For most of the last two years, our sales process ended in a pilot. Four to eight weeks, free, a kickoff and a workshop and a roadmap, success criteria agreed up front, and a go/no-go at the end with “part ways” listed as one of the honest outcomes. It was the responsible thing to offer. Everybody offers it.
Here is what we learned from running them: the pilots mostly went fine, and they mostly went nowhere.
Not because the product failed. Because a pilot tests the wrong thing. It asks a prospect to evaluate a system in the abstract - on a synthetic workspace, or a slice of data, or a demo account we built to look like their business - and then to make a decision about how their company works on the strength of a demonstration. Nobody changes how their company works because of a demonstration. They change it because something is already running on their real accounts and the team would notice if it stopped.
So we replaced the pilot with a week.
What a prospect is actually asking
Strip the evaluation theatre away and a buyer has three questions. Will this be live on my accounts? Not a demo account - mine, with my people, my CRM, my calls. Who runs it? Every platform I have ever bought needed an admin I didn’t have, and the ones that didn’t need one at the start needed one by month three. And what happens when InfoSec asks? Because they will, and the answer usually arrives after the pilot, which means the pilot was evaluating a product nobody had yet been allowed to connect.
A pilot answers the first question late, the second one never, and the third one only once it is too late to matter. A week answers all three by Friday.
The week
Day 0, the security pack goes to your InfoSec. Monday, three clicks connect your apps and LLMs. Tuesday, the workspace is customized for your team. Wednesday, the solution pack’s signals are deployed and tuned. Thursday, the solution pack’s agent goes to work. Friday, you approve the first actions. One 30-minute session a day from you; everything else from Noded. The day-by-day is on the Activation Week page.
The security question is where most pilots quietly die, so the week is built around it. The pack - SOC 2 Type II report, DPA, CSA, AI policy - goes out the hour you book, and the week starts the first Monday after the review clears. The review runs from the booking, not after the demo.
Why it isn’t free
The week costs $15,000, once, included in year one of a Scale subscription, waived on a two-year term. If it isn’t live on your top accounts by Friday, you cancel and get the week and the subscription back in full.
We went back and forth on this. A free pilot is the convention, and charging for the first week looks like friction. But a free pilot tells you nothing about commitment on either side: the vendor spends what it feels like spending, the prospect attends what they feel like attending, and “part ways” is always the easiest box to tick. The week is real work - five days of our team on your systems, including the admin who stays with you afterwards - and it ends with a guarantee rather than an evaluation. If we can’t get it live by Friday, we don’t deserve the money. If we can, you have something running, which is the only evidence that was ever going to move the decision.
No admin on your side, because Noded comes with one
The second question - who runs it - was the one we had been answering badly. For a long time our answer was “nobody, it’s zero admin,” which is true of the data (there are no fields to maintain, no record to keep fed by hand) and misleading about everything else. Somebody still decides what counts as risk for your business. Somebody still tunes the templates when the business changes. Somebody still decides when the second agent is ready.
So there are now two ways in, and they are named for who does that work.
You run it. That is Growth: your own LLM is the admin. It interviews you about your business, proposes the signals, folders and agent, and builds them with your approval. First value in a coffee break; it is the right door for a person or a small team who want to run it themselves.
We run it. That is Scale: a named admin inside the price, who stays after Friday, keeps the signals and templates tuned as your business changes, and sends you a weekly summary of what Noded did for you. The Activation Week is how Scale starts.
Both doors are on the same platform with unlimited users. The difference is whose calendar the admin work lands on.
Fair use, not meters
The last thing we changed is what you pay for. Reading and asking are free. You pay for the work Noded does that you keep: the emails, updates and documents it writes that you send or save, about one per account per month. No overage, and we true up at renewal.
That is a deliberate incentive, pointed at us. If the agents produce next actions you don’t want, you don’t keep them, and we don’t get paid for them. The week, the admin and the fair-use line are the same bet made three times: Noded has to be useful on your real accounts, every week, or none of this works for either of us.
When one week isn’t the whole answer
Two situations need more than the week, and we say so on the first call rather than discovering it on Wednesday. If your account record lives in more than one place - two CRMs after an acquisition, or usage and billing with no per-account view - custom data pipelines build the record first, scoped on the call. And if you have several business units or more than 5,000 accounts, you get the week more than once, in order, with a named admin per unit. Both are on the enterprise and complex-data page.
Everyone else gets the question we now end every first call with. Which Monday?