Selling a service: each step small enough to say yes to, and each ends with something they keep

The path for selling an agentic service: a free conversation about what the client wants agents to do and must never do; a first run on a real problem for £10 to £50 that leaves a vault; £500 for about two hours or £1,500 for a day to steer it or write the behaviour policy for one team; a four-day pilot in their own environment for £5,000; then a maintained setup from £149 a month so they run it themselves. The boutique benchmarks are the same shape everywhere: a free call, a paid discovery (a one-week audit at £2,500, a 14-day sprint at €2,900, a two-week assessment at $4,999), a fixed-price pilot (from £8,000), a build, a retainer. The prices are hypotheses to test with the first ten customers, and the plan says so: no paid run yet.

Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).

Note. Prices from ruv.sgit.ai's published offers and the boutiques' public pages, read on 16 October 2026. The market map's positions are a judgement, as the article says.

Where it comes from

Agentics, ready to sell Who else is selling this; The engagement path (newsroom)

What it answers in the 2018 book

Be a founder answered written, Life Patterns
Upwork unanswered outline, Your CV

Where it goes

Chapter Sell, part Start the company (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).

Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Send an agent, not a spreadsheet: due diligence derived from the code, not composed by the vendor, A startup should double down on understandability: less code, the same tools, and it can be checked and pass, The market is crowded at the top and thin on evidence: sell the record the client keeps, A service only scales with people: a curated marketplace of consultants, joined by proof of work, The reason to move is never sovereignty or cost: sell value that lands the day they switch, Answer the hard questions in full, publish what is live and what is design, and check your own site against the answers, Do not sell the need; answer a question somebody already has to answer, with a deadline.

Node idea:the-engagement-path-starts-small in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.