This guides details Stage 3 of our founder-driven sales framework. Be sure to see the overview to check your assumptions and use Stage 1, Prospects to Problems, and Stage 2, Problems to Pilots, before you try these techniques.
Getting your first pilot signed is huge. It was not an easy journey to get here—but we’re still early. Before you can begin to scale your business, you’ll want to use this opportunity to build the right business, and prove to yourself that it’s scalable.
We break it down into 3 steps of a cyclical process that never stops:
Deliver value
Deduce what works and destroy what doesn’t
Double down
We’ll also use a few stories 📖 based on our experiences to help make these perspectives more concrete.
1. Deliver value
You’ve signed a commitment to deliver some value in the form of a pilot. But how do you deliver it?
Prioritize learnings
The point of these pilots are to go deep with your customers. Use these engagements first and foremost as a learning opportunity. We like to bake it into the customer agreement that they’ll meet with you on a regular cadence in exchange for the discount or free value. Their time is 10x more valuable than any amount of money they can initially pay.
Here’s one way you can use consulting to develop the right solution:
📖 Consulting a solution instead of self-service
For Vistaly, product managers and business consultants have many steps to ultimately improve the alignment and do better product discovery. While Vistaly is a great product for experienced leaders that have already figured out their business metrics and how they map together, helping them operationalize their strategy to build consensus and keep it updated—it’s difficult for the rest of us—for people that have never documented a strategy in the first place.
To learn how to best deliver an experience to do this, Matt runs workshops—multi-hour consulting calls that allows Vistaly to perform this work with them. While expensive, this gives Matt the time to really understand how people perform this job today, see what questions they have, and where they struggle.
It turns out that there’s a 2-step process here:
Laying out everything they’re working on and what they care about first
THEN figure out how they’re all connected.
His live prompts during step 1 gets immediate feedback, further questions, and better results.
Vistaly is already in market and is expanding product-market fit.
This practice works way after the initial pilots.
So this is one way you can maximize your learning. Try to perform this work with them. A single 4-hour session might seem like a lot of work, but that’s a lot cheaper than building software for 4-6 weeks to realize you built the wrong thing.
Do things that don’t scale
These pilots are your minimal viable products, the least amount of rigid product (work, service, or program) that can maximize what you need to learn.
If you have to build, build as little as possible. Code is not an asset, it’s a liability. These are code spikes. None of this may work and you’ll likely have to throw it all away once you learn something else.
Create interactive “fake doors”. Publish content to a URL to make it feel more “real”. Add on a mouse tracker and you can “see” what they do. It doesn’t matter how the content and data got there.
Retool, Notion, Airtable are some of our favorite applications to deliver value in a “fake app” way that all minimize the hard-content creation.
A note on speed
Manual MVPs are slower than automated software. Yes, speed is one aspect of value, but it’s not the only aspect. If your delivery is slower than a fully automated solution (since it’s a fake pilot) you may often hear that “this would be valuable if it were faster”.
One way to test this feedback is to try to figure out a pilot version that matches their time needs, but limit the amount of the pilot. For example, if your solution is an AI-driven Zoom-based BDR coach, see if you can hop on a sales call as a fake recorder and live-coach the BDR over slack. But only offer that for 1 call a day. The rest are delivered slower.
If there’s a substantial difference to value in this case, see if you can measure it or if it’s just perceived-value (ie: look for proof that there’s a material outcome difference between the live coaching and after-the-fact coaching). It may not be there.
2. Deduce what works and destroy what doesn’t
Once you’re in pilots you’re in learning mode. Your job is to understand everything. Every little detail of the process should be clear to you.
Map it out
Using Miro or a whiteboard, create a map of the entire process and all the sub-steps. You can be as rigid as a User Story Map or as messy as sticky notes. Sort through each piece you don’t understand and prioritize what you need to learn and understand next.
Challenge yourself
Playing devils advocate can really help bolster your original position. You don’t have to believe what you are saying to raise these objections—but to do so genuinely can help you dive deeper into your learning.
We personally find this difficult to accomplish as an individual and like to bring in a partner or coach to help. With the advent of ChatGPT, GenAI LLMs are an accessible method at helping with this as well. Whichever way you go, here are some questions that can help challenge your thinking:
“[Learning]. What exceptions are there to this?”
“[Learning]. Is this biased in any way?”
“[Learning]. Who else might this impact? What does this mean to them?”
“[Learning]. What scenarios might this not be true in?”
“[Learning]. What’s a hypothetical scenario that refutes this?”
“[Learning]. What alternative explanation might there be for this?”
“[Learning]. What’s the absurd extreme version of this?”
“[Learning]. What flaws might exist within this?”
“[Learning]. Why won’t this work?”
“[Learning]. Who is hurt by this?”
“[Learning]. What ambiguity exists in this?”
“[Learning]. What assumptions are hidden in this?”
Experiment
If you don’t think there’s value, try skipping a step or piece of a deliverable to see if the customer misses it and demands it back.
Try different versions for each step. You’re not shooting for perfect delivery, you’re shooting for perfect understanding. Figure out what’s really working here and get rid of everything else. Yes, you’ll need to do some pre-work and steps to deliver that ultimate value, but everything else is icing and extra.
All of these techniques can help you build your understanding. Here’s one way we corrected our assumptions while learning how the customers thought:
📖 Improving existing software? Ride along.
