Skip to content

Buyer Discovery

Status: Experiment plan Validation status: Initial customer-described use cases captured; buyer, budget owner, and willingness to pay still unconfirmed

The most important question is not "do engineers like this?" It is:

Who owns the consequence when a release package is wrong?

That person is the likely buyer, even if the CAD user is the daily user or champion.

Buyer Hypothesis

STATUS: HYPOTHESIS

For ETO machine builders and mature engineering organizations, the first buyer may be the engineering manager, Konstruktionsleiter, PLM/release owner, ERP/master-data owner, manufacturing engineering lead, or configuration manager measured on release cycles, master-data cleanup, design reuse, ECO churn, FAT-date slippage, supplier RFQ quality, and downstream firefighting.

This must be confirmed or broken in discovery.

Candidate Buyers

Buyer What they suffer What they may pay for Discovery risk
Engineering manager / Konstruktionsleiter ECO churn, missed release dates, team firefighting fewer post-release issues may see it as engineering hygiene, not urgent budget
Manufacturing engineering lead unclear drawings, rework, build stoppage fewer shop-floor surprises may not own software budget
PLM / release coordinator wrong lifecycle state, revision mismatch, metadata gaps fewer rejected packages and cleaner approvals may own process but not budget
Quality / APQP / FAI / PPAP lead missing critical characteristics, inspection ambiguity, submission rejection first-pass approval and auditability strongest in regulated/automotive/aerospace contexts
Procurement / sourcing lead supplier clarification loops and bad RFQ packages faster quotes and cleaner supplier packets may avoid deeper engineering intent
ERP / master-data owner missing item fields, wrong material groups, bad make/buy data less manual cleanup before ERP release may push the product toward integration services
Operations / program manager schedule slip, launch delay, customer escalation fewer late surprises before launch or FAT may only care after a large failure

Discovery Evidence To Date

Signal Source Buyer clue What to validate next
Drawing setup standards in NX Volocopter / Vinicius design engineering, methods, CAD standards owner who owns the standard matrix and failed-check cost
Geometry/dimension search across PLM/ERP Volocopter / Vinicius + Aaron design engineering, PLM, ERP data owner whether search saves enough time to fund a pilot
Requirements/guideline review Rohde & Schwarz / Robin requirements, systems engineering, quality/compliance one requirement check that is painful and demoable
Custom-to-order design reuse Bauer / Wolf Goetze engineering manager, senior design owner, sales engineering one customer request and the prior design it should retrieve
Drawing standards and Teamcenter release context Avilus / Franz signal structural CAD lead, design engineering, PLM/release owner one drawing standard, one sheet-metal drawing, and one Teamcenter package
Stress input readiness and load provenance Deutsche Aircraft / Jose V. C. stress lead, methods/tools owner, program engineering, IT/security one wrong-load or missing-load-source example plus deployment boundary
Drawing completeness before SAP release Deutsche Aircraft / Evgeny configuration manager, release owner, quality, PLM/SAP owner one CATIA/3DEXPERIENCE drawing checklist and SAP/BOM metadata package
Machine-aware DFM and costing Ulrich manufacturing engineering, production planning, costing one machine-park constraint and one quantity rule
Material/AM/CO2 review Dennis Schmitz design engineering, sustainability, manufacturing process owner one part-level material/route calculation with evidence
ERP/CAD metadata pain Theegarten/Marcel signal, Bauer fit ERP/master-data owner, PLM owner, engineering manager new-part creation walkthrough: fields, people, systems, minutes

Founder Knowledge Gap

Adeel has strong upstream design, FEM, and mechanical engineering intuition. That helps with artifacts and technical plausibility.

The market-map signal is uncomfortable but useful: CADTALK and CADDi live downstream of where an upstream design/simulation career spends daily attention. The buyer may sit in manufacturing operations, procurement, release coordination, quality, ERP/master data, or supplier readiness rather than CAD design.

This gap closes through conversations, not more desk research.

Interview Script

Do not start with AI. Do not pitch Release Readiness first. Start with the painful day.

Opening prompt:

Tell me about the last mechanical release package that caused pain after engineering thought it was ready.

Core questions:

  1. What was being released?
  2. Who released it?
  3. Who first noticed the problem downstream?
  4. What artifact was wrong, incomplete, ambiguous, or missing?
  5. Was it a mismatch, a missing field, a missing standard requirement, missing engineering intent, historical memory, or process failure?
  6. Why did the normal release process not catch it?
  7. When was it discovered?
  8. What happened next?
  9. What did it cost in time, scrap, rework, supplier delay, ECO, audit problem, or customer escalation?
  10. Who was blamed or pulled into the fix?
  11. Who had authority to block the release earlier?
  12. What would have needed to be shown before release to prevent it?
  13. Would you trust software to flag this? Why or why not?
  14. Who would pay to prevent this?
  15. Can you share or describe an anonymized version of the package?

Frown Test

Show one bait scenario from Bait Scenarios.

Record:

  • what they agree with
  • what they reject
  • where they frown
  • what they say is unrealistic
  • what they say is missing
  • what they say is the real problem instead
  • which role they say owns the consequence

The frowns are more valuable than agreement. A frown shows where the current model is wrong, and that wrong spot is where the real product insight often lives.

Evidence Standard

A claim moves from hypothesis to evidence only when at least one of these is true:

Evidence level Meaning
Customer-reacted a target user reacts to a bait scenario with specific corrections
Customer-described a real target user describes a real failure story
Artifact-seen an anonymized drawing, BOM, package, or checklist is shown
Buyer-identified a real budget owner or consequence owner is named
Pilot-tested RapidDraft catches a real agreed-upon defect on customer-like files
Paid the customer commits money or a paid pilot

AI-generated scenarios, founder intuition, competitor existence, broad market maps, and synthetic ROI ranges do not count as validation.

Definition Of Progress

This phase is done when there are:

  • 3+ real failure stories from people who own or absorb the consequence
  • at least one anonymized real release package
  • a confirmed or broken answer to "who owns the budget?"
  • one tiny demo that catches one real, agreed-upon defect on a real or realistic file

The July 2026 calls satisfy the first part only as customer-described use cases. They do not yet provide artifact-seen evidence, budget confirmation, or pilot proof.

Pages written is not a progress metric. Frowns collected is.

Open Questions

  • Who is easiest to reach first: Theegarten-Pactec-style machine-builder engineering, ERP/master-data owner, manufacturing engineering, PLM/release coordination, quality, or procurement?
  • Which role can provide anonymized artifacts without a long security review?
  • Which buyer has the clearest metric for a 30-day pilot?

Sources