PAVING THE PATH FORWARD: GETTING FROM PILOT TO WORKING COMPANY

We’ve talked a lot about when things aren’t working. What to do when an idea isn’t as strong as you thought, how to deal with closing your company, when the right time to do that would be, and much more. However, we haven’t discussed enough the positive path and outcome from all this, namely being successful. 

What do you do if you’ve successfully completed your pilot, you’ve attracted one or two angels, and you have a few proposals to start incorporating your work and collaborating with other businesses? 

For the sake of brevity and clarity, let’s assume that you are a company that has an AI that helps create marketing strategies from scratch for companies within a matter of seconds. Your pilot went phenomenally, and as you were stepping off the stage of the World Startup Competition where you were pitching, two angels approached you and started asking you questions. 

One thing led to another, and they invited you to a meeting where they drilled down in you more and more. Surprisingly, by the end of the four-week-long deliberations, they decided to close on a deal and actually financially support you. No banks, no other commitments. Just you and them. 

You got a start, you sold the pilot, so what now? 

The best thing you can do is to start honing in your product and marketing. Given the amount of staff you have at the moment, would you need any more changes? Are there more people you would need to add to your staff pool? If yes, set some money aside for them.

From here on out, you have to figure out a couple of things:

1. How do you take the pilot and implement this AI strategy-setting business in companies
2. Find some companies that are willing to test with you 
3. Figure out if there are any additional conditions you and they can meet so that you can convert them into paying customers

In terms of your AI strategy-setting product, you have to:

1. Figure out how to integrate that into the systems of your customers in the quickest way possible
2. Figure out your margins and how quickly you can optimize the AI to refit the company’s needs and wants
3. How many people staff it take to do any and all of these operations and how much time would you need to plan ahead 
4. What are your contingencies and how do you want to reach out to new clients in the future - are there places where you can scale the AI so you can cater to a new audience? If yes, when does this happen in the future? Who is responsible for it? What does the process look like? 

A thing to note is that for you to graduate from pilot to a small business, you need to take the theoretical bits - how this would work and how that would work, and integrate them into a working relationship with your clients. For that A) you need a client and B) you need your product to be good enough to integrate swiftly and not demand constant updates that bottleneck your performance

In essence, you have two tasks - find who it is that you can sell to right now, and find who it is you can sell to 3 months from now. Incorporate the feedback, wants, and needs of these people into your product so you can guarantee you fulfill them as you go. 

Which stage of development are you currently in? Comment down below!