I used to tell founders that if they can't figure out how to find the right people to get feedback from early, they're also not going to be able to find the right people to sell to later.
The logistics are the same at either end of the process.
If they expect to hire a salesperson once they have a product, why not hire a research panel vendor or a firm like GLG to get validation?
If they want to own their sales and customer acquisition channels once they have a product, they have to figure out how to build an audience to get validation.
Is it a dark art of hustle and luck, or is it just marketing, and most founders don't want to do that?
The only difference is what you're selling, but the process is equivalent.
If you still have your proof of purchase (if you bought it from Apple directly, they should also have it), you can take your receipt and the laptop to an Apple Store and they'll remove the activation lock. They may wipe the machine in the process, I don't recall.
(We had some company iPhones in our device lab, not on MDM, and people would attach them to their personal accounts, so this was an occasional hassle.)
Not the OP, but in the TechCrunch Disrupt launch, founder Brynn Putnam says, "capacitive material manufactured into the pieces."
If you put capacitive material in a unique pattern on the footprint of each piece, and the rest of the piece material was conductive enough to carry your body's charge to register a touch, the shape of that touch could be unique per-piece.
There's no mention of syncing pieces, charging pieces, keeping pieces in view of a wide-angle camera, anything like that, so that's my bet. (This would also mean moving a piece using a non-conductive material would be a way to cheat by having it not get registered!)
I just shared this on LI this morning, linking back to a video showing showing related touchscreen explorations I did for a colleague in early 2013, sensing different coins by their radii as you touch them: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmiliano_a-vertical-triptych-...
All of vintage computer emulators on the Internet Archive owe a tip of the hat to the Canon Cat emulation, because that was the computer that started me on automating the original cross-compilation infrastructure.
The logistics are the same at either end of the process.
If they expect to hire a salesperson once they have a product, why not hire a research panel vendor or a firm like GLG to get validation?
If they want to own their sales and customer acquisition channels once they have a product, they have to figure out how to build an audience to get validation.
Is it a dark art of hustle and luck, or is it just marketing, and most founders don't want to do that?
The only difference is what you're selling, but the process is equivalent.