Video · 50 min

Build the Right It (Pretotyping)

Alberto Savoia · Stanford eCorner ETL (Alberto Savoia) Free Intermediate

Savoia, a former Google innovation lead, makes the case that most ideas fail because they are the wrong 'it', not because they were built badly. He shows pretotyping tricks that collect real market data in hours, so you test whether anyone wants the thing before you commit. It is the clearest argument that building the wrong thing well is the expensive mistake our answer warns about.

  • Most failures are wrong-it problems, not weak-execution problems
  • Collect real usage or purchase signals in hours, not months
  • Your own data beats other people's opinions about your idea
Open on stvp.stanford.edu ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I decide the single riskiest assumption my MVP should test instead of trying to prove the whole idea at once?

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