Deep Tech Discovery: Why is it much harder?

Finding a market for deep tech comes with considerable challenges. 

Commercial considerations, like customer discovery, don’t always come naturally to deep tech founders. Technologies aren’t developed with buyers in mind, and putting the tech to one side can feel like a distraction from the main task at hand. Take OpenAI, which existed for several years as a non-profit research lab before first commercialising through an API, and then ChatGPT. 

A common mistake is that breakthrough technology is not necessarily the same as a ‘product’ or a ‘solution’. So while the breakthrough itself can feel like success, it’s worth remembering that success in research doesn’t equal success in the market. 

Deep tech is often a ‘building block’ technology, foundations for other applications to build on top of. In some ways, this presents an opportunity: deep technologies may have dozens of use cases with plenty of problems to solve, a narrative that investors will warm to (it increases your market size and future potential). But it can also be a distraction—customers don’t buy ‘horizontal’, they want to see specific applications that solve problems for them. 

Category creation can be a double-edged sword. Being novel is advantageous but not unequivocally beneficial—there’s no existing market, no existing competitors, and therefore no existing customers. This makes market mapping much harder, requiring considerable work to think about who you are solving for and what you are offering an alternative to (not as simple as ‘doing X cheaper/faster than Y’). 

If there’s no existing solution, this may mean your customers don’t even know about the problem. It might be hard to fathom a solution that doesn’t exist yet, and they may just take the problem as a given. As the old adage goes—before cars existed, if you’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’.  

1. Market evaluation

To do this, founders need to start broad and narrow down opportunities very quickly. To find the most promising opportunity, you should identify a number of addressable markets, and evaluate the attractiveness of each market.

In short, you want to find specific but sizable problems. Weigh up a number of factors: value of the market, value of incumbents, as well as penetrability. 

We get founders to map out potential customers by using this template and adapting it to factor in specifics for the type of business they’re building. This helps ensure a focus on the most commercially viable path to begin with.  

3. Pick up the phone

Speaking directly to your potential customers is the tried and tested way of validating your hypotheses. There will be unknowns that your desk research didn’t pick up on; more importantly, desk research doesn’t measure the urgency of your solution, and how desperately (or not) your customers might want it. 

Picking up the phone isn’t just about discovery: it’s about starting an open dialogue with your customers, starting to qualify who you might ultimately end up selling to. There’s valuable work to be done here, which you’ll thank yourself for when it comes to GTM and actually trying to close sales. 

Who should you speak to?

Part of discovery is working out exactly who you should speak to. In some sense, this is another test in itself—you should set out to test a hypothesis around who sees the most value in your solution (and who has the biggest problem for you to solve). Various stakeholders you might speak to include:

• Strategic (e.g. CEOs)—key figures who will help you understand overarching business need for what you are offering, as well as who can manage the risk of using your product

• Financial (e.g. CFOs)—stakeholders who understand potential financial hurdles to overcome, such as budgets and procurement processes

• Operational (e.g. product teams, line managers)—end users, who will help you understand practical and emotional hurdles (do they care enough, will they integrate into their current workflow or technology stack?)

What are you trying to find out?

Bluntly, you are trying to find out whether they would pay for your solution: as above, is this more than just a technology, is it a product/solution? On top of this, you’re trying to understand why they’d pay for your solution: understanding this motivation will help you sell and identify other similar customers.

Calls should be as unbiased, uninfluencing, non-salesy as possible. Initially, you should be looking to:

• Identify the problem—their day-to-day, challenges they face, future trends or changes they anticipate

• Identify frequency and intensity—how often does this problem occur, what is most frustrating about it?

• Understand current solutions or workarounds—what have you tried using to solve this problem before, have you paid for it or was it a free workaround, did it work, and what happens if you don’t solve this problem? 

• Validate the value of a potential solution—how important is it that this is easier to solve, how much time or money would it save you, who would you need to consult before trying a new solution?

Your potential customer loves your solution? It doesn’t end here sadly. There are numerous other practicalities and specificities you should be sourcing from these conversations—other influencers on the decision making process, budget authority, approval processes, procurement policies and constraints, etc. Think through the entire end-to-end process that will take your customer to buying your product, and what answers you need to gain to be confident of this.  

And beware of false positives. People like to say what they think you want to hear. Potential customers may express enthusiasm without real intent to buy. The key question is: would they pay for it today? And if not, what needs to change?