How long does it take to make a prototype and get your product out for feedback?

Three months? Six weeks?

You could do it that way. Or you could spend one hour on a rapid prototype.

With a rapid prototype, you make a simple model or sketch that allows you to communicate your idea to people you hope would use it. You can use a 3D printer, or your can be go even simpler — cardboard and paper clips can sometimes do the trick.

With a rapid prototype, you get to find out whether your concept works before you’ve invested really any time, money, or energy in it.

Rapid Prototyping for Lawyers

Today in Entrepreneurship for Lawyers, students had eleven minutes to sketch or build prototypes of the product ideas they’ve been working on this semester. Then they had nine minutes to go out in the hallway or call someone on FaceTime and get feedback, and a few more minutes to adapt their prototype. In one hour, they learned some valuable lessons:

• A student working on a website that lists and rates local government officials learned that his users would want an app so they could use it outside their polling place

• Students exploring a detailed gift-finding website learned their customers would want to be able to search by occasion

• Students developing a product that delivers both nicotine and caffeine in one product (hey, I told them the sky’s the limit) learned that they will need a way to program their proposed “Zending Machine” to read IDs and verify the customer’s age

Lawyers and Uncertainty: Ignore Everything You Learned in Law School

One of the biggest challenges for lawyers as entrepreneurs is the uncertainty effect. As lawyers, we’re trained to gather all the information before we act. Never ask a witness a question you don’t already know the answer to, right?

In entrepreneurship, you have to abandon that mindset. In creating a new product or service, you can never have all the information. If you wait until you have all the answers, you’ll never act.

Instead, lawyer-entrepreneurs need to develop comfort with acting in uncertainty. If that raises your anxiety red flags, remember that it gets easier when you invest very little at each step of the process.

Rapid prototyping allows you to break the discovery process down into teeny-tiny pieces. Model once, seek feedback, adapt. Repeat ten, twenty, one hundred times. Soon, you’ll have A LOT of information about what your customer will buy — without have expended time, energy, or money on something they won’t.