Can I land a pilot in 3 weeks without a product?!

Hey indiehackers. I'm a bit stressed out.
This week, I've got a mid-sized company's founder to do a pilot with me (yay!). It was completely out of blue because I was only seeking advice from him, and he told me he wants to do the pilot.

I'm building a platform to connect employees to collaborate in a growing organization.

Now here's what's up:

• I haven't fully built out the product yet.
  He actually suggested that I do a low-fi MVP where I do everything manually. So OK, I can go with that.

• He doesn't want to be the first pilot.
  He wants me to do the pilot with another smaller company first, so I can sort out all the kinks before I do it with him.
  This means I have to get 1-2 companies to do my first pilots.

• I don't want to lose his interest and momentum, yet there's only realistically 2.5months left in the year.

The hypothetical case / plan is that:

• take 3 weeks to do user research (cold outreaches),
• find 1 or 2 companies to do the pilot (with my low-fi MVP),
• then carry out the pilot ,which will have to be at least 1 month due to the nature of the product -> by then, it'll be December 2019!!

So my questions are..

1. What flaws do you see in the above case? Is it even practical?

2. How can I keep this potential customer interested? so that even if we don't do a pilot with him this year, he still wants to do it early 2020. Note that he's a 2nd degree connection.

Any ideas or thoughts are welcome. Thanks everyone!