Name: The Right It
ISBN: 9780062884671

The Right It

The Law of Market Failure: Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed. Using his experience at Google, his remarkable success as an entrepreneur and consultant, and insights from his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia’s The Right It offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure. Millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others will be smaller, more personal but no less meaningful, successes: A little restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that does not make the best-seller list but tells an important story, a local nonprofit to care for abandoned pets. At this very same moment, another group of people is working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some of them will fail spectacularly and publicly: like New Coke, the movie “John Carter”, or the Ford Edsel. Others will be smaller, more private, but no less painful failures: A home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause that too few people care enough about.

What Hacker News says

sdoeringSep 2024

I‘d recommend 'the right it' by Alberto Savoia [1].

> Pretotyping is a set of tools, techniques, and tactics designed to help you validate any idea for a new product quickly, objectively, and accurately. The goal of pretotyping is to help you make sure that you are building The Right It before you build It right.

[1] https://www.pretotyping.org/

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frabiaMar 2023

A book that I really want to recommend to anybody in the process of validating product and business ideas: “The right it” by Alberto Savoia

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dawit123Dec 2022

If you failed on your startup i would recommend you to read "The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed" book by Alberto Savoia. This will give you basic tools to succeed and an explanation for why you failed before. Check it out and you will understand why you failed building your startup. Also don't get over your self, try to give some time for your self and take rest then after reading this book start building something new that you can test and validate the market. Good Luck.

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alexellisukApr 2022

Identifying an unmet need, getting a market fit for a solution, understanding what people are willing to pay are all counter-intuitive for engineers, but essential to make money.

These are my recommendations to anyone who's here and not getting the traction they want, or are considering starting a business. The 1-Page Marketing Plan - Alan Dibb. The Right It - Alberto Savoia. Monetizing Innovation - Georg Tacke & Madhavan Ramanujam. Obviously Awesome - April Dunford

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maxharrisDec 2021

I recommend reading Alberto Savoia's book, "The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed"

One of the examples that Savoia provides in his book is especially helpful to recall here:

Back in the 1960s, IBM was trying to figure out if they should make a massive investment in building a speech recognition product. Rather than betting the company on an expensive idea without being certain of the market for it, they simulated the speech recognizer by putting a secretary in another room with a mic, leaving the test subject with the impression that their commands were going directly into the computer in the room.

By doing this, IBM figured out that even if they made a perfect speech recognizer, their customers wouldn't use it! They were concerned about privacy, found typing to be faster and more precise, etc. Rather than investing huge sums of cash on a dud, they were able to put it towards the System 360 line, which turned out rather well :)

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heymax054Sep 2021

I've been wondering on the pros and cons of interviewing customers vs. just putting something out there and seeing the reaction/getting a commitment.

There's a great book about the latter called "The Right It" by Alberto Savoia (a guy who used to work at Google to test business ideas). There he describes 8 different ways to test a biz idea:

- The Mechanical Turk – Replace complex and expensive computers or machines with human beings.

- The Pinocchio – Build a non-functional, “lifeless”, version of the product.

- The Minimum Viable Product (or Stripped Tease) – Create a functional version of it, but stripped down to its most basic functionality.

- The Provincial – Before launching world-wide, run a test on a very small sample.

- The Fake Door – Create a fake “entry” for a product that doesn’t yet exist in any form

- The Pretend-to-Own – Before investing in buying whatever you need for your it, rent or borrow it first.

- The Re-label – Put a different label on an existing product that looks like the product you want to create.

A ques to the author (I saw he commented here). What do you think are the pros and cons of interviewing people using the MOM framework vs. just putting something out there and getting feedback? Often people give very different feedback when you ask them questions vs. present something and ask for skin in the game.

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