The Graded Pilot

My client has spent 25 years in transportation and buys data for a living. Vendors have burned him with stale lists, so he keeps a master answer key of contacts he already knows are correct and grades every vendor's sample against it. He told me straight up the test exists to catch fakers.

He didn't hire me off a pitch. He paid me $300 for a small calibration batch in his exact template and graded it.

I scored 8 out of 10, and his notes on the misses became the spec for the build. Three things in that pilot mattered more than the score. My freshness check caught one of his own confirmed contacts who had quietly changed jobs. One miss was mine, a too-strict filter benching a valid contact, and I said so instead of arguing the edge case. And he had assumed I was scraping LinkedIn. I wasn't, and I told him, even though the wrong assumption was working in my favor.

He funded a $4,500 engine that sources, enriches, verifies, and scores, delivered in his template. He owns the code outright. I charge for the build and optional maintenance; his raw data costs pass through at cost, where he can see them, never blended into my fee.

Python · sourcing and enrichment pipeline · verification and freshness checks · scoring · delivered in the client's own Excel template