Turn conversations into paid pilots to prove market fit

Founders often spend months building products in isolation, but Vlad Podoliako at Belkins and the team behind Arc X suggest prioritizing revenue as the primary signal for viability (Arc X, Produced Newsletter). To test this, you can follow a 100-day cycle where you conduct problem interviews with 40 potential customers, such as independent clinic owners, to identify a specific pain point that prompts them to pay for a solution. After identifying the problem, you define a clear value proposition and offer a paid one-month pilot to twelve prospects; if three agree to pay, you deliver the service manually to understand the workflow before writing a single line of code.

Once the pilot is underway, you track the most annoying parts of the manual process and resolve them weekly to refine your offering. If two of the three customers renew after the first month, you possess the evidence required to formalize your process into a scalable business. This method allows you to collect rejections as data points, which clarifies where the real business opportunity lies while avoiding the common trap of spending time on logos or websites that do not generate revenue.