Founder's pipeline playbook: selling software into mining

in short

What is the biggest early mistake when selling software into mining?

Confusing interest with a buyer. One interested person, often an innovation or IT team with budget to trial new things, is not a deal if they do not own the problem. Follow the incentives: find the business owners who are incentivised to embed your solution. The clearest sign is that your software's outcomes are on their balanced scorecard.

How do you speak the miner's language?

Put your value in the units miners already manage: recovery, tonnes through the plant, cost per tonne, contained or payable metal, and penalties. Miners are paid on contained or payable metal and manage their cost base per tonne, so a generic efficiency claim does not land. The key terms are below.

How do you find the real buyer in a mining company?

Use any door to get in, then ask who else should be involved. Know your ideal customer's day in the life, tie your outcomes to their balanced scorecard, and multi-thread early: IT security and procurement will be involved anyway, so bring them in early or expect pushback late. A sale forecast to close this quarter is already at risk if they were not involved early.

How do you set up a software pilot that converts?

Avoid free pilots, so that someone has signed off money and is incentivised to make it work. Agree what success looks like, write the scale-up steps and timelines into the pilot project plan, and run the commercial, IT and procurement questions in parallel with the pilot, not after it.

How does a founder get out of every deal?

Write down what is in the founder's head: the ideal customer profile, the sales script, the unique value proposition and objection handling. Set guardrails so the team can hunt and qualify on its own. Bring the founder in only for a question that has not come up before, or when the founder's authority is needed with a senior sponsor.

Key terms

Terms worth knowing before you put your value in a miner's units.

Head grade: The concentration of the target metal in the ore fed to the processing plant, for example % copper or grams per tonne of gold. Anything that affects grade affects revenue.
Throughput: The tonnes of ore the plant processes over a period, for example tonnes per hour or per year. Show value as tonnes processed, not uptime.
Recovery rate: The percentage of the metal in the plant feed that ends up in the product (concentrate or metal). The rest is lost, mostly to tailings.
Contained metal: The quantity of metal inside a given amount of ore, concentrate or product. Roughly tonnes multiplied by grade.
Payable metal (payability and TC/RCs): The share of contained metal the buyer actually pays for, set by the payability terms in the sales contract. For concentrate, the smelter or refiner also deducts treatment charges and refining charges (TC/RCs), and can apply penalties for impurities. The miner's revenue is payable metal, not contained metal.
Concentrate versus refined metal: Concentrate is the upgraded mineral product from a mine's processing plant. Refined metal is the high-purity product from a smelter or refinery, for example copper cathode. Know which one your buyer sells or buys.
Cost per tonne (mined, moved or milled): The unit cost of the operation, per tonne of ore mined, per tonne of material moved (ore and waste) or per tonne processed through the plant (milled). If your software saves cost, say so per tonne, on the same basis the site uses.
C1 cash cost: The direct cash cost of producing a unit of payable metal (mining, processing, site costs, and usually TC/RCs and freight), typically net of by-product credits. Usually quoted per pound or per tonne of payable metal. Exact definitions vary by company.
AISC (all-in sustaining cost): A broader cost measure that adds sustaining capital, corporate overheads and other costs to cash costs. Most common in gold, and also used for other metals.
Offtake agreement: A contract for a buyer (for example a smelter, refiner, trader or OEM) to buy part of a mine's future production over a set period. It sets quantity, quality specifications, pricing and payability.
Incoterms (EXW, FCA, FOB, CFR, CIF, DAP, DDP): The ICC's Incoterms® 2020 rules set where the seller's costs and risk stop and the buyer's start. Under EXW the buyer carries all costs and risk from the seller's premises. Under FCA risk passes on delivery to the buyer's carrier. Under FOB, CFR and CIF risk passes once the goods are on board at the port of shipment, although under CFR and CIF the seller pays freight to the destination port. Under DAP and DDP the seller carries risk to the named destination, and under DDP also import clearance and duties.
Your value in their units: Illustrative numbers only: 1,000,000 tonnes of ore at 1% copper contains 10,000 tonnes of copper. At 90% recovery, 9,000 tonnes ends up in concentrate. One percentage point more recovery on the same ore is another 100 tonnes of copper, before payability and TC/RCs.

The full workbook, with the checkpoints and templates, is in the PDF. Get the guide.