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In this accessible, prescriptive, and widely applicable manual, Google’s first engineering director and current Innovation Agitator Emeritus provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even if competently executed.
Millions of people around the world are working to introduce new ideas. Some will turn out to be stunning successes and have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others successes will be smaller and more personal, but no less meaningful: A restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that tells an important story, a local nonprofit that cares for abandoned pets.
Simultaneously, other groups are working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some will fail spectacularly and publicly: New Coke, the movie John Carter, the Ford Edsel. Others failures will be smaller and more private, but no less failure: A home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause too few people care about.
Most people believe that their venture will be successful. But the law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after launch—regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept.
Combining detailed case studies with personal insight drawn from his time at Google, his experience as an entrepreneur and consultant, and his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure: “Make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right,” he advises. In The Right It, he provides lessons on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype). Groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical, this essential guide delivers a proven formula for ensuring ideas, products, services, and businesses succeed.
Millions of people around the world are working to introduce new ideas. Some will turn out to be stunning successes and have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others successes will be smaller and more personal, but no less meaningful: A restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that tells an important story, a local nonprofit that cares for abandoned pets.
Simultaneously, other groups are working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some will fail spectacularly and publicly: New Coke, the movie John Carter, the Ford Edsel. Others failures will be smaller and more private, but no less failure: A home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause too few people care about.
Most people believe that their venture will be successful. But the law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after launch—regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept.
Combining detailed case studies with personal insight drawn from his time at Google, his experience as an entrepreneur and consultant, and his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure: “Make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right,” he advises. In The Right It, he provides lessons on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype). Groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical, this essential guide delivers a proven formula for ensuring ideas, products, services, and businesses succeed.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published March 30, 2020
284 people are currently reading
2491 people want to read
About the author
Alberto Savoia
10 books45 followersAs Google’s first Engineering Director, Alberto Savoia led the team that launched the
phenomenally successful Google AdWords.
He then shifted his focus to help Google maintain its
exponential going through aggressive company-wide innovation.
In his unique role as Google’s
Innovation Agitator, Alberto led a team that developed a powerful set of tools and practices to
help Google continue to innovate with the creativity, agility, and courage of startups.
Word of the impressive impact and results of Alberto’s approach to innovation quickly spread
beyond Google.
Today, he teaches and practices Apex Innovation worldwide, lectures at Stanford
University, and coaches Fortune 500 companies. From the first “Innovate Like A Startup. Go To
Market Like A Grownup” Stanford workshop in 2011, to today’s “How To Become an Innovators”
executive seminars at Google, Alberto’s insights and techniques have had a deep and lasting impact on the
way many world-leading companies view and approach innovation.
Alberto’s work as an innovator has won him significant recognition and awards, including the
2005 Wall Street Journal Technical Innovator Award, and he’s the author of “The Right It—Why
most new ideas fail and how to make sure yours succeed”, published by HarperCollins in 2019.
phenomenally successful Google AdWords.
He then shifted his focus to help Google maintain its
exponential going through aggressive company-wide innovation.
In his unique role as Google’s
Innovation Agitator, Alberto led a team that developed a powerful set of tools and practices to
help Google continue to innovate with the creativity, agility, and courage of startups.
Word of the impressive impact and results of Alberto’s approach to innovation quickly spread
beyond Google.
Today, he teaches and practices Apex Innovation worldwide, lectures at Stanford
University, and coaches Fortune 500 companies. From the first “Innovate Like A Startup. Go To
Market Like A Grownup” Stanford workshop in 2011, to today’s “How To Become an Innovators”
executive seminars at Google, Alberto’s insights and techniques have had a deep and lasting impact on the
way many world-leading companies view and approach innovation.
Alberto’s work as an innovator has won him significant recognition and awards, including the
2005 Wall Street Journal Technical Innovator Award, and he’s the author of “The Right It—Why
most new ideas fail and how to make sure yours succeed”, published by HarperCollins in 2019.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 102 reviews
November 6, 2021
Was the author not familiar with the Lean Startup? 🤔 Not a single reference to the work of Eric Ries, who covered the same concepts years earlier and with fewer unnecessary neologisms and acronyms.
