The Right It

28 Jul 2022

Book	The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed
Author	Alberto Savoia

The Law of Market Failure

Here are the main takeaways from Part I, worth repeating, memorizing, and perhaps tattooing somewhere on your body as a reminder:

The Law of Market Failure: Most new ideas will fail in the market-even if competently executed.

Most new ideas fail in the market because they are The Wrong It ideas that the market is not interested in regardless of how well they are executed.

Your best chance for succeeding in the market is to combine an idea that is The Right It with competent execution.

You cannot depend on your intuition, other people’s opinions, or other people’s data to determine if a new idea is The Right It.

The most reliable way to determine if a new idea is likely to be The Right It is to collect Your Own DAta (YODA).

Validate First (Before Building)

Make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right.

Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed.

No amount of design brilliance, engineering prowess, or marketing fireworks can save a product that is The Wrong It from the jaws of the Beast of Failure.

Your only chance for success is to combine competent execution with a product that is The Right It.

Data > Opinion

Data beats opinions.

You need to collect Your Own DAta (YODA).

To count as proper YODA, your market data must come with some skin in the game.

Pretotypes vs Prototype

Use “pretotypes” to gather your own data and validate. Pretotypes validate the idea and value, prototypes validate feasibility.

Pretotyping can play key role in validating our idea.

Pretotyping differs from traditional prototyping in that prototypes are usually designed, built, and used to verify that an idea can be built, to explore the best ways to build it, and to test that it will work as expected, and pretotypes are built for a single-but singularly important-purpose: to validate our Market Engagement Hypothesis.

Prototypes help us answer the key question: Can we build it? Pretotypes, in contrast, answer a very different question: Should we build it?