When my wife and I started Sutra 9 years ago we were reeling from a failed startup experience and super financially challenged.  It was the kind of situation where the most reasonable thing to do might have been to “get a job”.  But we had vision and felt called to trust our ability to “figure it out”.

Fast forward to today and our platform has supported over 65,000 people participating in group experiences around the world.  We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in transformation and supported programs at the Inner Development Goals, the WHO, the Presencing Institute, the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, and hundreds of other organizations and projects around the world.

We did all this with very little financial resourcing and a lot of creative hustle.  The core approach that enabled us to achieve these results is something we call prototyping.

Put most simply, prototyping is working with what you have to take action that informs future action over and over and over again.

In this article I want to go deep into some fundamental prototyping principles that can help anyone transform their vision into reality.

Let’s dive in.

The case for prototyping

Our last online course generated $140,975 in revenue for us.  This money helped us fund Sutra and expand our social learning platform to support over 65,000 people participating in group experiences online.

I’ve encountered countless people that have big visions for something they want to do in the world.  And that’s pretty much as far as they get.

Having a big vision feels good.  It’s a comfortable space to be in.  It’s like having an idea for a book you want to write or a sport you want to master.  It’s much easier to think about and imagine it than it is to actually do it.  The doing can be incredibly uncomfortable, especially when the path forward isn’t clear.

A big reason why people procrastinate is to avoid that discomfort.

When you have a big vision it can feel unwieldy.  Whether it’s world peace, writing a book, or losing 20 pounds, where do you start?

The truth is, you may not know where to start.  And, that’s ok.

Recognizing that you don’t know where to start is actually where you start.

Prototyping is about being real with what you don’t know so that you can learn quickly an iterate with more information.

Authentic not knowing is the entry point to curiosity which is a prerequisite for discovery.

The key is to notice any ideas you have about where you might start.  And then to explore simple ways that you can prototype those ideas to get real world feedback that informs subsequent action.

The power of small, specific steps

In 2011 I had a mystical experience that changed my life.  I had a visceral experience of world peace.  It felt like something real and attainable within my lifetime and left me with a profound calling to be in service of this possibility.

When I shared this experience with my friends they thought I was crazy.

It might have had something to do with the way I presented it:

“Hey guys, I’m moving the New York City to work on world peace!”

Ya, really. Just like that. I had no idea what I was talking about. I'd never seriously thought about peace before.  But I knew this was the path for me.

The work we do with Sutra today is a direct culmination of the journey since that experience.  In the process, I’ve gone from a very broad and ambiguous vision (”world peace”) to an extremely specific and actionable expression of that vision: a global ecosystem of relational learning spaces that invite meaningful connection and conversation.

Getting to this clarity has involved, and continuous to involve, countless tiny steps that shape our understanding and inform subsequent steps.

The pre-requisite for each step is that it’s available given the resources we have now and it’s as simple as it can be to enable us to move forward.

A great example of prototyping can be found in the story of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of Grameen Bank. In the 1970s, Yunus was an economics professor in Bangladesh, deeply troubled by the poverty he saw around him. He had a vision of a world where even the poorest people could access financial services and build sustainable livelihoods.

But how do you begin to tackle something as vast as global poverty?

Instead of being blocked by the enormity of the challenge, Yunus started small. He lent $27 of his own money to 42 women in a small village, just to see what would happen. To his amazement, they paid him back in full, and this tiny experiment sparked the concept of microcredit. What began as a small, specific test turned into a worldwide movement that has lifted millions out of poverty.

What made it work? It was specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. It was a SMART prototype.

You don’t need to “write a book.” You can write a blog post.

You don’t need to “build a business.” You can host a free workshop.

The heart of prototyping is taking action.  Small actions build momentum. They transform ambiguity into clarity.

It can be hard to go from the stratospheric heights of a big vision to the weeds of minute action steps that seem so far removed from the “important” work. But the truth is, that’s how most big things often happen - one small step at a time.

If you have a vision that feels overwhelming, start simple. Start messy. Start with not knowing how to move forward. And then take the next step.

Anatomy of a prototype

The most important aspect of prototyping is understanding the difference between prototyping and just taking action.  When you’re prototyping, there’s no such thing as failure.  Only learning.  Everything is data.

