Right, but, you'll tell a new customer you will have the product ready for them quickly, but because you didn't have a stakeholder that would, you're running the risk trying to sell them a product that wouldn't solve their particular problem (feature mismatch).
Maybe if you believe the limits of technology would be a blocker to solving your customer's vision of their problem, then a prototype before you have a stakeholder that would compensate you somehow is probably the right answer.
But I think you can easily confuse the business objectives with engineering objectives in making the assumption that the prototypical solution is representative of the customer's vision of the solution.
It's not that I think you or a business can't live with that dissonance, I think it may open you up to that problem.
Maybe if you believe the limits of technology would be a blocker to solving your customer's vision of their problem, then a prototype before you have a stakeholder that would compensate you somehow is probably the right answer.
But I think you can easily confuse the business objectives with engineering objectives in making the assumption that the prototypical solution is representative of the customer's vision of the solution.
It's not that I think you or a business can't live with that dissonance, I think it may open you up to that problem.