think that your perfectionist tendencies are going to get in the way of making progress on your business plans, how can you overcome them?

Tip #1: Reframe Your Understanding of How Perfect Happens

There is nothing wrong with having very high standards and wanting to produce excellent work. The problem is, most people don’t understand that extremely high quality work usually results from a practice my father taught me from photography: bracketing. Bracketing is a general technique of taking multiple frames of the same shot of the same subject using the same or different camera settings.

I used to think that professional photographers took award-winning shots with every click of the camera. As seasoned professionals, they surely did not have the same out of focus, finger in front of the lens, or poor lighting problems that plagued my amateur shots, right? Wrong. Great photographers might pluck one great shot in the middle of ninety-nine mediocre ones. They know that it is impossible to get the perfect shot in one try, so they take lots and lots of pictures of the same thing with the hope that one frame will come out perfect.

Writer Anne Lamott shares similar advice in her brilliant book Bird by Bird, which should be required reading for anyone who writes. She explains the importance of writing really, really bad first drafts:

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?” you let her . . . If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those crazy six pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you are supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go—but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.¹

So when you feel the breath of your inner perfectionist on your neck, turn to it and say, “Thanks for caring, but I am in the process of bracketing and doing really, really shitty drafts. I must do this in order to discover the perfect spots of my work, so rest assured that I will not be this bad forever.”

Tip #2: Fail Fast and Move On

A “perfect” work situation for you is doing work you love and are great at with people who totally support you in an environment that rewards you handsomely. If you are in a less-than-ideal environment and with bad partners, you will always feel inferior and mediocre.

Seth Godin explains this very well in his book The Dip. He says: “What really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.”²

You know you are in a situation where you have to quit and move on when:

• A client or partner continually disappoints you and makes you feel either incompetent or inferior.

• You have poured tons of time and money into an endeavor that never seems to catch fire. Despite enormous effort, you never get any real signals from the universe (or from plain old paying customers or partners) that the project is one you are meant to do. Don’t be embarrassed to admit failure because of the effort and money spent—just cut the strings and move on to the next thing that is more enjoyable to do and will best leverage your talents.

• You are working in an area that has tremendous constraints, so no matter how hard you work, you are not likely to be compensated adequately. This can involve a market that is very competitive, clients who can never afford to pay you what you are worth, or an idea so complex or difficult that it saps all your time and energy.

How do you know that any of these situations are truly times to quit and not critical moments before a breakthrough?

You just know. Something deep inside will tell you what work you are meant, and not meant, to do. Trust your instinct.

Tip #3: Hang Out in the Right Barbershop

A friend of mine said, “If you hang out in a barbershop, sooner or later you are going to get a haircut.”

Which barbershop are you hanging out in? What kind of lives do the people around you lead? Are they positive, filled with humor, successful and creative? Do they constantly learn new things and improve their skills? Do they attract great partners naturally, without being pushy? Make a list of the qualities of people who bring out the best in you. My list of ideal partners includes things like:

• Approaches life with a healthy attitude and learns from mistakes

• Handles money well and isn’t afraid to ask for what he or she is worth

• Treats others with dignity and respect

• Produces good work consistently

• Puts a priority on family life and does not work excessively

• Has a great sense of humor and laughs at mistakes

• Communicates openly and authentically

As you compile your own list, look around you and ask, “Do the people in my life exhibit these qualities? If not, how can I surround myself with people who do?”

Tip #4: Practice Forgiveness

We all make mistakes. Some of us make really big stupid ones (I use “us” very intentionally, as I continue to make some real doozies, even when I know better). Since we know they are part of the journey toward great work, learn how to do the following once you realize you screwed up: Understand why you did. The reasons may be:

• Didn’t listen to your intuition

• Had too many things happening at once and lost control

• Didn’t have the right partners

• Avoided an uncomfortable area

Grab the lesson. Ask yourself:

• What can I do next time to avoid this unfortunate result?

• How does this lesson position me for great success in the future?

• What is this situation trying to tell me?

Forgive and let go.

Do not let your period of embarrassment or despair drag on too long. Tell yourself, “You screwed up, you learned from it, and now it is time to move on. Everything is all right, and your whining is keeping you from doing the work you are meant to do.”

Bottom line: Don’t lose an opportunity, your wit, or your will by being a perfectionist. Life is too short!

Fling It on the Wall and See What Sticks

Much of what I just talked about is the mindset that will allow you to test your ideas without dying from humiliation.

The physical act of testing business ideas is really not a big deal.

• If you want to sell cookies, make some, put out a table on your sidewalk, grab a piece of paper and a Sharpie and write “Delicious, hot fresh cookies, 50 cents,” and watch what happens.

• If you have an idea for an improved bicycle basket, get some cardboard, duct tape, and string and hang a prototype on your son’s tricycle.

• If you have a great idea for a software product, invite ten of the smartest engineers you know, buy lots of Red Bull, and host your own Let’s-create-it-test-it-launch-it Party (more on this later).

• If you want to be a life coach, start to have fifteen-minute coaching sessions with everyone you know. Your daughter’s preschool teacher. The pharmacist. The guy at the bus stop. Don’t worry about asking their permission; just turn on your mad coaching skills. If you are any good, they will be hungry for more.

• If you are going to write a series of best-selling self-help books that will shift global consciousness, go to wordpress.com and write three sentences of a really bad blog post in a really ugly-looking template. The longest journey begins with the smallest step.

You want to make testing and prototyping an integral part of how you grow your business. It won’t just be the way you get your business off the ground, it will be the way your business continually grows and thrives.

Inside the Mind of an Entrepreneur

Rich Sloan is the cofounder of StartupNation, a resource-rich destination for aspiring and newbie entrepreneurs. Through his active online community, radio show, media appearances, and role as an angel investor, he probably gets pitched more business ideas in a week than most people hear in a decade.

Armed with specific business ideas from my blog readers, I interviewed Rich on how to go about testing and prototyping them. Here’s one example:

 

BUSINESS IDEA

 

An assembly business service, assembling and installing play structures, barbecues, patio furniture, kids’ toys, light fixtures, stereos, tools, just about anything that comes in pieces and troubles the average person to put together.

 

WHAT THE ENTREPRENEUR ALREADY HAS DONE

 

He’s created a huge inventory of things that can be assembled. So he knows he can. He got a URL and a name and he drafted a plan in terms of hourly rates.

 

WHERE HE IS STUCK

 

He thinks a lot of people need help but he doesn’t know how to connect with his potential customer base. He’s played with Google AdSense and he just doesn’t know how to find people who need help and how can he get market demographics to figure out if it’s viable. So what would be a way you would suggest that he could just start to test this a little bit to see if there’s a market for it?

 

RICH SLOAN, STARTUPNATION

 

As for the viability of the service, people are often drawn to the self-assembly things because they are a little less expensive. And so one of the sensitivity points with what he’s doing is absolutely going to be: Are people willing to pay for someone else to do this? Most of the time, people go into a purchase of something that needs to be assembled under the naïve assumption that what it says on the cover or label of the big box is true, which is “easy to assemble.”

And I actually think that there’s an attractiveness and an appeal to the place where the traffic is, the Home Depot or the Toys ‘R’ Us, whatever it may be. And there is a certain level of credibility that he will take on if his service is offered through those places. I also would say that the most compelling thing to me when I work with a contractor is knowing that other people have been satisfied. So I would further be willing to accumulate some number of initial customers at no fee whatsoever just to show off and acquire a testimonial.

A Prototype in Action

Ramit Sethi is the cofounder of PBwiki, the largest host of business and educational wikis in the world. As of this writing, the company employs twenty-five people and hosts over 500,000 wikis. But it wasn’t always that way.

Ramit told me the story of how his company was launched in 2005, which is the ultimate example of quick testing and prototyping:

There is a thing called “Super Happy Dev House” where hackers come and work on something from evening all the way to the morning. David Weekly [cofounder] and others provided a group of programmers a bunch of Red Bull and a WiFi, and they sat down and started creating stuff. People talked to each other and got feedback. When morning came, we launched the project. It was a great way of quickly paring down what we had in the application and what we didn’t.

