All my friends in startups have the same complaint. People like our idea but they want to see it working before they will buy.
The customers are both annoyingly conservative and also partially correct.
You are asking your customers to take first of a kind (FOAK) risk that will likely entail budget and schedule overruns. You are on a voyage of discovery where your ideas get to meet the reality of design and implementation. Most of them don’t want to take that risk as that is traditionally the role of shareholders.
So, you scrape together the funds for a demonstration – but it’s still not good enough. They want to see a commercial scale product. So then you try and build a full size plant.
This is where the trap lies. It often takes a completely different set of skills to build a full size plant, and once those managers are in place the companies goal then shifts from design and manufacture to full plants.
The world is littered with great technologies that got caught in this trap.
Why on earth would you design a revolutionary product and then sell it to yourself? That’s what demonstrations are – selling to yourself.
Go sell to others instead, and don’t lose sight of your actual purpose.
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