July 8, 2023
December 31, 2022: Out of all the startup/ product validation books I read (Lean Startup, the Mom Test, Experimentation Works, etc) this is the book I came back to after 6 long months failing at building a startup. Savoia is incredibly clear about his definitions and what exactly you must do to find out if your idea is the wrong one.
This book is for those people who care more about achieving success in general than achieving success with a specific idea. The one big lesson this book nails into you is that excellent engineering and execution cannot save you from failure if you're building something that no one wants or needs.
For people who love this book and want to take their search for 'the Right It' a step further, I highly recommend his 'The Math of Success' video series on Youtube.
July 8th 2023: I practiced Savoia's experimental mindset, and it saved me from over-investing in several bad ideas. Then once I found an idea that seemed promising, I completely forgot his methods and his Law of Market Failure "90% of ideas will fail, even if competently executed". Now here I am a year later, having been seriously bitten by the Beast of Failure on my project. Truly humbled, I'm now back with my hat in hand to relearn these lessons, hopefully this time it'll stick. And I don't have to experience this level of failure again.
This book is for those people who care more about achieving success in general than achieving success with a specific idea. The one big lesson this book nails into you is that excellent engineering and execution cannot save you from failure if you're building something that no one wants or needs.
For people who love this book and want to take their search for 'the Right It' a step further, I highly recommend his 'The Math of Success' video series on Youtube.
July 8th 2023: I practiced Savoia's experimental mindset, and it saved me from over-investing in several bad ideas. Then once I found an idea that seemed promising, I completely forgot his methods and his Law of Market Failure "90% of ideas will fail, even if competently executed". Now here I am a year later, having been seriously bitten by the Beast of Failure on my project. Truly humbled, I'm now back with my hat in hand to relearn these lessons, hopefully this time it'll stick. And I don't have to experience this level of failure again.
December 25, 2020
The book lays out detailed step-by-step guide on how to get an idea from start to finish, listing out useful techniques from hypothesising to testing to analysing your own data. It advocates for collecting skins-in-the-game instead of using other people's data such as market research as the means to determine if a product will be the right it. I really enjoyed how clearly each step is elaborated and how together all steps form a complete system. I also really enjoy the last chapter where the author advocates for building the right product for you and the world. It's the perfect book with concrete techniques and inspiration at the end.
February 16, 2023
3.5 stars. Really great for its target audience: “wantrepreneurs” or folks who have ideas and a desire to see them materialize, but don’t know the next steps to make that happen.
March 31, 2019
Highly recommend this book to anyone who has a business idea that involves significant risk. Are you wondering "will people buy this"? This book helps you find out.
Instead of investing significant sums of money into a 'full product' or even a prototype, the author advocates to make a 'pretotype' to test on the market and collect fast and cheap feedback on if people buy it. This should reduce risk on your way to fully developing your idea and answering: will it be worth the investment?
Alberto Savoia succinctly outlines a practical approach including formulating your Market Engagement hypothesis, and the more specific XYZ hypothesis, and finally the testable 'xyz' hypothesis.
I have already used this in practice, and I advise you to do the same: don't miss The Right It!
Best regards,
Mark A. Jansen
Instead of investing significant sums of money into a 'full product' or even a prototype, the author advocates to make a 'pretotype' to test on the market and collect fast and cheap feedback on if people buy it. This should reduce risk on your way to fully developing your idea and answering: will it be worth the investment?
Alberto Savoia succinctly outlines a practical approach including formulating your Market Engagement hypothesis, and the more specific XYZ hypothesis, and finally the testable 'xyz' hypothesis.
I have already used this in practice, and I advise you to do the same: don't miss The Right It!
Best regards,
Mark A. Jansen
May 30, 2019
The author is an inspiration and the book provides some great rules of thumb. But seeing how much I enjoyed Pretotype it, I kind of expected more. The examples are mostly non real-life and the process itself does not exploit the full power of pretotyping, I believe. Anyways, if you haven't read pretotype it, it might make sense to just read this one as it is the V2.0.
October 30, 2020
I have read tons of material on entrepreneurship and innovation, especially on business testing. This book is on a completely different level. Alberto Savoia magisterially mixes academic theory and business experience, with a writing style that makes the entire book pleasant to read. Learning has never been so much immersive!
September 5, 2019
Decent tips buried in a overly-conversational borderline smug tone. And I will refuse to propagate buzzwords introduced within these pages.
