At Rypple, we focus the design of our service around a central notion that Roger Martin shared with us, “turning the future into the past.”

This idea is central to our thinking because it allows our users to quickly overcome any questions/objections about the Rypple service.

When most people look at an innovative new approach to solving a problem (in our case, continuous feedback to improve execution & learning), they usually come up with an immediate set of questions:

• Will this service work?
• Will our people use it?
• Will it generate meaningful results?
• Will it be quick and easy to deploy and use?
• How will it impact business performance?

Instead of bombarding prospective users with jargon-based marketing material to co-opt the user into seeing the merits of your service, we advocate a different approach.

“Turn the future into the past”. With no risk and for no cost, allow the user to try the core elements of the service right away, and validate the benefits for yourself.

In order to take this approach, you will need to design all the elements of your service around speed to deployment: removing all barriers for a prospect to become a user and get value fast.

The entire value chain should be quick and seamless:  From signing up, learning how the service works, using it, enabling others to use it, and seeing results.

At this point, a more meaningful dialog can occur between service provider and user, based on a shared experience of use.

Which means, when you build something easy that adds value right away, users are more than happy to talk to you about how you can improve your service, and charge even more!

Then your prospective user won’t be guessing or hypothesizing about what might happen, but will actually know what has happened, and can make an informed decision about the merits of signing up for the service.

This approach has allowed us to find the right customers who believe in our vision and our solution and have yielded tangible benefits from the service before signing up for the Enterprise Solution. They have a good sense of what the service will provide to their entire organization before they begin the roll-out, since they have “turned the future into the past.”