It’s natural to have expectations and be attached to an outcome, even when you know you’re experimenting.  The key is remembering that even if your experiment does not generate the results you hoped, this is data that informs your process and shapes subsequent action.

If you’re trying to get somewhere and the action you want to take isn’t available to you, like hiring a person to build your website, that is also data that suggests that you might need to start with something else.

Let’s say you’ve sent five partnership emails and received no response. You feel rejected. But with a prototyping mindset, you realize: that’s data. Time to change the message. Try a new tone. Test a new subject line.

No response? That’s a result. You learned something.

A prototype can be intuitive or more structured.  The key is that you’re working with what’s available to you now and you’re trying something to learn something.

An intuitive prototype might involve trying a different approach in a spontaneous way—like changing the tone of an email or experimenting with how you tell your story in a conversation.

A structured prototype involves clearly defining your assumptions, then designing an experiment to validate (or invalidate) them.

Every time you take an action, there is an underlying assumption about what will happen.  Often, these assumptions go completely unnoticed.  They form an underlying subjective narrative that goes unexamined and shapes how we experience life and how we make meaning of everything that happens.

Realizing that almost every action that you take has an underlying assumption can be transformative.  The heart of prototyping is identifying assumptions and finding simple ways to test them through real world experiments.

For example:

Assumption: Our audience is mostly coaches or small-organization leaders.

Test: Run a workshop and ask participants how they identify professionally in the chat.

Validation: If over 50% identify accordingly, our assumption holds.

The structure can be simple:

• “I believe that…”
• “I will know this is true when…”

Here’s a real prototype that helped us grow our business:

Assumption: We believe that people interested in facilitation would be interested in Sutra.

Test: Run an online event series called the Facilitate the Future where we host high value workshops around facilitation

Validation: Track how many people join the event and continue to use Sutra.  Interview a selection of participants for qualitative feedback.

Sometimes, what you’re dealing with is a broad question that you’re sensing into.  You may not even be exactly sure what the question looks like or what success looks like.  Prototyping this territory might involve lots of simple micro experiments that give you more and more real world feedback.

Unknown: How do we create connection and share knowledge and resources between creators who are actively working on relational spaces?

Test: Many different iterations of community calls, focus groups, interviews, and small programs

Validation: Something “clicks”

Keep it as simple as possible

One of our most powerful prototypes started as… a flyer.

We were heading to a yoga festival with no clear plan to offer a course. In a Staples parking lot, we designed and printed a flyer promoting a program that didn’t even exist yet.

Someone walked up to our booth and said, “How do I sign up?”

We hadn’t even set up a way to accept payments.

That initial cohort had 10 participants. Today, that same program has generated over $140,000 in revenue, helped fund our platform, and taught us more about our audience than any survey ever could.

Workshops: The ultimate low-cost prototype

One of the best ways to prototype your ideas is to host a workshop.

One of the simplest and most informative prototypes you can run is some kind of workshop.  A workshop, or any group of people that you convene, offers an opportunity to test a wide variety of parameters that are relevant for almost any project.

There is so much to iterate on and learn from.

There’s the invitation:

• Who are you speaking to?
• How are you positioning your offer?
• How much are you charging?
• How long is it?
• What is the format?
• Landing page, email language, flyers, social media posts…

Then there’s the experience itself:

• Does it deliver on it’s promise?
• How do people engage with each other?
• How are you designing the experience?

And finally, there’s the follow up:

• Are you able to create continuity?
• Is it having the desired impact in the world?
• What’s the next invitation or thing?
• Can you get testimonials and referrals?
• What did you learn?
• Can you partner with collaborators and supporters?

Almost all of these elements are relevant in the context of a larger project.  The benefit of a simple group learning or conversational experience is that it requires virtually no resources.  There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from a simple prototype to bring people together so that you can iterate and learn from their real world participation.

Learning from your prototype

The key to successful prototyping is gathering data that informs subsequent iteration.  This can be an intuitive process where you actually notice what happened as well as subtle data like how you or the other person felt or the outcome that was generated.

Or it can be a more structured data gathering process.  Some great ways to gather information are:

‍

Personally interview every participant in your pilot

Jumping on a 30 minute call with someone who actually participated in your program is a great way to collect qualitative data that can be hard to capture in a survey.  It might be the tone of a person’s voice or it might be subtle things that you hear in their communication.  Having a conversation lets you dive deep to uncover small gems that offer big insights.

