No Pilot, No Project

Most early-stage teams start in the wrong place. They start with a project. A shiny backlog, a Figma file, a repo. It feels productive, it looks serious, and it's completely uncorrelated with whether anyone will ever pay for what you're building.

Start with Selling, Not Building

"Selling the idea" means treating your concept like a product long before you have one. You put it in front of real people, in your target segment, and you ask for real commitments: time, access, data, or money.

You're not asking, "Do you like this?" You're asking, "Will you pilot this, with your team, in the next 30–60 days?"

If the answer is a vague "this is cool" with no calendar invite, no introduction to a decision-maker, and no follow-up, that's not validation. That's entertainment.

Pilots: A Contract with Reality

This is where pilots come in. A good pilot is not a half-hearted free trial; it's a focused contract with reality. You define:

• A narrow use case that attacks one meaningful pain
• A time window (typically 30–60 days)
• A couple of concrete success metrics
• A decision point: continue, expand, or stop

Suddenly, you're not debating opinions inside your team. You're watching how your idea behaves when it hits an actual workflow, with real stakes. Pilots force you to see the difference between what people say in a call and what they do when they have to change their habits.

What Makes a Good Pilot

A well-designed pilot gives you:

• Real customer discovery: Not the persona in your deck, but the person who shows up to pilot calls, pushes their team, and asks about rollout
• Workflow insights: Which parts actually move the needle and which ones nobody cares about
• Adoption blockers: Who blocks adoption (security, procurement, compliance) and how early you need to involve them
• Specific context: Instead of wandering in "we build for X industry" land, you start learning, "We build for this specific role, with this specific pain, in this specific context."

For Small Teams: This Is Survival

For small teams, this is not a theoretical nice-to-have. It's survival. With 0–10 people and <12 months of runway, every "project" is a massive bet.

If you spin up a full roadmap without at least a few committed pilots, you're basically using your runway to subsidize your own curiosity.

The alternative is brutally simple: no pilot, no project. You don't green-light substantial engineering work unless you have evidence that someone is willing to run the experiment with you, soon, with clear stakes. That one rule will save you from months of beautifully executed dead ends.

The Hidden Problem: Lost Insights

Of course, there's a hidden problem: most pilot insight gets lost. Feedback lives in:

• Random Slack DMs
• One-off Zoom notes
• A Linear comment
• A Discord message

Six weeks later, nobody remembers exactly who said what, which idea actually had energy, and which objection killed momentum. You "feel" like an idea has traction, but can't show why.

This is where tools like Duster earn their keep: by pulling conversations from Slack, Linear, and Discord into a single view, tagging them by idea and customer, and turning messy anecdotes into a structured map of signals. The pilot stops being a vague memory and becomes an asset that informs the next decision.

Invert Your Default Sequence

If you're a founder or early PM, invert your default sequence:

Don't start with: "What should we build?"

Start with: "What can we sell as a pilot in the next 30 days?"

Craft a simple narrative, show it to the right people, and push—politely but firmly—for a pilot commitment. When you get a yes, design that pilot like a contract with reality. When you get a no, treat it as data, not rejection.

Then, and only then, decide if the idea has earned the right to become a project.

Pilots give you the map. Your job is to read it before you start running.