September 1, 2020
The first part of the book subjectively felt as whisky watered down so much that it's hard to tell it from a limonade. Then amount of terms (that I felt was artificially created and may be avoided) were drumming along the way making one marching instead of enjoying a walk. So I didn't like a book at all by the middle.
When the storytelling finished and book started to feel systematic it's power unleashed. The list of suggested experiments was great. Case studies felt made up and too optimistic but still worked to add a perspective to the main point - getting an action from your potential customer to back up his interest and prove that it's genuine.
I'd say it's an essential read on the entrepreneurship. If one has read 4 steps to the epiphany or lean startup, it makes sense to go straight to the techniques and recommendations.
When the storytelling finished and book started to feel systematic it's power unleashed. The list of suggested experiments was great. Case studies felt made up and too optimistic but still worked to add a perspective to the main point - getting an action from your potential customer to back up his interest and prove that it's genuine.
I'd say it's an essential read on the entrepreneurship. If one has read 4 steps to the epiphany or lean startup, it makes sense to go straight to the techniques and recommendations.
April 25, 2021
This is a fun read on how to identify the right product to build, how to formulate hypotheses and validate them with the cheapest and fastest ways of getting data.
If you have read about prototyping / strategy before., the book is a quick read covering familiar concepts in a structured and simple-to-understand manner.
If you have read about prototyping / strategy before., the book is a quick read covering familiar concepts in a structured and simple-to-understand manner.
July 9, 2020
This is an excellent book about quickly validating product ideas using creative techniques without actually building.
Would highly recommend this book to anybody doing super early stage product development.
It does drag on a bit and could be shorter. But very useful despite that fact.
Would highly recommend this book to anybody doing super early stage product development.
It does drag on a bit and could be shorter. But very useful despite that fact.
February 16, 2023
This book was the answer to my prayers for market research. Savoia provides a well-written, step-by-step handbook for those who want to launch a new product or start a business.
This book saved me from months if not a full year of misguided market research.
Read this before you start anything.
This book saved me from months if not a full year of misguided market research.
Read this before you start anything.
July 26, 2021
The book provides a hard reality check about how difficult and hard it is to find the right idea to build. It provides a set of tools to validate your idea with from a set of experiments that let users invest their skin in the game rather than working on opinions and empty promises.
July 22, 2023
The author knows precisely what he is talking about and has also practiced what he preaches and gave really good examples to justify his theory.
This definitely one of the best books one can read in the Lean Product Development Category.
Lean Product Management depends on experiments, and this book talks about the need to do those experiments without actually building the product i.e. the concepts that drove the point through are
fail fast, faster, fastest
fail cheap, cheaper, cheapest
fail close, closer,closest
distance to discovery, dollars to discovery, hours to discovery etc.... are the key aspects that you need to keep in mind.
Anybody can spend 6 months and a million dollars to create prototype, throw it into 600 square miles market and then learn.
But how do you get the same learnings in 6 hours, 600 dollars and 6 mile radius?
That is what preotyping is all about, it is a very powerful hack to validate ideas without emptying your bank out.
In the earlier days, only the creators put their skin in the game, but now the author demands that the product creators must demand the market to put its skin in the game.
The moment market says that it won't put its skin in the game you can realize that there is no market at all.
The book is a very good read, especially the various kinds of pretotypes and their variations and combinations which make this technique all the more powerful.
This definitely one of the best books one can read in the Lean Product Development Category.
Lean Product Management depends on experiments, and this book talks about the need to do those experiments without actually building the product i.e. the concepts that drove the point through are
fail fast, faster, fastest
fail cheap, cheaper, cheapest
fail close, closer,closest
distance to discovery, dollars to discovery, hours to discovery etc.... are the key aspects that you need to keep in mind.
Anybody can spend 6 months and a million dollars to create prototype, throw it into 600 square miles market and then learn.
But how do you get the same learnings in 6 hours, 600 dollars and 6 mile radius?
That is what preotyping is all about, it is a very powerful hack to validate ideas without emptying your bank out.
In the earlier days, only the creators put their skin in the game, but now the author demands that the product creators must demand the market to put its skin in the game.
The moment market says that it won't put its skin in the game you can realize that there is no market at all.
