“Pretotyping tests the soul of the product, not the body.”

Every month, we give away one scholarship to our Learn Pretotyping online course. Recipients receive access to the course for just $99, alongside a free one-on-one call with our founder Leslie. Saibelle Khaibah was our first scholarship recipient when we launched the initiative back in September. We sat down with her to hear how pretotyping has changed her innovation game….

Tell us a bit about yourself. 

My name is Saibelle Khaibah, I am based in Toronto Ontario, but have travelled and lived in many places in the world (UK, Africa, USA, Puerto Rico, Spain). Ever since I was a teenager, I have been obsessed with the landscape of products, consumers, inventions and disruptive innovations. Along the way it transitioned into a career, and for the last 10 years I have been designing products, and offering entrepreneurship and product development consultation services. At the minute, I am studying software engineering while continuing to test new ideas.

So what brought you to pretotyping? 

Well I've always been trying to launch my own products into the market and have worked with many entrepreneurs trying to do the same. And while I have grown as an innovator, I wouldn't say I have had the success that I would like to see for myself. People tell me I have great ideas, and I have had investors in the past but I keep getting stuck at the same point in this entrepreneurship journey: no matter what the idea is or how much start-up money is involved, the idea would fail and I never really knew why. I was working so hard and felt I was following all the rules, but I knew I was doing something wrong and I didn't know what. I was just left thinking: “There has to be another way. This can't be it.”  

And then, one day while googling something like ‘idea validation’ or ‘test your products cheaply,’ I stumbled on Alberto [Savoia]’s YouTube channel. Then I read his book The Right It and started following Leslie [Barry, founder of Exponentially] and found the pretotyping course! 

And how have you found pretotyping?

Pretotyping is the missing piece that I have been needing to move forward as an innovator, because it’s about getting product ideas to the market without spending thousands of dollars building it. I’ve seen a lot of my clients lose so much money that way, and it’s just exhausting. 

In a short period of time, pretotyping changed my approach to how I value and approach the ideation and market validation stage of innovation. Although I was practicing idea validation  prior to pretotyping, I was not using the same tools and techniques. Pretotyping is great because you do so much before you even think about building your product and marketing it. It incorporates a lot of other innovation methodologies - like the lean canvas and agile - so I could pick it up easily. I’d tried lean and agile but it didn’t fill the gap that pretotyping does. 

Pretotyping is great because it is precise: it doesn’t look at generalized testing and validation; it's very specific. This difference has saved me thousands of dollars, lots of time and - most importantly - has made me a stress-free product developer. 

So, what is it about pretotyping that makes it less stressful?

At its core, pretotyping encourages me to move slow and steady when executing ideas. It redefines the values that affect how innovators, entrepreneurs and thinkers currently execute idea validation. Most of us are under the impression that we have to move fast and furious when bringing an idea to market, and a lot of tools and resources are created from this fundamental assumption.

But the techniques and tools provided by pretotyping sets the stage for a slow and steady ideation process.  Within that environment the user is able to pay attention and see more “things” pertaining to their idea and the market.  Yes, pretotyping is about  market validation and ideation, but to do that you need to think differently and you can only think differently if the environment allows you to do so.

Pretotyping grounds you in a way that feels like you have control over your own ideas. With other methodologies, you spend a lot of time and money going through a process just to get to a place that is still uncertain. Pretotyping gets you answers quickly, so you can make informed decisions. It’s very grounding.

How has pretotyping changed how you're approaching innovation?

It has changed where I put my focus at the very start of idea execution. Prior to pretotyping, like many people I focussed on making ‘the perfect product,’ which costs a lot of time and money. With pretotyping, you learn that trying to build the product without market validation data is a waste of time.  Not just any market validation data, but precise data about your customers and industry.

So instead of  rushing to compare my product with others or Googling competitors or developing the physical thing, I’m focused on the product idea relationship to the market first. Instead of building it, I’m asking: what’s the value of the product? Do customers want it? How can I validate this idea? When I explain pretotyping to people, I say: it validates the soul of the product first, not the body. 

That shift of attention from the product to the idea - from the ‘body’ to the ‘soul - is such a small thing, but it’s reshaped everything about my product development. You want to invest your time into validating the spirit of the product, and that way it’s easier to manage, easy to build upon, saves you time and money, and makes building the ‘body’ (if the idea gets validated) so much easier. Product development makes more sense with pretotyping.

You’ve finished the course! What’s next for you as a Certified Pretotyper? 

Prior to the course I thought I needed to get into an incubator or work more and raise more money to continue building ‘bodies’ of products. But now that I’ve learned pretotyping, I know that’s not necessarily true. So the next thing for me is to reposition my innovation methodology to really incorporate pretotyping.

Prior to this, I had clients who were using their last $5,000 or $10,000 on idea and product development without being confident  that the market really wanted it.. And these are not big companies with millions to spare - these are individuals with a dream who have scraped together this money to work through an idea. With pretotyping, I can confidently say to them:  “I have techniques and tools that will validate your ideas to make sure you are on the right path to bring your idea to market. This methodology will validate your idea quickly and cheaply, so you can make better decisions before you invest so much more money and time.” And that’s the thing about pretotyping: even if things fail, or your idea can’t be validated, you are always going to be left with useful information that pushes you forward. 

How can people connect with you?

On LinkedIn and Twitter and through my company SK Innovations. I have also just established YouTube channel which will be dedicated to pretotyping and innovation, and I am active in Exponentially’s free Slack channel.

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Ready to become a Certified Pretotyper like Saibelle? Sign up for a free preview of our Learn Pretotyping online course, or apply for the Alberto Savoia Pretotyping Scholarship.