Collect survey data in the middle and at the end of your cohort experience

A survey is an easy way to capture data from your experience.  One of the most important questions we ask in almost any program that we run is: how likely would you be to recommend this experience to another person, with a 1 to 10 rating.  This simple question yields tons of insight into how much people actually valued the experience they just had.

Collect video testimonials and stories of how people have applied your work

Video testimonials offer a simple and powerful way to tap into the lived experience of your participants in a way that can help convey the value of their experience to future participants.  If you managed to deliver a truly transformational experience, it’s likely people will be downright glowing right after it’s over.  Make sure to jump on a quick Zoom with your participants to record the impact that your experience had on their lives.

Learn by doing

Prototyping is about working with what’s available to you right now in a way that involves real people in the real world.

It’s about taking a big idea that you might have in your head and finding ways that you can break it up in smaller, actionable pieces that give you real world feedback along the way.

For example, writing a book might involve publishing a series of posts on LinkedIn to gauge how people respond to certain ideas that you have.

Recently, I interviewed best selling author Dan Ariely who shared that a big part of his writing process involves workshopping ideas with his students.  He’ll start by presenting concepts in his lectures to observe the best way to present certain ideas and how people respond.  He’ll iterate his material over time to find the best way to articulate it.  That then becomes the source of his book material.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who struggle with online content creation.  They don’t want to come across as “salesy” or self promotional.  Or they’re not quite sure how to present or teach their material.  The reality of creating online content is that it’s about adding value to your audience.

Whether you’re selling something or building authority on some subject matter, the decisive factor in your ability to grow your online audience is the value that people receive from your content.

The key thing here is understanding who your audience is and what value means to them.

Value isn’t always a black and white equation.

For example, we run an online learning platform.  Most of our work revolves around supporting people with their group learning experiences.

But much of our content is more philosophical and spiritual in nature.  I share stories about personal transformation and how we’ve grown our business through various challenges over the years.

How are we adding value to people interested in creating learning experiences?

The value happens because we speak to the values of our audience and model that it’s possible to be deeply heart centered while running a successful business.  In this case, value is genuine inspiration and resonance.

Notice that I said genuine.  If I would have tried writing content like this 15 years ago it likely would have tried to be inspirational but would have lacked the substance of real experience.

Finding your value voice, whatever it might be, is a journey.  And prototyping is the path.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by too many options or stuck because you’re not sure how to move forward.  Or maybe you feel like you haven’t found your voice yet.  Or you’re not quite sure who your audience is.

Prototyping lets your take the pressure off of these questions.  You don’t need to have the answer to take action.  In fact, the whole point of prototyping is that you don’t already have the answer.  Your whole approach gets reframed as an inquiry.  Anything that is blocking you, becomes an opportunity for learning as soon as you notice that it’s blocking you.

Let’s say you’re struggling to figure out how to present your material.  In the past, you may have tried to promote a few workshops and failed to get the sign ups you hoped for.  Each time you put on a workshop there’s all this pressure to get it right and to get enough people to sign up.

Prototyping might involve completely dropping the pressure to get sign ups so that you can better explore content and delivery.  You might organize a series of five free zoom calls where you aim to have five to ten people from your target audience.  Each workshop might vary in subject, positioning and presentation, allowing you to practice and learn from different approaches without the pressure of “failure”.

Or maybe you’ve been creating content for social media and you feel discouraged by the engagement you get on each post.  Prototyping might look like a more active inquiry into what value looks like for your target audience.  Really putting yourself in their shoes.  Why would they be interested in reading your content and what’s the best expression of your voice?  This might look like trying different kinds of formats and styles and having conversations with people about what resonates for them.

Inquiry through action

Prototyping is inquiry through action.  Survey data alone just gives you a small slice of the picture.  When you combine iterative action steps with interviews and simple surveys, you unlock a much deeper understanding of your offering, your audience, and your self.

Some of the dimensions you can explore through your prototype are:

The audience

Who are the people that you are serving with your offering?

The experience itself

How you offer something that touches people and creates meaningful connection?

How you communicate about the experience

How you create resonance with the people that you want to involve?

