two staff engineers and an SRE have been patching around a homegrown rate limiter for three releases: issues, reverts, a stalled refactor. the problem you sell the fix for, in their own commits.
do they have the problem you solve
six months ago their backend team's stars were all Postgres. now three of them and a new ML hire are deep in vector DBs and eval tooling. they're building something new, and they don't have your piece yet.
what they're into now vs. before
the senior data engineer filing four issues this month also forked your competitor's SDK and follows its maintainers. that's who feels this most, and who to reach.
who feels it, and who to reach