Forty-eight hours after that initial overnight Red Bull-fueled product development session, 1,000 wikis were launched on the fledgling service.

Due to the publicity from relationships with well-connected bloggers that Ramit and David had cultivated for a long time and a clear “invite your friends” strategy with current users, the world spread about the new service.

And the numbers kept on going up from 1,000 to 5,000 and now (three years later) up to 555,000. Ramit says: “The key was putting out something really simple. In fact, if you look at the Internet archive, you can see how simple the Web page was. All you could do was sign up. It turned out people just wanted a really simple Web page that they can collaborate on.”

The wiki idea was actually one of many that Ramit and David were evaluating. “In fact, we had about nine different pieces of software we were interested in that we put on a whiteboard. When PBwiki took off, that was when we said, ‘All right. Forget the others. This is what we have to pay attention to.’ ”

Knowing that their product was bare bones and had lots of bugs, they made product improvement the number one priority. Product changes were made immediately.

We had a Gmail account that support questions would go to and we’d answer that. And then we’d be sitting in a room and talking about it or we’d be on IM because we didn’t have an office. We’d make real-time changes and we would basically announce them right there and the changes would be incorporated into the product. It was a really pure time because there were two guys, product changes being made, feedback coming in, sketches made and designs launched. It’s very quick. People love that, they love immediate feedback. They are willing to accept a lot of things if they get it.

In the true spirit of action over process, Ramit and David didn’t have a big plan when they started.

Our plan was: “Let’s open up a Gmail account then, okay, that’s it.” People often confuse the idea of our start-up, thinking we had a big long-term vision. The reality was, we just created a wiki. And now, three years later, we’ve developed this very, very unique vision of collaboration for educators and businesses. But at the beginning often it’s just “let’s roll this thing out and see what happens.” It’s more of a curiosity.

The start of PBwiki has enough stories to fill a whole book. What I hope you take away from their start-up process is the power in trusting the prototype process.

Ghetto but It Works

RAMIT SETH I, PBWI KI

 

We have a sign up at PBwiki that says, “Ghetto but it works.” The idea is: let’s get something out fast. What we do is have tech demos in our morning meetings. We’ll have an engineer who comes up with something overnight. He’ll put up a tech demo and he’ll say, “Okay, guys, I’m going to show you a tech demo but it’s really simple. It’s just a prototype.” Right? But that takes courage to show a tech demo with a lot of broken bugs in it in front of your entire team on a projector screen. But they do it, and we applaud. Because this person spent the whole night creating a feature just to show us and some of the stuff doesn’t work, the links are broken, sometimes you have to hit refresh or edit the code right there. But, guess what? It shows that someone took initiative and that they are not afraid to show this crazy idea they have because many of those crazy ideas end up in our product.

Visit Ramit’s Web site: iwillteachyoutoberich.com.

Gain Experience and Credibility as You Test Your Ideas

Testing an idea to see if it is viable is one part of the business plan equation. Another is gaining real experience with clients, which will make the marketing and selling process easier. Olivia, one of my readers from Australia, sent a thought-provoking question that speaks directly to the testing/prototyping question:

I’ve decided I’d love to do professional organising (only just emerging in Australia), and am reading lots of excellent books on the actual work/counseling and also marketing and business info. The biggest question is, since I’ve been a Personal Assistant, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever done (18 years), how on earth do I break out of the mold of the old job, and find the guts to actually TAKE ON A FIRST CLIENT in my new field? I mean, to study and ponder and learn and prepare is one thing, but actually going out there and DOING it, I have no idea where to get the “nerve.” This could be the difference to whether I take off or not. How do I go from preparing to doing?

This is such a juicy question because it highlights a number of challenges for first-time entrepreneurs:

 

If you are brand new in your field, “test drive” your service as a volunteer. Choose an individual or organization that would be an excellent case study and that would provide clear “before and after” results. Gain agreement from your client that if she is satisfied with the results, you may use her as a reference for future clients and would use her project as a case study for your marketing.

