Balsamiq

And you just create the simulation of how the software will work.

If you wanna get fancy, and I don't recommend it, there are other products out there like a Balsamiq, like a UXPin, like InVision app that allows you to create almost pixel perfect simulation of your prototype.

Now, here's why I don't recommend those.

is because when you show them to customers for feedback, they might be a little hesitant to give you really honest feedback because they think like, oh, you already built this.

I appreciate you coming on.

Balsamiq, if anybody's watched my stuff, like I told you yesterday, I referred probably three people just in email.

Because a lot of non-technical founders come to me for like, hey, I've got this idea.

I want to build it.

You can design it.

I actually built Clarity,

my last company, using Balsamiq.

I still remember my wife took a picture because it was like 3 in the morning.

That was just a crappy template that someone made a bad judgment call on to use on the home page, because when I looked at their templates, they had really nice templates.

So Balsamiq is, yeah, we like Balsamiq a lot.

So it's a program that lets you drag components of a wireframe.

Maybe it's a big box, or a headshot, or a movie.

So real quick I'm gonna walk you through three of my top ways and I kinda stack them almost in this order.

The first one is creating a clickable prototype using Keynote or you can even use Balsamiq's a great tool.

The second one is doing pre-sales to customers using the early adopter program, which is EAP, it's just saying, look, let's co-create this together because you're involved and you're giving us feedback, we're giving it to you at a discount.

And again, if at any point you decide you don't want to build a company anymore, you want to pivot away from that core customer, you can do that, give their money back, no big deal, no harm, no foul.

Just sit down and say, okay, what could we build in a six week product sprint? What are the three core features that'll deliver value for our customers? And you sit down and you build a prototype.

You can use tools like Balsamiq or UXPin or even InVision, but you wanna build a clickable prototype.

I've seen people use Keynote and PowerPoint.

So super simple, build the prototype, then here's the key is you want to run a pilot program.

I actually built Clarity,

my last company, using Balsamiq.

I still remember my wife took a picture because it was like 3 in the morning.

And I had my Thunderbolt monitor with the flows.

Graduate to something more complicated.

If you hire a UX professional, then they're going to use whatever they want.

But we want Balsamiq to be the first tool that people who are getting into UX use because it's just the easiest and most approachable, and we want to keep it that way.

What I did was I hid some of the most power user features from the product because we were going back to our roots.

It was on for two more years.

Yeah, because I seem to remember it being on while I was working at Balsamiq.

Good show.

Yeah, yeah.

You can use your computer.

You can use a tool like Balsamiq, which I like using.

But it's more or less just a sketch, a prototype.

is more of a, is a series of sketches that are kind of usually like attached together.