The Prototyping Process: How It Has Evolved on the Web

Guy Kawasaki is one of the most intriguing people I know in Silicon Valley because he has had the courage to try so many things. His initial fame came at Apple, where he was renowned as their all-star marketing evangelist (Guy remains one of the most engaging speakers I have ever seen: He is smart, funny, and unlike too many of us, does not take himself too seriously). Then, when the dotcom boom hit, he started his own venture firm. Garage.com. Guy didn’t do it like everyone else either – most local VC’s stay out of sight and lurk in boardrooms, and can only be spotted having breakfast at Buck’s in Woodside or Il Fornaio in Palo Alto. Guy was the VC for the masses. He held one-day entrepreneurship boot camps, and at the height of the madness, thousands of people would attend (like rock concerts, some would sleep in line overnight to get good seats). And he did other crazy things: I recall waiting for the movie at a local theater, and an advertisement appeared on the screen encouraging entrepreneurs to send their business plans to Garage.com. Guy also wrote a few best-selling books along the way too.  Guy has morphed himself yet again, and has become a leading – perhaps the leading – business blogger at How to Change the World.

The great thing about Guy, as you can see from his history, is he does not act like the best he can be is a perfect imitation of what he used to be – he is always trying new things. Some succeed, some fail, and no matter what happens, he is always learning (and adding to his pile of stories for those great speeches he gives). In this spirit, Guy launched a new venture last week called Truemors.com. Essentially, it is a site where rumors are submitted, and readers vote for them or against them. The current buzz on blogs is pretty mixed about the site, with some bloggers complaining about the interface, others about the lack of focus, some because he is moderating the comments too much, others that he is moderating the comments too little.

I suspect that some of these concerns are valid and having been to the site, I found that it was less compelling, for example, than Guy’s amazing blog. I think it needs to be more visually compelling in particular. Regardless of the ultimate fate of Truemors, to me it is indicative of both Guy’s wisdom in particular and how entrepreneurship in the current Web 2.0 environment (for lack of a better term) is so much different than the first dotcom boom.

Consider a few features of how Guy is launching the site:

1. It was developed for about $12,000 by Electric Pulp before being launched; as Guy pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, during the first boom, there would be a pitch (and if he was lucky) some VC might have thrown a few million bucks at it. And then it would have probably failed after burning through all that money.

2. Guy is treating this as first, quick and dirty prototype, and he is getting people in the user community to help him come up with ways to improve it. Now, as with all designers, I am sure that hearing negative comments is no fun, but as we teach our students in the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, the fastest way to improve your prototype is to get it in front of users and to keep iterating in response to their feedback. In the “bad old days” a bunch of venture capitalists (none of whom had ever managed a web company, and most of whom had never funded a successful one) would pick away and make suggestions about the site before it was launched. In the new world, for better or worse, you can just put it out there, and update it constantly in response to the customer and user responses. Guy’s site may keep getting better and ultimately succeed, or at worst, it will be a cheap failure and you will probably learn something.

3. I also have to commend Guy for having the simple courage to do this; Guy has spent a lot of time giving people feedback on their ideas for new companies (and like all VC’s. most of this is usually negative, as most new things have a lot of flaws). Guy is putting himself on the line in a most public way.

4. So, for me, the upshot of all this is that Guy is demonstrating the very essence of design thinking that we teach at the Stanford d.school – get a prototype out there that is cheap, show it to a lot of users or customers, update quickly in response. This increases your chances of succeeding and, if you do fail (as will often happen), it will be cheap and fast.

I first learned about how entrepreneurship on the web had changed so dramatically about two years ago. Jeff Pfeffer and I had just finished our book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, and I was talking about it with a group at Stanford that included John Lilly, now COO of Mozilla (most famous for the Firefox open source browser). I mentioned that one of the main ideas of the book was that the most effective leaders treat their organizations as an unfinished prototype. John – a mighty smart guy I’ve known for about 10 years – went on to explain that the meaning of a prototype for a web-based company had changed dramatically since the dotcom boom:

Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about this in an article in Strategy & Business, and I think that John’s wisdom goes a long way to explain why Guy’s approach is so smart –whether Truemors ultimately succeeds or not. To quote part of the opening two paragraphs of the article:

‘John Lilly, formerly the CEO and founder of a Web-design firm and corporate incubator called Reactivity, recently recalled what it took to sell an idea to venture capitalists during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. In a period of 30 weeks, his team generated 30 PowerPoint presentations as “prototypes” for a diverse group of Internet-based startups. Out of these, a combination e-mail and Web browser was chosen as the most promising. Its PowerPoint presentation was fine-tuned and then shown to potential backers. Based primarily on this slide show — there was very little else for the venture capitalists to go on — Reactivity raised more than $100 million for a new company (now defunct) called Zaplet.