So in Olivia’s case of being a professional organizer, she has a great opportunity to choose a client with a terribly messy office or closet. She can take a “ before” picture, do the work, then do the “after” picture. If she does a stunning job (which I am sure she will) she can take a picture of her satisfied client and ask for a two-sentence testimonial. This will be great for her Web site or marketing materials.

Gaining Confidence

Find a mentor. There is nothing like hearing “stories from the trenches” from someone who used to be in your position and now has a thriving practice. You can get information, resources, and confidence from the right person, or group of people. You may also join a professional organization or community forum like StartupNation to get some ideas and support.

Getting Clients

Start by defining your niche. If you are concerned with just getting things going and taking on a few clients, start with defining your niche. That is the specific segment of people that you will target for your marketing efforts.

For just about anyone these days (well, anyone with something meaty to share and who likes to write), I would recommend starting a blog on your topic, since it is a great way to showcase your expertise, build community, test ideas, and develop a friendly relationship with potential clients.

In Olivia’s case, since she mentioned that professional organizing was just getting started in Australia, maybe she could partner with a more established service professional such as an accountant to provide financial organizing services for their clients. Whatever niche she chooses, I would recommend starting in a targeted way, then as she gains exposure and experience, she could branch out to other groups.

Forget Strategy

DIEGO RODRIGUEZ, IDEO AND METACOOL

 

An innocuous typo I saw today got me thinking: what if we used a word called “startegy” instead of “strategy”? When faced with a blank sheet of paper, we tend to spend too much time engaged in discussions about strategy, otherwise known as “strategery,” and too little time learning by doing. In this context, talking a lot about what to do and why is inappropriate because we don’t know enough about context and constraints. When you’re getting out into the world and starting things, guiding evidence has a way of surfacing in a way which doesn’t happen within the cloistered confines of meeting rooms.

Revolutions don’t just happen, they get started. Startegy.

Get Out of Your Mental Ghetto

San Francisco’s Mission District is a lively Latino neighborhood, filled with activity, twelve kinds of chili peppers in outdoor markets, loud music, and killer restaurants. It is also home to two gangs: the norteños and the sureños. Each wears their designated color (norte = red, sur = blue) and stays within rigid boundaries of their neighborhood. If you are a young person with any remote affiliation to these groups (desired or not) and venture past these lines, the consequences are very violent, and sometimes deadly.

This context is important to understand how I could meet a young man named Dennis who had never been outside of the four-square city block he grew up in. He had never seen the Golden Gate Bridge, or Coit Tower, or the ocean. And he was fourteen years old.

Many people could look at his situation and think it was absurd. Of course he could have found a way to get out of his neighborhood. But logistics were not the real issue. What had created an imaginary electronic fence around his four-square block was a combination of fear and a false sense of security. He had seen many of his young peers fall to violence and was really terrified of the same thing happening to him. And he believed that if he just followed the rules and stayed within the “safe” boundaries of his neighborhood, everything would be okay. He had everything he needed to get by.

A lot of us get caught in the same mental ghettos with our professional affiliations.

• We huddle in online forums with our peers and convince one another that with a little bit more subject matter expertise or certification we will be ready to create a successful business.

• We attend conferences filled with people who all agree with us, and talk about practices, tools, and technologies that excite only us. (Participating on Twitter for a couple of months has led me to believe that there are more “Web 2.0/social media consultants” than there could possibly be businesses to support them.)

• We spend thousands of dollars in classes and workshops learning the next big coaching technique/marketing trick/SEO optimization that will magically make us successful.

What would happen if we just hung out with the people we want to serve?

By “hang out,” I don’t mean read a study on their behavior or conduct a structured focus group, I mean pull up a chair, sit with them in their natural habitat, attend their conferences, or pick up the phone and talk to them. Examples:

• If you are an accountant who wants to work with slightly zany, creative people, shred your “Accounting Trends 2008” conference tickets and hop a Volkswagen bus to Burning Man.

• If you are a software developer who wants to create time management software for busy moms, get off the Joel on Software forum and get to the grocery store at 5:00 p.m. and talk to twenty women with kids hanging off of their shopping carts.

• If you are a coach who wants to work with leading technology executives, save the money you would have spent on your “master double platinum certification training certificate” and attend the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas.

