Gut feeling, based on my experience mentoring 250+ startups. This graph is not backed by a scientific study. Even though I’ve seen many startups go through these steps in this order, for every step there are exceptions.
True. It’s hard to measure early-stage innovation. Getting hung up on metrics is the worst thing you can do early-stage. A metric is just one of the signals you can look into. I rather have you handcraft 10 pilots to learn what makes your customer happy than to obsess over your ‘landing page to email sign-up’-conversion rate.
Likely not. Someone with 100k followers probably has a bunch of sales already. You should consider the signals as isolated signals. What is the furthest to the right signal you have generated? If somebody has 100k followers without any sales, that’s a red flag, right? Consider 50 paid pilots without any followers vs. 0 paid pilots with 50k followers. You choose what’s more valuable.
If you can do that, great. You will learn about ps-fit and business-model fit in the same pilot. If not, it’s fine to do a free pilot first. I’m planning to write a standalone post on ‘How much to charge for a pilot’ soon.