The demo went well. The deal didn't.

I've been thinking about a simple test for AI startup ideas lately. When you're building something with AI capabilities, it's easy to get excited about what the technology can do. But I'm realizing the real test isn't whether users like the demo. It's whether a buyer can explain it to finance.

Can they articulate what cost disappears? Can they justify the budget? If they can't walk into a procurement meeting and make the case, your clever feature will quietly die inside some enterprise org—even if the demo went great.

This has made me rethink what to build with AI. The technical capability matters less than whether the value proposition survives translation through a buying committee. A CFO doesn't care that your LLM does something impressive. They care about what shows up in the budget line.

For indie devs and solo founders, this is a different kind of validation than "does it work?" It's closer to "could someone actually sell this?"

I've started drafting a checklist before building—things like: can I write a one-sentence explanation that a non-technical stakeholder would repeat? If not, maybe the idea needs sharpening before the code gets written.

Anyone else running into this tension between "technically impressive" and "actually buyable"?