“That approach wouldn’t work now,” said Mr. Lilly, currently vice president of business development and operations at Mozilla Corporation. “By and large, venture capitalists only fund Web-based companies that already have proven the ability to attract customer traffic.”’

As John suggests, venture capitalists now want to see a website that works and attracts traffic. And as Guy suggests, this means that there will be times when you don’t actually need a venture capitalists any longer, or for that matter, major corporate funding for your web-based venture – if you have a good idea and some skilled programmers (or can hire some for a little while), you can throw it out there and see if it works.

Does this all sound too easy? Perhaps it does, and indeed, most new websites, as with most new ventures, fail. But a very interesting student project in our current d.school class on Creating Infectious Action shows how it works. One of the student groups came-up (this was done by 4 students in less than 2 weeks.... and I think they have only one who can program) with something called My eBay Fox – which is a version of the Firefox browser that is “customized to provide you with a better eBay experience.” The students are Tyler Hicks-Wright, Madalina Seghete, Ana Paula Azuela Garcia, and Peter Gleason --- they have a blog, of course, which you can check out – I also include a picture of the team.

I went to class last week, and Diego Rodriguez reported that they had overall 30,000 unique visitors to the site so far that week (it was only Thursday) – a heck of a week. On Saturday, Tyler reported that they were up 40,000 unique visitors and 13,000 downloads.

There is also an interesting twist: It turns out that eBay and Mozilla have been working jointly on a customized version that is similar to the student’s project  for months, and these students have produced something that (I am told, I am not an eBay user) is quite good in just a couple weeks. Check out this article, which probably overemphasizes the competitive aspects, but is an interesting read. Note that the students came up with this idea without any prior knowledge that eBay and Mozilla were working on a similar product – in fact, I was sitting near Mozilla COO John Lilly (who visited class) when he first heard about it, while is jaw dropped a bit, he did not make any attempt to stop the group -- after all, it was their idea, they didn’t know that a similar product was under development, and Mozilla’s hallmark is open source development (which is why the have less than 100 paid employees and over 100 million users).

Now, to return to Guy. He is doing the same thing the students are doing. He put it a quick and inexpensive prototype, he will keep improving it on the basis of feedback, and if it succeeds, that is wonderful. If it fails, the worst thing that happens is that he will have learned something and will have some great stories to tell – although he will have missed the fun of all those PowerPoint pitches to VC’s like in the good old days, and at the extreme, the chance to burn through millions. I am not saying the venture capital business is obsolete, it is just that if you have a web-based company, you need to have a site up and working, and making some money, before you try to pitch the company.

This approach may sound new, but although web prototyping are more realistic and faster now, they notion of doing a lot of things and seeing what sticks is a very old idea. Failing fast and failing forward is a hallmark of creative geniuses through the ages, at least if you believe large scale historical studies done on one sample after another – artists, scientists, composers, and so on --  by Professor Dean Keith Simonton at the University of California at Davis.  He concludes:

“Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do so by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. ….. The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!”

So the most creative people don’t have higher hit rates, they just do and make more stuff.

P.S. The four students on the d.school team keep tweaking My eBay Fox, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for them… they also have launched a Firefox tool bars for Facebook, called My Facebook Fox, which is already getting positive reviews too. Not bad for four young people, who each have other classes as well .

P.P.S. A shorter version of this post also appears on my Harvard Business Online blog, The Working Life, buy I wanted to post the whole thing here, as it has some important twists and turns that were cut, and I wanted to make sure and get the student’s names and pictures in – very important!

Comments

[Online Shop]

I think these blog is really useful for new comers and Excellent resource list.
It´s a very interesting Blog and simple answer of many questions.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks it helps me a lot…

[Web Design MN]

No problem! :)

[Bob Sutton]

Thanks, it is www.truemors.com. I fixed the post too!

Bob

[Web Design MN]

FYI - you have a link to www.truemors.com and then later when you are talking about it, you call it TrueRumors. Thanks for a great read, though! :)