Hey everyone. In this video we're going to be discussing planning for prototyping. A lot of you may look at prototyping from the standpoint of, "I've got my product, service, or idea that I want to come out with, and that's what I'm going to prototype". However, your product or service concept is not going to operate just purely by itself, there are so many other related components to how you bring your concept to the end user with minimal problems and hopefully good quality controls and good profit margins. When I work with companies on getting started and we look at very initial phases, they'll be very focused just on the concept or product service and not on the overall infrastructure of the company. When you do plan on starting a company, don't just look at building out the product or service without tying in how it relates to the manufacturing, the logistics, supply chain, sourcing, negotiations, all of these because, I went through this. I'll be completely honest, when I started my company, it was back before I knew any better, and as we grew and adapted and I had to put in infrastructure to be able to accommodate the growth, I found there are a lot of growing pains involved with being scalable and over time alone that when I into new markets, or deliver new product or service, how to tie in the operations, logistics, and all that fun stuff while the concept is growing at an evolving, so that we don't have those growing pains, issues and things falling through the cracks. I can tell you from a painful experience, start with building out how you do it when you want to get to the customer from the very get go. Another reason for why you'd want to do this is, it's much harder to change the Engine in a moving car than one that's standing still, so when you're already trying to work with your processes, and all the different departments, and keep things going in addition to making improvements and changes, it can be a bit of an expensive nightmare. Doing things correctly from the very beginning will save, money, time, effort, tears, personal and professional relationships, and determine the performance metrics. I generally like to prototype companies in terms of the product and service that you want to be able to do, like heavier wire-frames, but then can have the considerations for your operations as well, and then if you're already an existing company with products and services, you can apply the same rules of prototyping to corporate operations as a service, even if you're delivering a physical product. I'll go into detail on that. The name of the prototype. The purpose, select final wheel spoke geometry, this is for a physical product here. However, with planning, I typically like to also tie-in how that operates to finding manufacturers and providers of different resources, because your supply chain is a huge issue when you're starting a company. Establish a level of approximation. Planning a prototype requires you to define the degree to which you need to approximate the final product. When you start your new company and you've got a product or service or software application to bring to market, you can take a look at the way you're meeting these specification that you've set for yourself, and if you're not hitting the mark or if you're going way over what the performance metrics need to be in order to be the leader, then you can see opportunities for new markets and potential new customer basis, and then you take a look at what these specifications are. Even if you're like," it's got this level of performance in this one area", but then you say, "okay, it meets it only in this one area, and you can possibly", then you can weigh where it falls in with the specifications and performance have a good competitive hold in the market. What works best?. A physical prototype or analytical prototype?. A lot of these will come down to really the costs associated with developing your prototype. It may be that it is so labor and time intensive and capital intensive, that without having a final customer or person who is willing to pay you money for it, unless you've got that person lined up, it would be extremely risky and not a solid financial move to build out those capabilities. So 3D models can be a good idea, virtual tours of those. There are multiple ways to give the user the experience virtually without having to build out the full capabilities without a solid investment or in-customer. Outline and experimental design. It can be considered an experiment; I love to apply the design of experiments to software applications, services, experience mapping, and making sure that we can look at how much time is used between different components, where things fall through the cracks and then mixing different variables, and seeing what the outcome will be. It can be very hard to determine and predict what the outcome is going to be, but that's the fun part. Create a schedule for procurement, construction, and testing. Again, tie this in from the very beginning, because when you're developing your prototype, by just looking at the concept, you're not tying in all the associated manufacturing costs, economies of scale, and being able to ensure that you have solid profit margins. Define the purpose. Are you prototyping the corporate operations, the concept itself, the integration of the concept to the operations of the company? Are you prototyping the supply chain? Again, you can apply the prototyping process to all aspects of a company in multiple ways and tie it all together and experience mapping. I highly recommend doing this instead of just looking at your product or service, because ultimately, you do want to be able to turn a solid profit and be competitive in the market, and if you've got redundancies in your operations and inefficiencies, then it's really hard to be able to position yourself at the right price point to be competitive. We all want private island money, but good private island, not the super cold ones. Thanks.
