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The Wizard of Oz Method

The Wizard of Oz Method

Pay no attention to the man behind the website! How to launch your product with the main technology behind it being...YOU

Tal Raviv

August 20, 2013
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  1. Are you flat broke? Have no desire to learn to

    code? Want to launch tonight? Perfect.
  2. Why? Every time something has to be done from scratch,

    things get complicated. The more pre-fab parts you can use, the better.
  3. There are a LOT of pre-fab parts out there for

    building products. Many of them you already use every day.
  4. Many entrepreneurs see technology as this thing that simply MUST

    get built or else it’s not a company. Those people have a lot of time and money.
  5. Imagine cutting down the amount of work by 59%... or

    88% In many cases you can create a 100% entire product out of pre-fab parts and no one would know.
  6. Pay no attention to the man behind the.... website???? Pay

    no attention to the man behind the website!
  7. Customers don’t care how you get things done – just

    that you get it done and solve their pain. -Ben Yoskovitz
  8. Diapers.com Started by driving to the store, filling their van

    with diapers, and mailing them at the post office.
  9. TasteMaker Manually found three interior designers. Manually went out and

    found people who needed interior design. Built marketplace web app later.
  10. Stripe Offered innovative “instant” merchant accounts to users. In reality,

    founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes.
  11. But my product is technical... One YC company offered an

    enterprise API. When API was called, it emailed the founders. They then did the work manually, and sent back the result “asynchronously.”
  12. When founders of larval startups worry about [scale], I point

    out that in their current state they have nothing to lose. -Paul Graham
  13. Lots of engineers worked hard on algorithms to do this.

    Bertrand Fan had a different idea.
  14. He made a human interface: Wrote only enough code to

    send this to Amazon Mechanical Turk and...
  15. CardMunch Lots of business card scanning startups out there with

    fancy algorithms. They use Amazon Mechanical Turk for people to transcribe the cards.
  16. Customers don’t care how you get things done – just

    that you get it done and solve their pain. -Ben Yoskovitz Remember:
  17. Now of course, this won’t work for every idea. Fortunately

    there’s four more methods to build products with very little technology
  18. Next: • The LEGO method • The Wordpress method •

    The tiny-bit-of-code method • The clickable prototype method Want those slides? Sign up below