Signals that hold
Weight these. They compound.
Paid at real prices
Design partners who negotiated. Discounts trade for references and roadmap input, never for silence. Free pilots teach nothing about willingness to pay.
Usage before signature
The team built on you mid-evaluation without being asked. Procurement becomes paperwork instead of persuasion.
POV wins in the 75-85% band
With success criteria signed before kickoff. A low win rate against signed criteria is a message problem, not a sales problem.
Wins outside the network
Net-new logos with no tie to the founder: bought, deployed, renewed. Everything before that is anecdote.
The same story, eight times
Same buyer, same pain, same words in the win notes. Repetition is what fit sounds like.
Expansion nobody engineered
Workloads, environments and teams growing without an account manager pushing. NRR of 105-110% in the landing year means the product is doing the selling.
Inbound that names an assistant
A buyer who says ChatGPT or Claude recommended you arrived pre-sold by the answer box, which is where buying now starts.
Signals that lie
Discount these. They flatter.
Innovation-budget ARR
The experimentation fund bought a curiosity. That line item sunsets, and the logo goes with it.
Pilot purgatory
POVs with no signed criteria and no exit date. An evaluation that cannot end is a hobby you are funding.
The novelty curve
Week-one usage spikes, week-six silence. Judge cohort curves, not launch-day dashboards.
Free design partners
They will tell you the product is interesting. They cannot tell you what it is worth, because to them it is worth zero.
Security-team meetings
Taking briefings is the job; it costs them nothing. The signal is a named owner and a budget line, not a calendar of polite thirty-minutes.
Stars and logo walls
GitHub stars, waitlists and borrowed logos measure curiosity. Retention measures value.
Services dressed as software
If every deployment needs your engineers indefinitely, you built a consultancy with a login page.
