A facade prototype is a deliberately minimal product built to test real market demand. Cars Direct sold four used cars from a bare website in two days, proving people would buy cars online. A San Francisco team placed a fake product on an IKEA shelf and watched shoppers add it to their carts, confirming demand through actual purchase intent.
Chapters
The facade prototype. Cars Direct wanted to know at the beginning of the internet, would people buy used cars online? So what did they do? Did they buy cars? Did they have a big complicated website? No, they had a very simple website with just a few cars, no cars in inventory. They advertised it and miraculously the first 2 days they sold 4 cars. So immediately they shut down the website. They bought 4 cars at retail, they sold them at retail. So they lost a few hundred dollars on each car, but what did they gain? Yoda, right? Yoda. Nothing is more valuable than a check, right? A check tells you that people really want your product. I'd rather have a one-page business plan, an outline with 4 checks stapled to it, than a 30-page highly detailed business plan with all kinds of charts. Another example of prototyping is this from IKEA. This team in San Francisco came up with a really simple product called the Wall Hub. It's a piece of plastic where you put your keys and your mail. They wanted to know, would people buy them? Should we have 10,000 built? So they had an idea. They thought, well, where would people buy this? IKEA. So they did something very clever. They went on eBay. They bought a used IKEA employee shirt so they could pretend— remember, pretend attack— that they were an IKEA employee. Then they created a fake label for their product. Of course, they had to change it to an IKEA name like Valhubb. And they put this label. And then instead of shoplifting, they entered an IKEA store. And placed their product on some free shelf space. And then they watched to see if anybody would actually stop and buy it. And lo and behold, you can watch the video, I put the link there. People actually took it, put it in their cart, and everything worked fine until they got to the cashier because things got a little confusing. But would you agree that if I have two Valhubs in my cart, is that opinion? No. Is that other people data? No, that's Yoda. That's the most valuable thing you can have.
