Free pilots are the most expensive validation you can get.

Free pilots are the most expensive validation you can get.

The engineering time is the cheap part. The expensive part is spending a quarter without finding out whether anyone will actually pay.

We learned this the direct way: a team told us they’d move forward once a specific feature existed. Clear requirement, serious organization, and it sounded like the last thing between us and a contract. So we built it.

They didn’t buy.

The lesson wasn’t that they lied. A feature request from someone with no money committed is an opinion, not a requirement. 

This makes free pilots expensive. 

The actual question that’s driving a procurement decision is: is this problem pressing enough that someone will spend money they could have spent elsewhere? Budget is how an organization states its priorities out loud.

Also, whoever takes a free pilot is often the one who finds it interesting, not the one who’s blocked. Someone genuinely blocked finds money, because the alternative is staying blocked.

A paid pilot at a reduced rate still makes someone defend the spend internally. The number can be almost anything. What matters is that it isn’t zero.

So now I ask who signs before agreeing to anything. If the answer is vague, the problem isn’t pressing.

Don’t build what nobody is paying for.

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