The book is a very good read, especially the various kinds of pretotypes and their variations and combinations which make this technique all the more powerful.
July 3, 2020
Some useful, easily digestible approaches. A bit conservative in outlook vs failure being part of the process. The primary example was a thought experiment which went against its core tenets.
August 1, 2023
Book recommendations are my love language. This book came as a recommendation from a dear friend and it was spot on. The writing was really witty which made the subject matter VERY digestible. Savoia provides tons of great tools to help evaluate if an idea is worth building.
"You can probably test this faster" is something I'm likely going to be saying to myself until the end of my days. 4.5 stars!
"You can probably test this faster" is something I'm likely going to be saying to myself until the end of my days. 4.5 stars!
August 19, 2023
Exactly the type of plasticity, nimbleness, and leanness that most teams lack. If it’s taking you months and years to figure out whether an idea will work - this is book is what you need to read.
May 19, 2019
Factual, practical, logical. Very actionable and easy to do steps that will be critical for starting any idea or product. Also learned a few important market principles.
January 10, 2021
I was surprised that I found this book fun and full of practical ideas to test ideas.
October 8, 2021
I found this gem to be thought provoking. I wish they taught this stuff in high school.
April 16, 2022
The only business book I've read that's actually fun. Loved it 👌🏻
May 17, 2023
I find the book and examples very valuable. The method is explained with lots of details, and there are plenty of experiment options to test
May 22, 2023
Really good walk through of the process required to find the right product... Meaning it has the highest chance of true success in the market. Love this pretotyping and testing methodology.
March 11, 2019
Savoia pointed out that most business plans fail, even when executed perfectly. The problem is, people do not know what they really want, so ‘market research’, asking people whether they would buy something, is useless. Expert opinion often falls flat, and even innovative companies like Google has lots of flops. Lots of efforts and money are spent making a product or service, only to fail miserably in the market. We want to make the ‘Right It’, before making it right and marketing it right. That is because we develop products in ‘Thoughtland’, or our imagination where success is guaranteed.
He suggests a radical approach to product or service development: ‘pretotyping’. It is a prototype of a prototype, and is not a real product. Using this pretotype, you can gauge the real market response to it. First, make a hypothesis: X% of clients will pay Y to get Z. Then offer the pretotype to real potential customers to see how many of them put down ‘skin in the game’, namely a deposit or at least a verifiable email address, or their time. This will let you know whether it will sell or not.
1. To see whether you should open an antique bookshop, rent a shop and put a sign on the door. Then see how many people actually come in. Do give them a small gift for the deception.
2. To see whether a book will sell, give them some free chapters on a website and ask for a small deposit and email address. Give them a small discount.
3. To see whether people will pay to use a clothes folding machine, create a fake machine in the coin laundry shop with a human doing the actual work. IBM had used this before to simulate speech-to-text technology to test it on users.
4. List a product in a website which when clicked, jumped to a page to say that the actual product is not yet available.
He acknowledged that you can’t do this in certain fields, such as medicine. (Note: Theranos) For everything else it is a great technique.
Actually many products and services come out from serendipitous beginnings. Virgin Airlines happened because Richard Branson’s flight got cancelled; he chartered a flight and used a blackboard to get his first customers. Lots of best sellers are based on an already successful TED talk or column in a newspaper or magazine. Air B&B of course started when its founders sold their air mattress bed and breakfast on Craigslist. Many shows try one season to see whether it will be a hit.
You may find that the pretotype is a failure; that however beats wasting months or years of your time and then finding out the actual product is a failure!
The only weakness, I think, is that the examples he gave in his book are all thought experiments, so we won’t know whether this method would actually work. Also it is not ethical for certain fields like medicine. Finally, some literary works such as Harry Potter or Moby Dick, need to be presented whole to the publisher. I am not sure whether a few chapters can ever represent the whole book and whether a lot of potential great works will be lost because the pretotype is not appealing. Nonetheless, this is certainly one of the best business books I have ever read!
He suggests a radical approach to product or service development: ‘pretotyping’. It is a prototype of a prototype, and is not a real product. Using this pretotype, you can gauge the real market response to it. First, make a hypothesis: X% of clients will pay Y to get Z. Then offer the pretotype to real potential customers to see how many of them put down ‘skin in the game’, namely a deposit or at least a verifiable email address, or their time. This will let you know whether it will sell or not.
