90% of new projects and ideas end up failing in the market, with the majority among these failing due to a lack of user need. Resources are being spent building something nobody wants. A few years ago the former Google Innovation Agitator, Alberto Savoia, introduced a technique called “pretotyping”, designed to quickly sample market interest before committing resources to a new idea or project.

In this talk we’ll explore how pretotypes can help startups spot ideas worth pursuing, and specifically how we used it to kickstart an innovative consumer app in the traveltech space. With a combination of techniques like Mechanical Turk and Fake Doors, we managed to gather over a thousand early adopters without a single piece of product.

We’ll talk about lessons learnt, tricks we found particularly effective and caveats we had to learn the hard way.