Idea Inception to Production Ready: The Value of Rapid Prototyping

Early stage startups’ strive to develop their concept into one that will quickly see product/market fit. Our story of rapid prototyping helped us develop an app that found its match quickly.

Back in October 2013, when myself and Momchil joined together to begin our new venture, the first thing we did was decide our startup mantra. We wrote the following on a wall.

We knew why we were doing the startup, but we did not what the premise of the game would be. In fact, we had no idea. All we knew was it had to be based on real-time data, focus on simplicity of play while being both casual and social.

The following week, we starting building the first of four prototypes that we would test with users. This took place over the course of a month. Each took one week to build. They had no design, simply built in html using bootstrap. The purpose was to test functionality of gameplay with our target audience; football fans.

Simon Hade at Space Ape Games gave us a great tip on how to get fans to help test concepts and it was super simple; invite them to watch a live game and buy them a few beers! Space Ape did this for their NFL experiment Call It: Football. So we went on Reddit and created a post. Tickets got snapped up in no time. Our venue of choice was Sports Bar & Grill at Waterloo, it was a new spot not many new, that would help avoid getting overcrowded.

Over that month we learned more than we imagined. Our first observation was that, our target audience were consuming masses of content when watching live. Before introducing our prototype game, we saw they were already on reddit, twitter, forums and whatsapp during matches. They simply had to read what other people were saying about the match, sometimes even missing big events because they were immersed in the content on their phones. This helped validate that there users were already heavily engaging with their phones during football and there was potential to welcome our type of content, interactive gameplay.

Each prototype we built was referred back to our mantra. If it ticked the boxes, we built the prototype.

We then showcased our prototypes and observed users play, asking relevant questions and recording all this in action.

“Prototype testing was fundamental in our journey, to understand the direction of app that users would play”

Through our four tests, we found we had one specific gameplay that had the best balance of interaction. The others were either too involved, or had too little interaction. On one of the four prototypes around drafting/power-up’s, we visibly saw excitement levels of users differ and knew we had found our game that we would go on to build.

During testing we also learned that the best balance of game was where users picked 2 players each. We began with 3, but quickly observed that users would get lost trying to follow these 3 on the pitch. This was a crucial discovery.

The next months we spent building together a production ready app. This required a great deal of hard work. Building a prototype was relatively simple, but getting to 99% production ready required months of continuous testing and fine-tuning. We eventually soft-launched to public 6 months later for the FIFA World Cup. By this point we had tested the app with at least 100 different football fans through live group testing.

The World Cup launch and the high levels of engagement our app had, further validated for us that we had found product/market fit.

Reflecting back 18 months on (we now have a great community of avid users) we feel we eliminated a lot of potential early mistakes with that one month we spent doing prototype testing. For early stage startups, it’s critical to find product/market fit and that can be achieved sooner by getting feedback as quickly as you can.

Don’t delay getting out there.