1. To see whether you should open an antique bookshop, rent a shop and put a sign on the door. Then see how many people actually come in. Do give them a small gift for the deception.
2. To see whether a book will sell, give them some free chapters on a website and ask for a small deposit and email address. Give them a small discount.
3. To see whether people will pay to use a clothes folding machine, create a fake machine in the coin laundry shop with a human doing the actual work. IBM had used this before to simulate speech-to-text technology to test it on users.
4. List a product in a website which when clicked, jumped to a page to say that the actual product is not yet available.
He acknowledged that you can’t do this in certain fields, such as medicine. (Note: Theranos) For everything else it is a great technique.
Actually many products and services come out from serendipitous beginnings. Virgin Airlines happened because Richard Branson’s flight got cancelled; he chartered a flight and used a blackboard to get his first customers. Lots of best sellers are based on an already successful TED talk or column in a newspaper or magazine. Air B&B of course started when its founders sold their air mattress bed and breakfast on Craigslist. Many shows try one season to see whether it will be a hit.
You may find that the pretotype is a failure; that however beats wasting months or years of your time and then finding out the actual product is a failure!
The only weakness, I think, is that the examples he gave in his book are all thought experiments, so we won’t know whether this method would actually work. Also it is not ethical for certain fields like medicine. Finally, some literary works such as Harry Potter or Moby Dick, need to be presented whole to the publisher. I am not sure whether a few chapters can ever represent the whole book and whether a lot of potential great works will be lost because the pretotype is not appealing. Nonetheless, this is certainly one of the best business books I have ever read!
February 11, 2024
So my uncle gave me this book. It wasn’t actually hard to read it. I started being an entrepreneur and this book came into my life at the right moment. When I started being an entrepreneur things were really hard. I had no idea what to do. Right now everything is still new but at least I have a roadmap.
I learnt on the book about the xyz hypothesis. This wasn’t really new for me. It makes sense a lot and I agree on the statement. It is a way to prove if you are on the right path. It means to prove one part of the market and one part of the product but if you have one part of everything then you have a small business.
The second thing that I learnt that it is what I find the most valuable is about putting skin on the game. Skin on the game is about putting money on the table. It is a way of proving that your idea is going to work by asking potential customers to put money, a little bit of money to buy your product before it is built or before it is created.
I loved the last part and it is something I also learnt throughout the way. Alberto mentions building the right it for you. You cant just build the right it for the market but it also has to be a product or service that you like. You have to like the industry the product, the business as a whole to be willing to work on it for at least 5 years.
I learnt about building the right it for me when I was working on my first idea. When I was working building a savings product. It was a savings tech product for plastic surgery. I didn’t like the plastic surgery industry. I didn’t like it because there was something superficial and sketchy about it.
The pretotyping part was interesting. I like the examples that Alberto talks about. He mentions an exercise by a company where customers would enter a room and ask the computer to right everything they said. On another room there was a women typing everything. Customers would be impressed for thinking that this machine was the one typing everything, it was a simulation.
The company did this to know beforehand if building such machine would be a good business for the company.
The other part of the book that I really enjoyed reading was the example of the bus from San Francisco to Silicon Valley for google developers to take classes while commuting. He first had and idea and several hypothesis, he then tested them and found the truth about them. He learnt that paying 3,000 dollars for a month of classes wouldn’t bring him students. People were willing to pay only 600 dollars for a week of classes on machine learning on the bus. Every new idea could be tested under the same principles and real evidence would appear.
I learnt on the book about the xyz hypothesis. This wasn’t really new for me. It makes sense a lot and I agree on the statement. It is a way to prove if you are on the right path. It means to prove one part of the market and one part of the product but if you have one part of everything then you have a small business.
The second thing that I learnt that it is what I find the most valuable is about putting skin on the game. Skin on the game is about putting money on the table. It is a way of proving that your idea is going to work by asking potential customers to put money, a little bit of money to buy your product before it is built or before it is created.
I loved the last part and it is something I also learnt throughout the way. Alberto mentions building the right it for you. You cant just build the right it for the market but it also has to be a product or service that you like. You have to like the industry the product, the business as a whole to be willing to work on it for at least 5 years.