How you approach potential partners and supporters

How do you enroll people to support your vision in a meaningful way?

Say you might have a vision for a global community.  As an idea this is both exciting and unwieldy.  It sounds exciting as a top level concept.  But what does it mean in practice?  What, exactly, is a global community?  How will people engage with each other?  Why will they show up?  How will you attract people?

This is the detail territory where people get stuck in when it comes to transforming their vision into reality.  They start to tell themselves that what they lack is resources to realize their big vision.  But the truth is that what they lack is resourcefulness.

Sometimes, money and resources actually work against you.  When I started my first company out of college, I raised $5m to build a photo sharing company.  I had no idea what I was doing but I had tons of money with which to do things.  We hired 15 people and spent 3 years building a product before releasing anything to the public.

Guess what?  By the time we released something, we realized that nobody wanted what we had released.  The money allowed us to avoid this market reality until we ran out of it.

When my wife and I started Sutra, we had no money.  But we had a big vision and we were super committed to finding a way to transform our vision into reality.

Prototyping offered us a grounded approach to continuously making progress, even if sometimes that process felt minuscule in relationship to the ultimate vision that we held.  The key was to keep taking another step and to be receptive to whatever was emerging every step of the way.

There are so many times we sell ourselves short because we think people won’t be responsive to a request or that we’re not good enough to play in some territory.

More often than not, reality will match how we see ourselves and the world with remarkable accuracy.

Prototyping is a way to test our underlying assumptions and blind spots in the court of real life.

Everything can be a prototype.

Sending an email with a bold request.

Sending a series of emails to different people to test different ways to framing a request.

Hosting a small event or conversation designed for a particular audience.

Creating a landing page for a program that doesn’t exist yet to test interest.

There are so many ways that you can take small actions that help you avoid investing a significant amount of time, energy, and money into something without validation.

The key is continually asking yourself what’s the simplest way that you can test an assumption by taking action in the real world given the resources that you have available to you right now.

When you prototype well, you learn:

• What your audience values
• How to serve them better
• How to financially sustain your work

So, where do you start?

When it comes to prototyping, everything starts with your audience.  One of the guiding questions we use to support our work is: who are you inspired to serve?

Once you’re clear on that you can:

• Have a conversations with a few people. Two or three zoom calls can be enough.
• Get inside their reality. What are they actually interested in or challenged with. What language are they using? How are they thinking about this? How does this show up in their lived experience?
• Maybe you don’t know who your audience is, and that in itself is something to prototype. What happens when you say the SAME thing to people from DIFFERENT audiences or DIFFERENT things to people from the SAME audience?

There are many ways that you can break down a big vision into much smaller components that can help to inform and support your vision over the long term.

For example:

Writing a book might start with publishing some posts on LinkedIn to test how you present ideas and what kinds of people resonate with them.

Starting a social impact project might start with recording a series podcast episodes with thought leaders in related fields to build relationships and refine how you communicate about certain concepts.

Building a community might start with putting together a group course or simple workshop to start bringing people together in low level ways to build affinity and learn from each other.

All of this can start with something as simple as writing an email.

A prototype can be a bold request.  Maybe you reach out to someone that you would normally be reserved about reaching out to.  Or maybe it’s a small event where you invite people from a particular community or field of interest to share their ideas.  Or maybe it’s simple that way that you frame a request or an invitation.

There are so many things that you can experiment with when you really begin to look at how you operate.  If you’re frustrated or somehow not generating the results you want, prototyping is one of the most effective ways to shift your situation.

Entry point

No matter where you are, what you’re really looking for is an entry point.  At any stage of a project, there is often a next level that you’re not entirely sure how to get to.

The first entry point is actually not knowing.

If you can be authentic with yourself about not knowing then you can begin to explore simple experiments that can give you real world data on how to move forward with more complex experiments.  Each of these experiments is an entry point to the next stage of evolution for your project.  The key criteria is that they take place outside of your head and in the real world and that they generate data that informs your decision making.

In this context, every obstacle is actually an invitation to explore through prototyping.  When you feel blocked, that’s simply data suggesting that you should try a different approach.

I invite you to take a moment to sit with this and consider anywhere that you feel blocked or challenged in your work.  What’s a simple way that you might prototype something that will give you more data and inform future action?

‍