Ideas are easy. What’s hard is turning an idea into a plan, and that plan into a prototype.

7 teams remain. To stay in the competition, they need to turn their pitch into a crystal clear prototype that shows the judges their product vision — and its value.

The prototype is how we bring people along with our vision — and it’s the cheapest way to validate that what we’re imagining is actually going to work.

Without a prototype, we’re relying on each person who hears the idea to imagine it in the same way we are, and imagination doesn’t even scale to two people, let alone a whole team or customer base.

Prototypes focus the idea, make it real, and require us to edit down from the infinite possible paths we could take with our product down to the one path we will take to actually build it.

Host and judges

Host: Kelsey Hightower, distinguished engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelsey-hightower-849b342b1/ Judge: Jason Lengstorf, creator of CodeTV https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlengstorf/ Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit Industries https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephruscio/

About this series

Great devs build great projects. But building a great product is about more than the frontend and backend. Kelsey Hightower hosts a competition to find out what it takes to really be a builder.

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