How do you pretotype a pretotyping course?
We launched our online Pretotyping Course six weeks ago, on Monday, August 31, 2020. It’s been a hit. Our new Slack channel is full of pretotypers from all over the world, and new people are signing up for the free preview of the course every day. But… we almost set ourselves up for total disaster, because we almost didn’t pretotype it.
Back in March 2019, we got so excited about this idea that we started designing the course straight away. We had stepped through the gates of Thoughtland (anyone who knows pretotyping knows that is the most dangerous place to be) and we’d started to build something based on nothing but our own opinion. Big mistake. (Nearly). Instead, we took a deep breath and stopped building it.
Pretotyping is hard! It’s hard to pause your ideas and enthusiasm, and be disciplined enough to create experiments, run pretotypes, and gather useful data.
So we stopped building the course, went to the Exponentially app and started capturing the Lean Canvas that would help us design our first pretotype for the course.
We ran the first pretotype in March 2019 and - true to form - it failed.
In this case, the Fake Door Pretotype seemed appropriate as it was the fastest, cheapest way to get our idea in front of customers. So, we made a post promoting the (at this stage non-existent) course to our followers:
And - as we have seen many times in many different pretotypes - we got nothing. So we moved on to our next pretotype…
Next, we ran some Google ads to drive people to the offer so we can measure customers’ Initial Level of Interest. We calculate this by seeing how many people viewed the offer, versus how many people actually took action.
Pretotype #2? Also failed. Excellent!
Even though the Initial Level of Interest wasn’t high in this pretotype, this still gave us some great data about customer demographics, competitors, how customers search, how they behave, how they understand the concepts, what problems they have and - most importantly - how to run the next experiment.
So, we tried again.
We tweaked the ads, tried different copy and different regions. We also tried multiple versions of a call to action on the main Exponentially website.
Remember, the course still doesn’t exist! The aim? As with all pretotypes, it is to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, for as little money as possible. Here are the new ads that we ran:
Nine pretotypes later…
We kept iterating, kept targeting, and kept changing our offers, our calls to action, and our copy, until we hit our “go/no go” number. When we were satisfied that there was some demand for this course, we finally set about building it - over a year after we’d run our first pretotype.
But why bother with the pretotype at all, when there was already data from years of in-person workshops?
Beware… OPD (other people’s data) masquerading as YODA (your own data) can be hard to spot, and is the downfall of many new pretotypers.
We have run over 50 in-person workshops since 2017, and trained around 800 people. The feedback on this training is always great, with an average rating of 8/10, and the workshops absolutely work…
But even though it is data we gathered, in this context it is OPD because it was data from a completely different context - and it was useless to us when we were pretotyping our online course. Why, it was data that we had gathered ourselves, with our own workshops? Because in-person training is a very different beast to teaching online. It’s so different, in fact, that any data we had on in-person workshops was irrelevant. Enter YODA:
To pretotype anything successfully, you need “Your Own DAta,” so that’s what we went off to find. Because of our ads (which gave us YODA), we had a small mailing list of qualified people (more YODA) who had got their skin in the game (their email address) and told us they were interested in the course. So, we used this as a soft-launch opportunity to get the course out there and iron out any technical or practical issues, which was an incredibly useful final pretotype.
To anyone reading this who experimented with us during our pretotyping phase: thank you. (In true pretotyping fashion, we rewarded our ‘guinea pig’ customers with a huge discount on the course).
So, have our pretotyping results lined up with real-world course signups?
Absolutely yes! Our course is gaining students all the time, from all over the world. We are offering scholarships every month, our free Slack channel is taking off, and we are proud to be certifying pretotypers at scale. The best bit? We know exactly why it is working so well: we put skin in the game and gathered data, not opinion.
Our experimentation isn’t over: we have skin in the game by offering a free preview of the course. Our conversion rates from preview into paying students is looking great so far - and this is the number that we are measuring to prove that we are solving a problem that exists for our customers, in a way that is valuable to our learners.
So, next time you see a banner or button on Exponentially.com, ask yourself, “Is this a pretotype?” 😉
In the meantime, we can’t wait to welcome you into our flagship Learn Pretotyping online course.