1. Business Model Validation Lab
Customer Discovery
Customer Validation
Mentor Feedback
Mentor Feedback
It’s helpful to orient everyone to where they are in the Lab. Plus further explanation here will give mentors a sense of how far the entrepreneurs have come so far over the last three days and how they might guide their mentoring based on what the entrepreneurs have focused on.
Identify Assumptions
Rapid Prototyping
Mentor Prep + Cost Assumptions
Strategic Planning
Keep Momentum

2. Check-in What’s worked? What was confusing?
What do you think your key priorities are today?
It’s always good to check in and see how entrepreneurs are doing and feeling. Having a brief check-point like this will enable you to calibrate where entrepreneurs are, who might be lagging behind, how the energy is, and how you might customize things going forward so as to make sure that the content is constantly relevant.

3. The Plan Learn Rapid Prototyping Principles Practice the methodology
Design your Rapid Prototyping Plan
Test in-market

4. Unknowns → Knowns ..but quickly!
Your Job
Unknowns → Knowns
..but quickly!
The Lab is designed to convert unknowns into knowns. We all know that already. But the question is, how can you actually convert unknowns into knowns faster?

5. Tom Chi, built Google Glass
Tom Chi, Unreasonable Mentor, was the lead designer/builder for Google Glass

6. Tom Chi, built Google Glass Two common mistakes:
Tom Chi says that there are two common mistakes that entrepreneurs make

7. Entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time in market
Tom Chi,
built Google Glass
Two common mistakes:
Entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time in market
Tom Chi says that entrepreneurs just don’t spend enough time in market working with, interacting with, talking to their customers (which is what we tried to address yesterday with customer discovery).

8. Tom Chi,
built Google Glass
Two common mistakes:
Entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time in market
Entrepreneurs underestimate how fast they can learn

9. Entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time in market
Tom Chi,
built Google Glass
Two common mistakes:
Entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time in market
Entrepreneurs underestimate how fast they can learn
This is the mistake that we will focus on today, and offer a methodology for how to overcome it.

10. Probabilities of Success
Assuming something has a 5% chance of succeeding
By the time you try 20 things,
a 64% chance of success
By the time you try 50 things,
a 92% chance of success
This slide simply shows how doing something more often increases the chance of success. We usually say: “imagine you had a 20-sided dice.” The chance of rolling the number 4 is 1/20 or 5%. But let’s say you rolled that dice 20 times, you would have a 64% chance that at some point a number 4 would turn up. If you rolled the dice 50 times, you would have a 92% chance that the dice would turn up a number 4.
So how can you take this mathematical probability into your work into thinking how you quickly try and test things out?
The problem is if it takes a long time to try something 20 times, then the time it will take to arrive at success will be longer. The goal here is to communicate that the number of attempts matters!

11. Stop thinking, start trying...

12. Stop guessing, start learning...

13. What is a prototype?
A prototype is an early sample or model of a product, service, experience, or plan that is built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from
Definition of a prototype

14. I’m too advanced for this...
This is simply acknowledging how an entrepreneur might feel….

15. ...I’ve already built my prototype
This is simply acknowledging how an entrepreneur might feel….

16. ...I already have a product I am selling
This is simply acknowledging how an entrepreneur might feel….

17. Rapid prototyping =
An approach to your work when you don’t have time, money, or expertise

18. Rapid prototyping = The operating system of entrepreneurship

19. Other examples?
This slide is a placeholder for a game that you can play where people pair up (Person A and Person B). Person A has 90 seconds to draw what they would imagine Person’s “Dream House” looks like WITHOUT getting talking to person B / getting feedback. They just have to do it by imagining/assuming what that person would like. Then ask the Group how accurate the drawing is to the dream house. You’ll notice that not many people report it being that accurate because it was done based in “isolation” and not with feedback from the person whose house it is.
Then they switch and Person B has 90 seconds to draw Person A’s dream-house, but Person A gets to be involved in the process, contributing thoughts, answering questions that Person B might be. This process is highly collaborative. In this exercise, Person B is drawing Person A’s dream house by reacting to what Person A is saying they want and don’t want. This is a microcosm of what rapid prototyping is! You can refer back to this example as people design+test prototypes and encourage them to be interactive in their development. Then ask the group if this house is more accurate, and people will say yes.

20. Two lies we have been taught:
There is only one right answer
Measure twice, cut once

21. Rapid Prototyping
There are multiple answers that will lead to the best one
Start cutting, and you’ll figure out how to measure

22. RP: Example
Zappos: Zappos is an website that sells shoes. When they were first starting out, they wondered if people would be willing to buy shoes online. After all, you usually need to try shoes on before you buy them, which perhaps made the internet not an ideal place to sell shoes. So they simply went to a local shoe-store, took pictures of shoes that were on the shelves, then uploaded those pictures to their website. If someone bought the shoes online, they would go back to the shoe-store, buy the shoes, box them up, and then send them to the buyer.
Why is this a good example?
It shows a very low-tech way to prototype something.
It shows a very low-risk way to prototype something. Zappos didn’t go out and buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory in shoes, and then try to figure out if people would buy them online. They did the first thing first.
It tested one thing: if people would buy shoes online. Answering that one question was the goal. The other stuff came later. This is important as entrepreneurs deconstruct their business ideas into multiple rapid prototyping experiments (not just one).
Note: Encourage the entrepreneurs to look at this example and consider exactly what the prototype was testing. It will be valuable for entrepreneurs to understand that this prototype did NOT test:
If this was a profitable business
If they carried the right inventory
How returning wrong-fitting shoes would work

23. Other examples?
Ask the entrepreneurs if they have other examples of rapid prototyping

24. How would you prototype a… marketing campaign?
For this slide and the following slides, use the example from the Lean Canvas.
Use this prompt to get entrepreneurs to think about how they might prototype this element of the business.

25. How would you prototype a… sales process?

26. How would you prototype the.. best website design?

27. How would you prototype the.. most effective sales one-pager?

28. Planning a Prototype

29. Testing the prototype

30. What to Prototype
Something that will likely get better over time as you learn more or get more feedback about it
Something that is important when it comes to finding a market, serving your beneficiaries, and validating your business/impact model

31. What to Prototype Product Service Customer Experience Website Design
Marketing campaign
1-pager for sales / marketing
Sales process