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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.

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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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