I learnt about building the right it for me when I was working on my first idea. When I was working building a savings product. It was a savings tech product for plastic surgery. I didn’t like the plastic surgery industry. I didn’t like it because there was something superficial and sketchy about it.
The pretotyping part was interesting. I like the examples that Alberto talks about. He mentions an exercise by a company where customers would enter a room and ask the computer to right everything they said. On another room there was a women typing everything. Customers would be impressed for thinking that this machine was the one typing everything, it was a simulation.
The company did this to know beforehand if building such machine would be a good business for the company.
The other part of the book that I really enjoyed reading was the example of the bus from San Francisco to Silicon Valley for google developers to take classes while commuting. He first had and idea and several hypothesis, he then tested them and found the truth about them. He learnt that paying 3,000 dollars for a month of classes wouldn’t bring him students. People were willing to pay only 600 dollars for a week of classes on machine learning on the bus. Every new idea could be tested under the same principles and real evidence would appear.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 19, 2024
The book covers the process of finding the "right it" (which is described as a pre-cursor to PMF) and outlines a range of techniques how to do that. The pitfall many people tap into is getting absorbed in their idea and listen to the opinion of other people that do not have skin in the game and then focus too much on building it right (instead of building the right it).
Alberto makes a distinction between "other peoples data" (OPD) and "your own data" (yoda). OPD cannot be trusted as you have limited insights in how it is generated and if the market circumstances are comparable to your scenario. Mainly the book is about hacks to get yoda quickly.
The process outlined by Alberto can be outlined as the following steps:
1. Build a Market Engagement Hypothesis (MEH) that describes how you expect the market to react to your product (e.g. 30% of travelers will use my BnB Service given that it is cheaper then hotels)
2. Break the MEH down to a local market you can test within hours (this is what Alberto calls "hypozooming"). The new hypothesis should follow the pattern "X% of Y will Z" (XYZ-Hypothesis). It should be a sub-set of your MEH. (e.g. 30% of people that will attend the conference next month in my city will be interested in booking a room on my service)
3. Use a pretotype to test the XYZ-Hypothesis. Pretotypes (pretend Prototype) can come in many forms (e.g. Mechanical Turk, Concierge, Frontdoor, Placeholder, etc). The core principle is that people interact with it as they would with your service (the closer you get to that the better the yoda).
4. You can rank the interactions of people based on their "skin-in-the-game" (e.g. money is a good metric, just given email address or saying they are interested not really). Define what would be valueable interactions and rank your experiments accordingly.
Based on that you can validate your ideas against the law of market failure (90% of all new ideas will fail in the market) and create a quick iteration loop. The goal should be minutes or hours to new insights (compared to weeks or month).
Alberto makes a distinction between "other peoples data" (OPD) and "your own data" (yoda). OPD cannot be trusted as you have limited insights in how it is generated and if the market circumstances are comparable to your scenario. Mainly the book is about hacks to get yoda quickly.
The process outlined by Alberto can be outlined as the following steps:
1. Build a Market Engagement Hypothesis (MEH) that describes how you expect the market to react to your product (e.g. 30% of travelers will use my BnB Service given that it is cheaper then hotels)
2. Break the MEH down to a local market you can test within hours (this is what Alberto calls "hypozooming"). The new hypothesis should follow the pattern "X% of Y will Z" (XYZ-Hypothesis). It should be a sub-set of your MEH. (e.g. 30% of people that will attend the conference next month in my city will be interested in booking a room on my service)
3. Use a pretotype to test the XYZ-Hypothesis. Pretotypes (pretend Prototype) can come in many forms (e.g. Mechanical Turk, Concierge, Frontdoor, Placeholder, etc). The core principle is that people interact with it as they would with your service (the closer you get to that the better the yoda).
4. You can rank the interactions of people based on their "skin-in-the-game" (e.g. money is a good metric, just given email address or saying they are interested not really). Define what would be valueable interactions and rank your experiments accordingly.
Based on that you can validate your ideas against the law of market failure (90% of all new ideas will fail in the market) and create a quick iteration loop. The goal should be minutes or hours to new insights (compared to weeks or month).