For another startup, we were learning how to optimize complex staffing payroll. A payroll controller ran reports to gather information from their systems. By sitting next to them at their computer, we saw how cumbersome the process was to coordinate values from different systems. How they tried to “touch” the screen at times and how they thought about their data flow in steps—independently from the features of the software today.
For our own understanding purposes, we diagrammed out the steps that person was going through, with a focus on what data they needed when, what questions they were asking, and what confidence levels they had.
Our first take, to simplify the entire process into a single button, didn’t deliver the real value they were looking for.
They didn’t trust the computer data, and wanted to “spot check” things to boost their confidence.
They’d rather have what we thought of as bad—more friction. That taught us that a middle-ground solution that was able to showcase the work with preview spot-checks delivered the value of confidence over a simplistic “do it for me” approach. Sure, the CFO would rather payroll gets done correctly and faster—but the controller needs to guarantee that outcome, which requires a high level of confidence.
Get more pilots
While you’re delivering value and understanding it, don’t stop selling. Net-new research conversations give you the opportunity to try out learnings with other perspectives to learn objections and challenges from your pilots in other environments. You should still be spending more than 50% of your time talking to new prospects and continue to sell. This is where having a cofounder can come in handy—as it’s difficult to do both at the same time.
If you need to pivot to another stakeholder, keep the original pilot happy—make them whole by giving their money back or asking what they need in exchange for the learning. They might not be in your target market, but they’re another connection that can make or break your future work.
Beware your biases
Every founder has biases that they need to work through and check at the door.
For example, technical founders enjoy building and like to over-engineer solutions. While building a scalable product is great for later-stage products, it actually hurts us now—because we’re much more likely to build a solution that the target market doesn’t understand or know how to use.
Founders with a sales (AE/closing) background, on the other hand, will likely find it easier to build for a single customer instead of generalizing across their entire customer base—and often expand features and value to compete based on objections, instead of prioritizing ROI of each feature developed.
Whichever bias you have, push yourself out of that default mode of operating and strive for better, conscious investments into the next stage—when you double down on your bets.
3. Double down
Off the success of our first few pilots, let’s get to building more and creating more value.
Start to automate core pieces to what is working. Prioritize those features based on a ROI calculation—high returns with small investments. At some point you’ll need to build a lot more, but here you have access to the resources to make it possible.
Surprise! You’ve got traction
These pilots are proof—proof to yourself, investors, and customers that you can really deliver value. Now your goal is to scale that up.
If you can, continue to use that initial traction with customers and keep the relationship just delivering value with them. Convert those existing pilots into full-blown customers. That’s the easiest form of business.
If you don’t have the balance sheet to grow, look for alternative options. Reduce employee wages by offering them equity or alternative benefits. Reduce vendor expenses with payment terms. Look for loans on AR (long-term contracts) or leveraged assets. This calm growth pays big in the long run because it’s compounding.
But it’s not always feasible—and venture capital might be a good partner for you. Pre-seed investors, angels, and friend and family are a good source of capital now that you have initial traction. Just beware that these silent partners are looking for returns—and you’ll enter the comparison game of all investments—likely leading to decisions that don’t best serve the owner-operator.
Growth from pilots
One of the most valuable assets you have as an actual business is your customer base. Turn their success stories into yours—you can use their logos as marketing collateral and their testimonials as social proof to your outreach and sales.
Get referrals to their friends and competitors. Learn from them what community they live and operate in professionally. Go to the conferences they attend, publish ads in the articles they read, and host webinars with them. Create look-a-like profiles for social media ad-spend or find other ways to learn where to find 10 others just like them.
Each growth playbook is unique per market and changes over time. Here’s a story of one that worked for us:
📖 Improving the physical world? Go there.
For Awaiting, early on in the pandemic contact-tracing was all the rage. We theorized that just by collecting phone numbers we’d be able to deliver a manual form of contract tracing for businesses that might be on the hook to perform it for regulation purposes.
Turns out that regulation never came to pass in America (Canada was a different story)—but what was needed was less crowds. By creating a virtual waitlist service we were able to capture all sorts of scenarios where crowds were an issue. We helped BTS concerts line-up while staying far apart, Job fairs regulate their lines, resorts handle check-in on popular (and cold) weekends, and even daycares handle parents picking up their kids.
After failing to sell to many “look alike” companies, we had to go to these events to really understand the value we created and be able to find other opportunities. Physically experiencing the lines, proximity, and visual capabilities that a physical space had showcased where a virtual waitlist would really prosper—and how it was incredibly different from curbside service (Ala drive thru) at Best Buy.
Without seeing the whole picture, we would’ve missed the surge-event opportunity, which was ultimately where the majority of our revenue came from.
Some things you can’t do from behind a desk. Sure, travel costs money, but it doesn’t cost as much as the missed learning or opportunity.
Now what?
Congratulations, you’ve gotten some market traction and can re-run your projections to see what kind of business you’ve created.
Look at your goals and plan what you need to get there. You should now be feeling the burn of the candle at both ends, and might want to consider raising funds to scale faster or grow at your comfortable rate.
There’s several directions you can head now, and several alternative playbooks. We’ll cover some growth options like outbound sales, enterprise sales, and product-led growth models soon, but with initial recurring revenue, continue to support customers while you spend on acquiring the next customer. At this point in the public SaaS market, you’re not just looking for CLTV > CAC, but things like:
90% profit margins
acquiring new customers in a scalable way
some referral engine for new customers
framing a market category
constantly evolving to a changing world
🎉 Congratulations, you’ve come a far way—we’re excited to see where you’ll grow from here!