It may feel as awkward and scary for you to do these things as it was for Dennis to cross the street at the edge of his “safe” zone. But, unlike him, you don’t face a death threat. You have just as much to learn and discover outside of your mental ghetto as he did outside his.

What If You Crash and Burn?

I have highlighted some examples in this chapter of successful business launches that resulted from rapid testing and prototyping.

But what if the opposite happens?

• What if it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined?

• What if no one likes it?

• What if no one buys it?

• What if someone else does it better?

• What if you have been wasting your time and should have done something else?

I don’t want to minimize your frustration and pain, since it is not fun to fail at something you really care about.

But in the big picture, isn’t it better to find out that your idea doesn’t have legs before you have invested a lot of time, effort, and money? Won’t that free you up to pursue other things?

As a culture, we revel in stories of early dejection that were followed by fame and fortune. Stories like these:

• After Harrison Ford’s first performance as a hotel bellhop in the film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, the studio vice president called him in to his office. “Sit down, kid,” the studio head said, “I want to tell you a story. The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie he delivered a bag of groceries. We took one look at him and knew he was a movie star.” Ford replied, “I thought you were supposed to think that he was a grocery delivery boy.” The vice president dismissed Ford with “You ain’t got it, kid, you ain’t got it . . . now get out of here.”

• Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, Bill Walsh, and Jimmy Johnson accounted for eleven of the nineteen Super Bowl victories from 1974 to 1993. They also share the distinction of having the worst records as first-season head coaches in NFL history—they didn’t win a single game.

• After his first audition, Sidney Poitier was told by the casting director, “Why don’t you stop wasting people’s time and go out and become a dishwasher or something?” It was at that moment, recalls Poitier, that he decided to devote his life to acting.

These stories should fire you up.

The more you try, test, get beat down, get back up, laugh in the face of massive failure and maintain a spirit of curiosity, the better entrepreneur you will be.

Bestselling author, successful businessman, and marketing guru Seth Godin is thought of in most circles as a genius. But he has not been exempt from business failures, as he described in this blog post:

Failure as an Event

I try hard not to keep a running tally of big-time failures in my head. It gets in the way of creating the next thing. On the other hand, when you see failure as a learning event, not a destination, it makes you smarter, faster.

Some big ones from my past:

The Boston Bar Exam. My two partners and I spent a lot of time and money building this our last year of college. It was a coupon book filled with free drinks from various bars in Cambridge and Boston. The booklet would be sold at the bars, encouraging, I dunno, drunk driving. Lessons: Don’t spend a lot on startup costs, don’t sell to bar owners and don’t have three equal partners, since one person always feels outvoted.

The Internet White Pages. This was a 700-page book filled with nearly a million email addresses. It took months to create and IDG, the publisher, printed 80,000 copies. They shredded 79,000 of them. Lesson: If the Internet Yellow Pages is a huge hit (it was), that doesn’t mean the obvious counterpart will be. A directory that’s incomplete is almost always worthless.

MaxFax. This was the first fax board for the Mac. It would allow any Mac user to hit “print” and send what was on the screen to any fax machine. We raised seed money from a wealthy dentist, built a working prototype and worked to license it to a big computer hardware company. Lessons: Don’t raise money from amateurs, watch out for flaky engineering if you’re selling a prototype, think twice before you enter a market with one huge player (Apple knocked off the idea) and don’t build a business hoping to sell out unless you have a clear path to do that.

I have a dozen more. The first wireless Sonos-like device. A nationwide game show using 900 numbers. A fundraising company that offered light-bulbs for sale to high school bands (lighter than fruit!). Not to mention classic book ideas like, “How to hypnotize your friends and get them to act like chickens.” I’m not using hyperbole when I say that in 25 years, I had at least 20 serious career-ending failures.

I guess the biggest lessons are:

• Prepare for the dip. Starting a business is far easier than making it successful. You need to see a path and have the resources to get through it.

• Cliff businesses are glamorous but dangerous.

• Projects exist in an eco-system. Who are the other players? How do you fit in?

• Being the dumbest partner in a room of smart people is exactly where you want to be.

• And the biggest of all: persist. Do the next one.³