We show, we don’t tell: Why working software is our most powerful tool.

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For as long as we can remember, the enterprise sales playbook was dominated by a ritual: the sales presentation! After who knows how many decks, pre-sales calls and “can I just have a moment of your time”s companies would end up in the office of the CXO with generally somewhere less  than 30 minutes (after all the pleasantries and intros) to try and “convince” someone to try or buy their thing. 

As a former CTO, I lived that world and I quickly learned a brutal truth: 

PowerPoint and words mean nothing and working software means everything. 

Don’t tell me your USP, your amazing UX and devex, your cost benefit analysis, your KPI’s. I am literally not interested unless you can show me the software working. Hence, I stopped taking any meetings with software vendors who wouldn’t or couldn’t invest the time or effort to show me something relevant in working code.

At Rilla, our conviction in this truth is rooted in that empathy and respect for people’s time. In  understanding of our market. Major broadcasters and streaming platforms aren't buyers swayed by talk; they are seasoned engineers and executives whose decisions rest on trusted relationships, data and engineering rigour. They simply don't have time for activity that doesn’t generate value.

In the world of P2P CDN, everyone promises the same thing: high deflection, low latency, and Quality of Experience (QoE)for millions of viewers. But It’s all words and most of them cannot deliver on all of these. The moment a potential customer engages, the risk of wasted time can be fatal if you cannot deliver on those promises. 

They need to know: Can you actually orchestrate millions of concurrent users without compromising my live feed - Can you do this at a cost of ownership and change that beats what we do today?

So from day one we decided to cut through the noise by leading with solid product engineering principles. Our goal was to build a single, simple and compelling live demonstration tool. It had to be transparent, self-contained and accurately represent a live P2P network showing how they can be both volatile in nature and reliable in outcome.

This wasn't a mock-up or a video. It was working software designed to prove two things: 

We know how to build the right thing and we know how to build the thing right!

What this live demo allowed us to show was:

1. Real time orchestration and visualisation of the user graph network: Showing the seamless formation and management of a Peer-to-Peer network across accurately simulated real-world conditions, demonstrating peers connecting, redistributing load, and sharing videos instantly.
2. Measurable Impact: Provide a real-time dashboard of the core metrics that CTOs care about: a significant, verifiable deflection in traditional CDN usage, translating directly to cost savings.
3. Quality of Experience (QoE): Track and show every single instance of re-buffering, proving that our P2P augmentation maintains high QoE and does this with low latency across the network.
4. The ability to show a realistic extreme volatile scenario where 20% of the network fails. Allowing us to simulate a massive power outage or “rage quit” sporting moment. This has to be possible while maintaining zero disruption for the customer.
5. Integrity:  The effectiveness of this demo goes beyond the dashboard metrics. It’s a showcase of our team's engineering integrity. The ability to quickly deploy changes, adapt the demonstration to meet the unique network profile of a specific customer. We do this, and manage the entire test automation and continuous delivery pipeline which is a serious indicator. It tells the customer: We are not just another software vendor; we are in the product engineering business. 

In a market where the lines between hype and reality are getting blurred by a sea of AI-generated content, this tool is real “deep tech” and an anchor of truth. It instantly helps to validate our claims and builds trust in a way that no sales deck ever could. 

The result of this approach diffuses many objections and fears that knowledgeable people in the streaming game have about cost, quality, latency and content protection.

We know that when you sit across the table from a fellow engineer or a former engineer who became a CTO or CEO, they don’t just want your story, your vision or your USP; they want proof that you have a product that works.

At Rilla, our most powerful asset is not just our code, but our understanding of the problems our customers face and how they need to engage with and roll out new innovations. We know that nothing speaks as loudly as working software, and that is why this one tool has proven to be the most effective in our approach. We don't sell software; we demonstrate outcomes.

This is what has allowed us to walk with credibility into this privileged arena and pitch with empathy. This in turn has led to us being trusted by some of the best in the business to work with them to co-develop Rilla to meet their needs.

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If you want to see this in action then please hit us up. We love this topic and we love to show our wares.

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