// Pilot marketplace
PilotSlate
Every brand we launch needs its first ten design partners. So we built the place to find them.
Startups publish a product with a concrete pilot offer. Buyers browse by category, stage, and price band, or post a brief and let startups come to them. Pilots are agreed in one private thread, and a new drop lands every Tuesday.
Weekly
New drop
every Tuesday
1 thread
Pilot terms
scope, timeline, and price in one place
No upvotes
Ranking
matched on fit, not popularity
// The thesis
Why we own PilotSlate.
// Why now
AI collapsed the cost of shipping an MVP, so the bottleneck moved from building to finding the first customers willing to try it. Launch sites reward attention, not adoption. Founders need pilots and revenue; operators want early access and a say in the roadmap. Nothing connected the two in one structured place.
// Market
Two sides: pre-seed through seed B2B startups looking for design partners and first revenue, and businesses (operators, team leads, innovation and procurement owners) scouting new tools in their category with budget and a timeline.
// Moat
Every pilot creates structured data: which categories buyers pilot, at what price bands, and which offers convert to paid. That pilot graph makes matching sharper for both sides, and it is something an upvote board or directory never collects.
// The product
What it does.
Product listings with a concrete pilot offer: stage, category, price band, and the number of design-partner slots open.
Buyer briefs: businesses post the problem, budget, and timeline, and startups apply with their product.
One private thread per pilot, where scope, timeline, and price are settled with status visible to both sides.
Design-partner terms built in: roadmap input for buyers, founding pricing locked, and a reference customer for the startup.
A weekly Tuesday drop of freshly launched products actively looking for design partners.
// What we've learned
Lessons from operating PilotSlate.
01
Attention is not adoption.
Launch-day upvotes rarely turn into customers. We built PilotSlate around the actual unit of early traction, a pilot with a scope and a price, and let everything else follow from that.
02
Buyers want a say, not just a discount.
Businesses join early pilots to shape the product around their workflow. Making roadmap input an explicit part of the design-partner offer gets more serious buyers than price alone.
03
Seed the demand side with real briefs.
A marketplace stalls when startups list into silence. Buyer briefs flip the motion: startups apply to stated needs, which gives both sides a reason to come back every week.
// FAQ
PilotSlate, answered.
The questions buyers ask before they sign — pricing, implementation, security, and how human approvals work.
// More from the portfolio
See the rest of what we own.