The single biggest difference between a startup that stalls at Phase I and one that reaches STRATFI is a real Air Force customer. AFWERX designed the program around it: Open Topic Phase II and Direct-to-Phase-II (D2P2) proposals require a customer memorandum that documents genuine government interest. No memo, no award.
The memo names three roles. The customer is the Department of the Air Force or Joint organization that wants the capability. The end-user is the operator who would actually use it. The TPOC — Technical Point of Contact — is the government technical sponsor, and this person must be DAF civilian or military. Sometimes one person wears two hats, but you cannot invent them; evaluators verify.
The fastest way to earn a busy program officer's signature is to make their decision easy: show them the capability working. A simulation that models your system against their mission scenario turns an abstract pitch into something a TPOC can defend up their chain. Ansys evaluation licensing helps small teams build exactly that artifact.
See if you qualify for an Ansys eval The MVP playbook →AFWERX publishes a step-by-step guide to the form — read it before you draft anything. The memo should state, in the customer's own words, the mission gap, why your solution matters, and how they intend to use or transition it. Vague enthusiasm reads as a favor; a specific operational need reads as a market. Give your sponsor a clean draft to react to so you are not asking a busy officer to write from scratch.
Start this earlier than feels comfortable. Government signatures move at government speed, and a customer memo often needs a sponsor to socialize it up their own chain before they will sign. Founders who wait until the proposal window opens routinely miss the deadline not because no one was interested, but because the interested person could not get approval in time. Treat customer discovery as a months-long sales motion that runs in parallel with your technical work, not a form you fill out at the end.
A signed customer memo is not paperwork — it is the seed of everything downstream. The same relationship that unlocks Phase II is what makes you competitive for STRATFI and TACFI matching funds and, eventually, a sole-source Phase III contract. Invest in the customer first; the funding follows the mission fit.
Official sources: AFWERX — Open Topic customer memorandum (PDF) · AFWERX — completing the customer memorandum (PDF) · AFWERX — SBIR/STTR divisions. Figures change; confirm on the official page before relying on them.
