committed to paying == paying

if you ask them for money to pay for development of the project with the understanding that they are paying for the development. If they say "no" then the problem doesn't really solve a highly painful problem for a market that is flush with cash on hand. Or to put it this way, if a problem is costing those potential customers $15k a month, throwing $15k at a likely solution is a reasonable investment for a company with reasonable cash flow. If you're going to focus on sales, then closing sales will make it easy to hire engineers to deliver the product.

Good luck.