| > but as we had to learn the hard way nobody was willing to pay for it. I was part of a startup a few years ago with some really cool technology and good market validation. Somehow we got connected to a very well known media and technology company and were brought in to sell our product to them. The founders, star struck, pulled out all the stops on our presentation, flying people cross country, buying up demo data, the works. They saw the potential install base * our license cost (even at discount) and were thinking immediate exit. During the demo there were oohs and ahhs at all the appropriate places especially around certain features we really wanted to show off. Questions were constant and detailed and follow ups were planned before we even left the room. High fives were given in the parking lot. Over the following weeks calls were vague, "hard to coordinate all these people" "he's on travel" "she's changed departments" Weeks turned into months, calls just stopped being returned. The deal was put into back burner status with lots of finger pointing. One day, a year or so later, one of our employees came back from a tradeshow pointing at a flyer they had picked up from that company's booth. It described a new feature in their technology offering that was an exact copy of some of what we had shown in our demo. The copy even used a term we had coined for the demo. The screenshot looked more or less like that piece of our product, reskined for their technology. Lawyers were consulted. The end result was that they hadn't done anything wrong, just copied an "idea" they had seen. But as a result we were effectively locked out of their market segment. They had simply done the math, develop it in house or pay a license fee per use and it had been cheaper to do it all in house. By buying relevant data and making a demo so complete you could make actual decisions off of it, we had even shown them what they should aim for, what worked, what didn't work. We helped them optimize their development process and made the decision to do it all in house even easier. |