To start to make your technology business real, there is a set pattern of steps that you need to follow, regardless of what the product is or does.
One of these key stages is the “pilot project”, which is the bit where you have something that roughly works, but you want to get it out in front of someone to actually use.
You may be wondering how to do that, but in my experience it’s generally easy to find people who want to help with pilot projects.
People generally like to be nice and help – and for the most part if you find people who are good at what they do, they like to be thinking about ways to improve the state-of-the-art in the work they do, and if you’ve got decent product-market fit in what you’re doing, what you’re building will likely help them improve.
Pilots then are one of these things that seem harder than they are. Whatever you built does roughly need to work, but if you start “socialising” it with people, I suspect most founders can quite quickly find an opportunity to test out the project with a pilot.
One gotcha though is that oftentimes people forget that the pilot can reveal quite radical learns, so much sure you have the resources to go to wherever you need to go to, post pilot.