Read
August 9, 2021Within these pages is the best framework for developing new products but there’s this buzzword business speak undertone that cheapens the lessons. It’s frustrating as there are a lot of great concepts and I genuinely enjoyed the author’s cadence and dad-pun vibes. I guess this is just my own personal problem with business books marketed for the masses.
Anyways, here are my main takeaways from the book.
Purpose: How to build products with higher successes in the marketplace with minimal time and effort.
Most products fail in the market but an idea that is validated as the “right it” can beat the odds
- Law of market failure dictates that most products, even if competently executed, will not succeed in a market
- The right it is a product that if competently executed will survive in a marketplace
- A product idea can only be tested if a variation of it is put in front of the market and measured
Test your product iterations with strict hypotheses using pretotypes to gather customer buy-in data
- Use a market engagement hypothesis with the XYZ formula to run your experiments (X% of Y people will do Z)
- A pretotype is a pretend version of your product that is built for the purpose of collecting market data
- Only track data from customers that invested some non-trivial form of personal currency (i.e. money > phone number > email)
Iterate on your pretotypes cheaply and locally within your problem space to determine if this is the right product to work on
- Each expriment should be cheap to run and tested within a local domain space (i.e. close to where you live, a niche subreddit, etc.)
- Run multiple experiments at a quick rate to validate whether your product is viable in the problem space
- Even if your product has failed the experiments, the benefit is that the knowledge was acquired with minimal investment of your time and money
Anyways, here are my main takeaways from the book.
Purpose: How to build products with higher successes in the marketplace with minimal time and effort.
Most products fail in the market but an idea that is validated as the “right it” can beat the odds
- Law of market failure dictates that most products, even if competently executed, will not succeed in a market
- The right it is a product that if competently executed will survive in a marketplace
- A product idea can only be tested if a variation of it is put in front of the market and measured
Test your product iterations with strict hypotheses using pretotypes to gather customer buy-in data
- Use a market engagement hypothesis with the XYZ formula to run your experiments (X% of Y people will do Z)
- A pretotype is a pretend version of your product that is built for the purpose of collecting market data
- Only track data from customers that invested some non-trivial form of personal currency (i.e. money > phone number > email)
Iterate on your pretotypes cheaply and locally within your problem space to determine if this is the right product to work on
- Each expriment should be cheap to run and tested within a local domain space (i.e. close to where you live, a niche subreddit, etc.)
- Run multiple experiments at a quick rate to validate whether your product is viable in the problem space
- Even if your product has failed the experiments, the benefit is that the knowledge was acquired with minimal investment of your time and money
October 15, 2021
This was a phenomenal book on how to test your new product/service ideas to see if they are the "right it" to build. (Before you build it right, determine if it's the right it to build.)
It's very tactical and specific, but not boring or dry at all. It has all sorts of interesting stories and even regular injections of humor and personal comments from the author.
Some key ideas:
Not all feedback on your idea is equally weighty. A friend telling you they would totally buy your product is NOT as valuable as that same friend actually putting money down to buy your product. (People will often say they would buy when they really wouldn't.) Time spent with you is also valuable feedback, though real money is the most significant.
Rather than aim for the ideal test, aim for the fastest and/or closest test. While NYC would be the perfect place, your midwest suburb might still offer a quick option you can try this Saturday, before you spend a ton of money setting something up in NYC.
Savoia outlines several options for how to test your idea BEFORE you build it, all with cool names like Pinocchio, Facade and Mechanical Turk. Examples: you can have a human manually do what the machine would do (not scalable, but you can sell that for a test); you can put up a website and collect money before it's built (you can then build it and deliver a bit "late" or give the money back); you can make a fake version to play pretend with and see if it actually will be carried around.
So many books are vague, hype books without any teeth. This one is an amazing way to get real customer insights on what you're trying to build.
It's very tactical and specific, but not boring or dry at all. It has all sorts of interesting stories and even regular injections of humor and personal comments from the author.
Some key ideas:
Not all feedback on your idea is equally weighty. A friend telling you they would totally buy your product is NOT as valuable as that same friend actually putting money down to buy your product. (People will often say they would buy when they really wouldn't.) Time spent with you is also valuable feedback, though real money is the most significant.
Rather than aim for the ideal test, aim for the fastest and/or closest test. While NYC would be the perfect place, your midwest suburb might still offer a quick option you can try this Saturday, before you spend a ton of money setting something up in NYC.
