ViewR - three pilots in person

I ran 3 ViewR customer pilots in person between March and June 2025. Two days on each site, sometimes three. Each one taught me something I would never have gotten from a Zoom demo.

Masters Union in Gurgaon was first. Business school, they wanted attendance and after-hours intrusion detection. We installed 6 IP cameras across 2 buildings, enrolled around 400 student faces from their existing photo database, ran the system for a month. Attendance accuracy landed at 94 percent. The lesson was that the customer's existing data (in this case, student ID photos) was a goldmine for enrollment. Use what they have.

Giva was second. Jewellery brand, watchlist-based security at experience centers. Two flagship stores. The first store install took 4 hours and worked first time. The second store took two days because the cameras were behind a captive portal that blocked our AWS calls. Symptom from the dashboard - "the app is slow". Real cause - 95 percent of API calls timing out. I figured it out by SSHing into the box and watching tcpdump for outbound traffic. The lesson - "slow" is never a root cause, it is a symptom of "blocked", "lossy", or "throttled".

Third pilot, an enterprise office, I will not name them. The technical install went fine. The pilot did not convert because their actual need was visitor management workflows (a thing we did not build) and the face-recognition was a "nice to have". Lesson - if the customer's stated need is not your product's core capability, you are not solving their real problem and they will not convert.

The non-technical lessons mattered as much as the technical ones. Bring a checklist. Bring spare cables. Bring a USB Wi-Fi adapter in case the customer's network refuses you. Show up half an hour early. Wear something you would not wear to code in - the customer's security manager is your peer for the day, not a Slack thread.

Three pilots in 4 months taught me more about product than the previous 4 months of building did. Every engineer should run a customer pilot.