The Prototyping Handbook

Test and validate (or kill) your product idea in one day to one week, without wasting time, energy, or money.

Hi, I’m Eli, and I’m a designer, entrepreneur, and teacher. For the past 15 years, I’ve been prototyping products, ranging from physical consumer products (underwater photography and lighting products, print magazines) to software products (mobile & desktop apps, for myself and for other startups). I also teach product design (and by extension, prototyping) at Stanford University.

Over the years I’ve learned that the best way to validate a product idea is to get it in front of users, quickly. Through a series of case studies, interviews, and step-by-step demos and instructions, The Prototyping Handbook is a guide that will help you prototype your idea, get it in front of users, and get enough feedback to iterate on or kill the idea, usually without investing time in designing or writing a line of code.

If you’re bootstrapping your product, The Prototyping Handbook will help you avoid wasting your time and money on ideas that don’t resonate with users, and help you quickly iterate to a product that people are willing to pay for.

Using this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Create an interactive mobile app prototype in less than an hour, test it with real people, and use their feedback to iterate and improve the product (or pivot to a better idea).
• Use “Wizard of Oz” techniques to manually test and improve product flows, without writing any code.
• Quickly create better landing pages to test product ideas, drive traffic to the page, and implement a framework for learning from the people who sign up.

Sign up to my email list to keep in touch, and I’ll send sample chapters and interviews with founders who have used these techniques to build products that went on to win over thousands or even millions of users:

Or pre-order now to get 20% off after the book is published: