The Right It by Alberto Savoia

Author:Alberto Savoia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

The One-Night Stand Pretotype

I named the One-Night Stand pretotype after the performing-art practice of holding a single performance of a play or show at a particular place—but go ahead and associate it with the more salacious use of the term if you prefer.

As the name suggests, the main characteristic of the One-Night Stand pretotype is the lack of a long-term commitment or investment. It does not necessarily have to be exactly one night or one shot, by the way; don’t take the name too literally. The duration of the pretotype experiment can be as brief as a couple of hours or as long as a couple of months; the point is that it’s a relatively short-term commitment—just the time you need to collect enough data to make an informed decision. If you want 100 data points and you can get them in one day or with a single experiment, then make it one day and one experiment. If it will take you a week and multiple experiments to get the necessary data, take a week. Having said that, two of my favorite examples of One-Night Stand pretotypes in action come from Virgin Airlines and Airbnb, both of which began with a one-shot/one-night offer.

Example: Virgin Airlines

In the early 1980s, legendary entrepreneur Richard Branson had booked a flight to the British Virgin Islands to meet his then girlfriend for a romantic vacation. When his flight was canceled, instead of moaning, groaning, and cursing the airline—as most of us would have done—he decided to create his own One-Night Stand Airline. He borrowed a blackboard, wrote on it “Virgin Airlines / $39 one-way ticket to BVI,” rounded up a bunch of the other passengers who had been bumped, and sold enough tickets to fill a chartered plane.

Encouraged by this successful experiment, he returned from his romantic vacation and decided to call Boeing: “Do you have any used 747s for sale?” They did. Branson grabbed one and stepped up from a one-flight pretotype to a one-plane airline pretotype. Eventually, Virgin Airlines went on to become one of the most successful and innovative airlines in the industry. Branson’s girlfriend must have also been quite impressed because she ended up marrying him.

Example: Airbnb

Sometime in 2007, two Airbnb cofounders, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, could not pay the monthly rent for their San Francisco residence. To make some quick cash, they came up with the idea of renting out three air mattresses in one of their apartment’s rooms (hence the “air” in the Airbnb name) and, perhaps to make up for the somewhat uncomfortable sleeping conditions, included a home-cooked breakfast in the deal (hence the “bnb” in the name). They bought the airbed andbreakfast.com domain, created a simple one-page website with a map showing the location of their apartment, and advertised it on Craigslist. A few hours later, they had two men and one woman signed up for their one-night-plus-one-breakfast deal, paying $80 each.

That’s skin in the game—quite literally. Those three Airbnb pioneer customers risked their skin when they agreed to spend the night in a room with two strangers in the home of other strangers.

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