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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. |