Pilot Customers

To which extent do they matter?

They do matter a lot, especially in a business-to-business environment. Involving pilot customers at an early stage is the best way to validate your vision and product concept. Moreover, it will help shape your product roadmap, maximizing your chances of reaching product-market fit quickly. This principle also applies to consumer-facing products, where you'll want beta users to test your product early on to confirm you're heading in the right direction.

Product development involves many critical decisions when creating your initial version. Consider a marketplace product, for example. You'll need to choose between a vertical or horizontal approach. Should you integrate a few suppliers with a broad range of capabilities? Or should you onboard many suppliers but limit the feature set? Pilot customers or beta users are invaluable in helping you make these crucial choices.

An important consideration, though: securing a company's agreement to pilot your product doesn't necessarily mean you're in the clear. All key people in this company need to be fans of your product concept and must perceive it as critical for their future growth. You may have convinced the CEO, but others in management might not be on board and could potentially sabotage the pilot phase (again, I have learnt this the hard way). Therefore, don't celebrate such a win too early. Instead, spend time developing relationships with all key stakeholders within your pilot customer's organization.

For reasons I've highlighted earlier, flyiin's consumer-facing Air Travel Marketplace never went live. Consequently, we couldn't determine if our new approach to marketing flight products was on the right track. Our approach was clearly contrarian to existing online travel agencies and flight search engines. It could have been either a tremendous success or a complete disaster—I'll never know.

When we pivoted to focus on developing our Airline DirectConnect Platform, we were fortunate to onboard a pilot customer just a couple of months after raising our only financing round. It was a good start, as it would allow us to go live within months. Unfortunately, two issues arose: the customer went out of business six months after we launched with them, and in the interim, we developed features that were possibly too specific to their needs as a consumer-facing product, and not entirely applicable to our wider market. Another crucial lesson: if you have the choice, select pilot customers whose needs align closely with your target market to avoid veering off course.

Twelve months later, just before COVID-19 hit, we secured another pilot customer—a travel tech company that chose to outsource their partner airline integrations to us rather than handling them in-house. Although not our target profile, we desperately needed to process live transactions to validate our platform. However, we faced a significant challenge (besides the pandemic resulting in zero flight bookings): we couldn't progress beyond implementing a single airline integration on their behalf, despite our initial agreement to integrate 4–5 airlines at minimum. This experience taught me another two valuable lessons: having the CEO's support alone isn't always enough and… don’t celebrate too early.

Key Takeaway #30

Onboarding pilot customers early is key to validate your product vision and shape your roadmap, but securing agreement isn't enough. It's essential to ensure all key stakeholders within the pilot customer's organization are fully on board to avoid potential sabotage. If you have a choice, select those who more closely align with your target market.