[beachstartup]

uhm, this is your fault. why were you working for free?

a quote is one thing and as a sales professional you should expect to waste a huge amount of time on quotes that never go anywhere, but a proof of concept is supposed to be something you charge for. it's engineering work!!!

if they don't want to pay for a poc, that's a real good sign that they're not worth working for.

[sijoe]

We've limit "working for free", to things that should help us close business against existing quotes with a commitment from the customer to execute on the quote in question. Our work is hard enough to replicate elsewhere that there is a natural incentive to work with us if we meet their objectives. More formally, we had at least an agreement to work together if we met their objectives. We blew them out (way better than they anticipated), which worked strongly in our favor.

Unfortunately, while you are correct it is our, and specifically my (the buck stops with me) fault, I've run into variations on this from very small "free advice" requests, through what amounted to fake RFPs, where the 'customer' loved our design, and in one case specifically asked us to train our competitors and share our IP (with no compensation) to have them deliver it.

This POC was piggy backed atop another project that had ended, and it amounted to getting some run-time in for them, after they indicated a strong preference for us (given our recent domination of an industry benchmark at the time). The 'customer' swore they would buy, and I worked to get an operational quote in front of them that they agreed to push through if the POC was in fact viable.

So much for that.

One thing I've learned over the years (no, decades) of startup life is, you don't have the deal until the check clears. Curious how similar this is to raising capital.

The cost of this POC for us was power/cooling, some of my time, and the opportunity cost of not using the machine for other engineering work. But the long term cost to the customer for their poor behavior and poor choices can't be easily measured, other than them not hitting their KPOs.

I do take full blame for this failure though. It was mine. But it is still annoying. All teachable moments leave marks.

[beachstartup]

here's a tip: if a customer ever asks for an 'escape clause' in a contract, unless tied to very specific measurable things, they're going to rip you off.

[beachstartup]

> We've limit "working for free", to things that should help us close business against existing quotes with a commitment

heuristic: if someone has to log into a machine, it's no longer sales, and is engineering.

this is hard to do. it takes discipline. it takes wondering "gee we could have gotten that sale." and tossing it to the wind. it's HARD. but you have to do it. please have some self-respect, our industry is short on it.

[CPLX]

> Curious how similar this is to raising capital.

Exactly the same.

[beachstartup]

interestingly, a lot of our sales woes went away when we started asking for some money up front. we're all first-time sales people at my outfit.

people who are willing to pay a small fee up front are the only people you can work with as a services startup, the rest are worthless.