PATAS v3: customer-first validation and benchmark-gated build #8

Result

Validate and sell one bounded PATAS historical spam-campaign audit before
building a new v3 runtime. The benchmark is the paid pilot's acceptance
contract, not a pre-customer implementation phase.

Context

• The durable product and architecture source is
  docs/v3/BRIEF.md.
• The current market, competitor, economic, data-access, technical, and
  anti-slop synthesis is
  docs/v3/research/README.md.
• The current Core is a reference baseline, not a clean production foundation.
• PATAS is historical pattern/control discovery; TAS remains the separate live
  filtering concept.

Decisions

• Conditional GO for a paid customer/data validation; NO-GO for a new v3 build
  until both gates pass.
• First-cohort hypothesis: a company-backed UGC/support operator with paid
  staff, recurring cross-message campaigns, an authorized abuse-plus-legitimate
  export, and a PostgreSQL-backed review/control surface.
• Founding money probe: a scoped $500 offline audit after metadata-only data
  preflight, with one frozen PostgreSQL replay adapter and no live integration.
• Exact, character, entity, and sparse methods are baselines. Dense semantics
  is a challenger and is removed if it adds no future-slice control yield.
• Rules remain typed, cited, replayed, and human-approved. No raw LLM SQL or
  automatic production enforcement.
• Data possession or de-identification alone does not establish processing
  rights; provenance, authorization, purpose, retention, and deletion are
  separate.
• Owner authorization for the bounded customer-validation sprint was granted
  on 2026-07-17: up to 20 individually verified first touches, at most two per
  day, one follow-up per contact, asynchronous qualification, and up to five
  identical $500 offers after all qualification gates pass.

Acceptance

• Critical market, competitor, economics, data-access, technical, and
  adjacent-use-case research is published.
• Buyer qualification, fixed artifact contract, benchmark contract, and
  prospect/cohort kill rules are documented.
• Bounded customer-validation execution is owner-authorized.
• At least 5 of 15 qualified operators confirm the owner-set pain threshold.
• At least 3 of 10 data-qualified prospects can provide usable authorized
  abuse and legitimate history with future replay coverage.
• At least 1 of 5 concrete paid founding-pilot offers is accepted.
• One paid pilot produces a deployed control or review shortcut with
  measured work reduction under the buyer's legitimate-error ceiling.
• Three customers share 70-80% of the pipeline and at least one wants a
  repeat audit before broader v3/platform work.

All numeric thresholds above are owner-set falsifiers, not market statistics.

Current handoff

• State: Cold cohort parked on 2026-08-08 after eight of 20 authorized first touches. Four single follow-ups were sent; two automated acknowledgements, one substantive human platform-boundary reply, zero verified bounces, and zero qualified buyers are recorded.
• Outcome: A fresh authenticated Gmail All Mail, Spam, and delivery-failure scan found no new human reply or verified bounce. PistonHeads, The Student Room, and Digital Spy follow-up windows expired silently. The cold-email hypothesis is falsified for this cohort; closed lanes remain closed.
• Evidence: PATAS-TAS/PATAS@3d107a8, docs/v3/research/PROSPECT-COHORT-30.md, knowledge/completions/2026-08-08-customer-validation-cold-cohort-parked.md, and the private execution ledger.
• Remaining: Zero qualified buyers, offers, or pilots. The remaining first-touch allowance is reserved and must not be spent on another generic cold wave. A mailbox review found no substantive existing relationship that authorizes a PATAS business approach.
• Next: Run one materially different warm/permissioned lane capped at ten operator conversations. Nick must provide three to five real introductions or an operator's explicit opt-in; no generic inbox, forum post/DM, CAPTCHA route, paid LinkedIn, unrelated inbound email, or one-line test message counts as permission.
• Pass/Kill: Continue only if at least two operators quantify the same recurring staff workload after native controls and at least one has budget authority. Park PATAS and change the segment/problem if ten permissioned conversations yield no qualified operator or every route requires free work, custom development, live integration, or a price/scope change.
• Gate: No customer rows, contract deviation, production access, custom development, price or scope change, offer, or new v3 implementation before explicit workload, native-tool gap, retained abuse-plus-legitimate history, export/process authority, budget, payment, and metadata fit.
• Source: PATAS-TAS/PATAS@3d107a8 on main after the verified documentation commit.