Selling

How does a company get someone to pay, repeatedly?

1. 01Aurygine synthesisEvidence quality: high

   Utilisation and price: the two levers a service business actually has

   Aurygine's own synthesis across observed practice. No single work is reproduced.

   Extracted pattern

   • A service business grows through sold hours and price per hour. Everything else is downstream of those two.
   • Raising price on new customers only is the lowest-risk experiment available.
   • Unsold capacity is a cost that never appears on an invoice.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Revenue is flat and the founder is already working full weeks.
     Move. Measure utilisation honestly, then raise price for new work by 10–15% and hold it for one quarter.
     Trade-off. Some prospects are lost; the ones lost were usually the least profitable.
     Breaks when. Utilisation is low because demand is weak — then the problem is acquisition, and a price rise makes it worse.

   Practical implication

   Check utilisation before you check marketing. High utilisation and flat revenue is a pricing problem; low utilisation is a demand problem. They need opposite moves.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Software businesses have near-zero marginal delivery cost, so utilisation thinking misleads them.

   Failure modes

   • Adding staff before price has been tested.
   • Counting booked hours instead of paid hours.

   What was measured

   utilisation % · average price per engagement · repeat rate · days to payment

   Stage relevance

   First customers · Traction · Mature

   Source

   Aurygine · 2026-03-05
2. 02Aurygine synthesisEvidence quality: medium

   Channel concentration: when one working channel becomes the risk

   Aurygine's own synthesis across observed practice. No single work is reproduced.

   Extracted pattern

   • A channel you do not own can be repriced or removed without notice.
   • Diversifying before you have one channel working is procrastination; diversifying after is insurance.
   • The second channel is nearly always slower and worse than the first, and should be judged on payback, not volume.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. One channel produces most of the company's new customers.
     Move. Keep investing in the working channel, but run one small, funded test in a structurally different channel each quarter.
     Trade-off. The test costs money and attention that the working channel would convert better today.
     Breaks when. The company has not yet found a single channel that works — then focus beats diversification.

   Practical implication

   Measure the share of new business each channel produces. Above roughly 70% from one source, fund a deliberate second bet — sized so failure is affordable and success is measurable.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Local service businesses often survive fine on one referral channel for years, because the channel is a relationship, not a platform.

   Failure modes

   • Assuming a platform's current economics are permanent.
   • Judging the second channel by first-channel efficiency and killing it too early.

   What was measured

   share of new customers by channel · payback period per channel · owned audience size

   Stage relevance

   First customers · Traction · Scaling

   Source

   Aurygine · 2026-02-02
3. 03Aurygine synthesisEvidence quality: high

   Customer-funded growth: making the buyer your investor

   Aurygine's own synthesis across observed practice. No single work is reproduced.

   Extracted pattern

   • A customer who pays before the thing exists has told you more than any survey could.
   • Deposits, pilots and prepaid pilots are financing instruments, not just revenue.
   • If nobody will pay in advance, the problem is usually urgency, not price.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Founder needs money to build, has no capital and no track record.
     Move. Sell a paid pilot to three buyers with a fixed scope and a delivery date, and build only what the pilot requires.
     Trade-off. The first version bends towards three specific buyers and may not generalise.
     Breaks when. The product needs heavy upfront infrastructure before any value exists, or the buyer cannot legally prepay.

   Practical implication

   Before raising or spending, test whether the problem is urgent enough to be prepaid. Prepayment is the cheapest validation instrument available to a founder and it funds the build at the same time.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Capital-intensive and deep-tech companies routinely cannot be customer-funded early; milestone financing fits better.

   Failure modes

   • Building for six months on savings, then discovering the urgency was imagined.
   • Discounting the pilot so heavily it proves willingness to try, not willingness to pay.

   What was measured

   prepaid pilots signed · cash collected before build · pilot-to-contract conversion

   Stage relevance

   Idea · Pre-revenue · First customers

   Source

   Aurygine · 2026-01-12
4. 04SourcedEvidence quality: high

   Manual first: why early unscalable work is the strategy

   Summarised in Aurygine's words from a publicly readable source, linked below.

   Extracted pattern

   • Recruiting the first users by hand is the work, not a workaround for the work.
   • Manual delivery is a research instrument: it shows you what to automate and what to drop.
   • Founders who refuse the unglamorous phase usually never learn what the product should be.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. A new product has no users and no distribution.
     Move. Recruit the first users individually, deliver the outcome by hand, and observe every failure directly.
     Trade-off. It does not scale, consumes the founder's time, and looks inefficient from the outside.
     Breaks when. Manual work is masking a product that fundamentally does not work, or when it continues long after the pattern is known.

   Practical implication

   Treat the manual phase as paid research. Serve a handful of users personally until the repeatable part of the work is obvious — then automate exactly that part and nothing more.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Regulated or safety-critical products cannot be delivered by improvisation; the manual phase has to be designed, not improvised.

   Failure modes

   • Waiting for a launch moment instead of finding ten users this week.
   • Automating a process before you have run it by hand often enough to know its shape.

   What was measured

   hand-recruited users · time to first delivered outcome · retention of hand-served cohort

   Stage relevance

   Idea · Pre-revenue · First customers

   Source

   Paul Graham · Y Combinator · 2013-07-01 original
5. 05SourcedEvidence quality: high

   Default alive: knowing whether the company survives without new money

   Summarised in Aurygine's words from a publicly readable source, linked below.

   Extracted pattern

   • Every founder should be able to answer, without a spreadsheet session, whether the company reaches profitability on current cash and current growth.
   • Not knowing the answer is itself the finding.
   • Once the answer is no, the choices narrow to: grow faster, cut cost, or raise — and delay removes options.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Spending exceeds revenue and the founder is unsure how serious it is.
     Move. Compute months of runway at current burn, then ask whether current growth closes the gap before the cash runs out.
     Trade-off. Forces an uncomfortable conversation earlier than the founder would choose.
     Breaks when. Revenue is highly seasonal or lumpy, where a single month's burn misreads the year.

   Practical implication

   Keep the runway number visible and honest. The decision that matters is not 'are we doing well' but 'does the company survive on the cash it already has'.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Deep-tech and infrastructure companies are structurally default-dead for years by design; the measure there is milestone risk, not runway alone.

   Failure modes

   • Treating a funding conversation as a plan.
   • Cutting cost so late that the cut has to be twice as deep.

   What was measured

   months of runway · monthly burn · growth rate · gross margin

   Stage relevance

   First customers · Traction · Scaling · Turnaround

   Source

   Paul Graham · 2015-10-01 original