Francis, a financial planning app, is an excellent example of a B2B (Business-to-Business) pretotype. It is a Fake Door because it’s testing the proposed solution with a yet-to-be-built service. It makes sense to validate this first as this space is complex, expensive and crowded, and they will need to create the “a-ha!” moment to cut through the noise in this market.
The Francis marketing site works well — it’s professional, the value proposition is above the fold, and the call to action is clear. It’s presented as an existing service which makes it an actual experiment, where the data is the number of views vs the number of emails submitted.
Assuming this is the first experiment, I suggest:
Remove or limit pricing options, which could skew the results.
Remove the messaging near the footer, which implies the product does not exist.
This pretotype gets an 8 out of 10 because the user would potentially not see the footer message until they’ve signed up and given us the coveted data vs opinion!
What are the takeaways?
Make your pretotypes professional and believable — just like Francis does.
Avoid ‘coming soon’ or ‘express interest’ messaging as it undermines the believability of the pretotype.
Give the user some immediate value for their trust in you after giving you data. In this case, the message could offer a future discount, for example.
The value of running a pretotype; this is how August at Francis sums it up:
"As we see it, the website (pretotype) is the key to de-risk the value risk further. The interviews were basically just a way to optimize the message before trying to get a scaled insight into the value risk."
In the above video, I talk about Experiment Velocity ( 🧪 ),which is how many experiments you run in a period of time—whether it’s a week, month or year—and the rate at which they’re completed. But how is it useful for your business?
For example, one of the large enterprise customers that we’ve worked with since 2020 uses Experiment Velocity to track the health of their experimentation and innovation capability.
The below chart shows the number of experiments (blue) and Experiment Velocity — the number of experiments executed per month (red).
The chart makes for interesting reading and is an excellent leading indicator of experimentation health. You can see that experiments slowed in November and December, which is perfectly normal due to seasonality, but experimentation has picked up again in February. This company has a target of 80 experiments, so it’s simple to see they’re on track to achieve this.
Like pretotyping, this is more “science-y” than guessing, and it works well to communicate to the business and teams to measure if we’re on track. Measuring something simple is often the first step to experimentation at scale.
Check out this article from Krishna Rao, PhD student at Stanford & AI Resident at X, the moonshot factory, on getting comfortable with killing ideas and why failure = growth.
Did someone else share the love? Join our community to
get our newsletters each month.
Until next month, happy innovating!
Leslie
Can't get enough of innovation?
There's plenty more where this came from...
Join our pretotyping Slack community
Our community is full of innovators from around the world – join us to ask questions, share ideas, and learn from the best.
Learn pretotyping – online!
As we start looking towards the year ahead, there's no better time to become a Certified Pretotyper and raise your innovation game. The first module is yours, completely free – sign up here today!
Join our pretotyping Slack community
Our community is full of innovators from around the world – join us to ask questions, share ideas, and learn from the best.
