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

Transcript

1. Are you flat broke?
   Have no desire to learn to code?
   Want to launch tonight?
   Perfect.
   

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2. Let’s learn how to build
   things without writing code.
   

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3. My name is Tal Raviv
   and I’m the co-founder
   of
   

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4. I’m a developer, BUT...
   ....every chance I get to avoid writing
   code, I take it.
   

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5. Why?
   Every time something has to be done
   from scratch, things get complicated.
   The more pre-fab parts you can use,
   the better.
   

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6. There are a LOT of
   pre-fab parts out there
   for building products.
   Many of them you
   already use every day.
   

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7. Remember:
   Tech is just a means.
   

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8. 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.
   

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9. 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.
   

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10. Today we’ll learn the
    Wizard of Oz* method
    *coined by LaunchBit founders
    

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11. Pay no attention to the man
    behind the.... website????
    Pay no attention to the
    man behind the website!
    

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12. The best pre-fab part is YOU
    

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13. Customers don’t care how you get
    things done – just that you get it
    done and solve their pain.
    -Ben Yoskovitz
    

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14. Diapers.com
    Started by driving to the store,
    filling their van with diapers, and
    mailing them at the post office.
    

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15. TasteMaker
    Manually found three interior
    designers.
    Manually went out and found people
    who needed interior design.
    Built marketplace web app later.
    

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16. Stripe
    Offered innovative “instant”
    merchant accounts to users.
    In reality, founders manually signed
    them up for traditional merchant
    accounts behind the scenes.
    

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17. 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.”
    

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18. This doesn’t work for all startups,
    But think hard about whether it
    can work for you
    

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19. When founders of larval startups
    worry about [scale], I point out that
    in their current state they have
    nothing to lose.
    -Paul Graham
    

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20. Sounds like one of them
    good problems.
    -Marlo Stanfield
    

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21. Oh, and one more thing.
    This can scale.
    

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22. Instagram wanted to hire an
    engineer, so they made a contest:
    Fix this image.
    

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23. Lots of engineers worked hard on
    algorithms to do this.
    Bertrand Fan had a different idea.
    

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24. He made a human interface:
    Wrote only enough code to send
    this to Amazon Mechanical Turk
    and...
    

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25. Problem solved!
    Program run time: 10 minutes
    $0.50 per image
    

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26. Not everything needs to be instant.
    

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27. CardMunch
    Lots of business card scanning
    startups out there with fancy
    algorithms.
    They use Amazon Mechanical
    Turk for people to transcribe the
    cards.
    

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28. (That said, most likely YOU’LL
    be behind the curtain)
    

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29. Customers don’t care how you get
    things done – just that you get it
    done and solve their pain.
    -Ben Yoskovitz
    Remember:
    

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30. Now you know the Wizard of Oz
    method of building a product
    

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31. Now of course, this won’t
    work for every idea.
    Fortunately there’s four more
    methods to build products
    with very little technology
    

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32. Next:
    • The LEGO method
    • The Wordpress method
    • The tiny-bit-of-code method
    • The clickable prototype method
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