Savoia outlines several options for how to test your idea BEFORE you build it, all with cool names like Pinocchio, Facade and Mechanical Turk. Examples: you can have a human manually do what the machine would do (not scalable, but you can sell that for a test); you can put up a website and collect money before it's built (you can then build it and deliver a bit "late" or give the money back); you can make a fake version to play pretend with and see if it actually will be carried around.
So many books are vague, hype books without any teeth. This one is an amazing way to get real customer insights on what you're trying to build.
January 24, 2020
What a great book. A friend of mine recommended it and I can't say I'm disappointed. This book deserves a cult following like the lean startup in my view. By reading this many users could avoid a hard failure that so often occurs when people think they have a brilliant idea.
Alberto shares a variety of techniques to 'pretendotype' your product, and gets your creative juices flowing, so you can understand if your idea has a chance of making it in days rather than months or years.
For me the most important part of the book that helped me was that asking users questions is pretty useless. Their actions will differ when you start asking them to sign up, pay for the idea or actually invest in it, even though they may say it's a great idea. It reminds me of the fact that as a founder you need to listen to the problems of users, not listen to their ideas of how to fix it - it's up to you to find that solution.
Alberto is an advocate of 'YODA' or collecting your own data, which has stuck with me. He explains how other peoples' data/research may have been for another experiment, and you don't know how they conducted their research, if it's biased/exaggerated, or how they will translate into your idea. He therefore says collect your own data and you'll realise much more quickly whether your idea has a chance of succeeding, and of course you get access to a customer base.
There's a lot to learn from this book, but those were just a few key ideas that resonated with me :)
Alberto shares a variety of techniques to 'pretendotype' your product, and gets your creative juices flowing, so you can understand if your idea has a chance of making it in days rather than months or years.
For me the most important part of the book that helped me was that asking users questions is pretty useless. Their actions will differ when you start asking them to sign up, pay for the idea or actually invest in it, even though they may say it's a great idea. It reminds me of the fact that as a founder you need to listen to the problems of users, not listen to their ideas of how to fix it - it's up to you to find that solution.
Alberto is an advocate of 'YODA' or collecting your own data, which has stuck with me. He explains how other peoples' data/research may have been for another experiment, and you don't know how they conducted their research, if it's biased/exaggerated, or how they will translate into your idea. He therefore says collect your own data and you'll realise much more quickly whether your idea has a chance of succeeding, and of course you get access to a customer base.
There's a lot to learn from this book, but those were just a few key ideas that resonated with me :)
July 17, 2021
Alberto Savoia experimented with The Right It process steps before writing this book! No wonder it turns out to be such an amazing product! This book is the unwritten, 4th part to the Lord of the Rings trilogy of startup and innovation books, along side Zero to One, The Lean Startup, and Innovation Stack. The author takes us through a journey of nurturing & testing an idea from ideation to pre-market decision. Replete with everyday, relatable examples and a set of practical, applicable, and easy-to-access tools & tips - the author helps readers take an idea critically, yet passionately from ideation to market
Divided into 3 sections, the book talks about "Hard facts" in the first, where we understand failure is very real and how to ensure we do not fail badly - think staying the rounds, but not knocked out. In the second section, "Sharp tools", the author offers a great list of practical hypothesis, pretotyping, and analytical tools to ensure we are closer to identifying if the idea is The Right It. In the final section, "Plastic Tactics", the author closes with universal principles for approaching testing with a simplistic and essentialist mindset, along with a real-time example, where we go through the process end-to-end
Overall, I would recommend this book with my eyes closed and placing this as a re-read in my collection. Thanks to Alberto Savoia for providing us with The Right It!
Divided into 3 sections, the book talks about "Hard facts" in the first, where we understand failure is very real and how to ensure we do not fail badly - think staying the rounds, but not knocked out. In the second section, "Sharp tools", the author offers a great list of practical hypothesis, pretotyping, and analytical tools to ensure we are closer to identifying if the idea is The Right It. In the final section, "Plastic Tactics", the author closes with universal principles for approaching testing with a simplistic and essentialist mindset, along with a real-time example, where we go through the process end-to-end
Overall, I would recommend this book with my eyes closed and placing this as a re-read in my collection. Thanks to Alberto Savoia for providing us with The Right It!
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