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.
2. Let’s learn how to build things without writing code.
3. My name is Tal Raviv and I’m the co-founder of
4. I’m a developer, BUT... ....every chance I get to avoid writing code, I take it.
5. Why? Every time something has to be done from scratch, things get complicated. The more pre-fab parts you can use, the better.
6. There are a LOT of pre-fab parts out there for building products. Many of them you already use every day.
7. Remember: Tech is just a means.
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.
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.
10. Today we’ll learn the Wizard of Oz* method *coined by LaunchBit founders
11. Pay no attention to the man behind the.... website???? Pay no attention to the man behind the website!
12. The best pre-fab part is YOU
13. Customers don’t care how you get things done – just that you get it done and solve their pain. -Ben Yoskovitz
14. Diapers.com Started by driving to the store, filling their van with diapers, and mailing them at the post office.
15. TasteMaker Manually found three interior designers. Manually went out and found people who needed interior design. Built marketplace web app later.
16. Stripe Offered innovative “instant” merchant accounts to users. In reality, founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant accounts behind the scenes.
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.”
18. This doesn’t work for all startups, But think hard about whether it can work for you
19. When founders of larval startups worry about [scale], I point out that in their current state they have nothing to lose. -Paul Graham
20. Sounds like one of them good problems. -Marlo Stanfield
21. Oh, and one more thing. This can scale.
22. Instagram wanted to hire an engineer, so they made a contest: Fix this image.
23. Lots of engineers worked hard on algorithms to do this. Bertrand Fan had a different idea.
24. He made a human interface: Wrote only enough code to send this to Amazon Mechanical Turk and...
25. Problem solved! Program run time: 10 minutes $0.50 per image
26. Not everything needs to be instant.
27. CardMunch Lots of business card scanning startups out there with fancy algorithms. They use Amazon Mechanical Turk for people to transcribe the cards.
28. (That said, most likely YOU’LL be behind the curtain)
29. Customers don’t care how you get things done – just that you get it done and solve their pain. -Ben Yoskovitz Remember:
30. Now you know the Wizard of Oz method of building a product
31. Now of course, this won’t work for every idea. Fortunately there’s four more methods to build products with very little technology
32. Next: • The LEGO method • The Wordpress method • The tiny-bit-of-code method • The clickable prototype method Want those slides? Sign up below